Subtle Fiction

"Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.” John Updike

There’s a lot of talk in the writing world about fiction and what it is—how much of it is true, how much of it relies on truth, whether or not it’s worthwhile, etc.  This quote caught my attention the other day, and I think it strikes closer to the truth than most of the other talk.  As a fiction writer, I spend a lot of time making up things, often to the point of leaving my entire world behind in favor of another.  Why do I bother?  The writing of stories doesn’t improve the economy or persuade anyone in favor of world peace.  My stories don’t teach anyone how to do anything, or help them understand how the world works, or give them any kind of useful information for their lives.  At best, it makes them think a little bit, but even that isn’t life-changing.  So what’s the point?

According to John Updike, writing fiction is done more for the sake of the writer than the reader.  Well, this is nothing new—there are dozens of quotes from authors that can testify to that.  What does interest me in this quote is the idea of subtlety: the proposal that we write to explore ourselves, and we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Now that I’m thinking about it, many of the things I believe, I’ve discovered through my writing.  Things like personal freedoms, political options, and questions of ethics are all explored in my alternate worlds, the stories that I write.  I put my characters through problems in their lives and always somewhere in the back of my mind I’m thinking, what would I do in this situation?  In most cases, the characters are doing what I would do in that situation, and so in a strange way, I gain experience through writing that I might never get in my own life.

But it’s not only self-examination that Updike talks about: he also mentions self-display.  The vast majority of writers are a private lot.  We don’t like to be out and about, making statements about who we are and what we want from the world.  But everyone at some point needs to declare themselves, to say what we believe and try to explain who we are.  The avenue of fiction is a very safe way of doing this.  We can say “oh, it’s just a story” but deep down we know better.  The stories we tell are our declarations of self to the world, and we don’t even have to know that we’re doing it.  It is through fiction that we make it known who we are.