Advocating for rights? Proselytizing for religion? All of that is crafting a narrative about the world and how it works, ordering pieces of the universe into a shape that makes sense to the human psyche. Trying to win votes? Create a political yarn that frames your ‘vision’ of the future. Conducting a science experiment? Data is just a set of numbers until you draft a narrative to explain their relevance. “They’re a framework for making sense of reality.”Įverything in life is a story. “Stories aren’t in competition with reality,” I told him. The kind of question that book-nerds dream of being asked. “There is nothing in fiction which can surpass the complexity and beauty of real life,” he said. I liked nonfiction, too, but was surprised by the vehemence of his distaste for novels. He loved reading, which we could agree on, but only nonfiction. We drifted into discussing linguistics and literature. What is fiction good for, anyway? Sunyi Dean has an idea, and in this Big Idea for The Book Eaters, she delves into it, and how our stories can cause us to change our lives.īack in August 2012, I was attending a teacher training course and got talking to a fellow trainee.
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