Recently, my wife and I finished watching the second season of Shrinking, and while the credits rolled, I leaned in, wrapped my arms around her, and just stayed there for a while because I cherish her so damn much.
For me, it was a moment of pure storytelling magic. While stories can have myriad effects on us, depending on the story and the audience, Shrinking is a show about cherishing loved ones and growing by facing personal challenges together. It’s therapeutic and only natural that my response to it is an outpouring of love. Other responses also are perfectly natural or reasonable, though, if it makes you feel violent, you might want to talk to someone about that. I found myself profoundly moved.
When I taught literature to undergrads, I distinguished between fact and truth with my students. One appealing aspect of nonfiction storytelling is it’s built on facts. We tend to call them “true stories,” but I wish we’d call them “factual stories” because there’s a larger truth to factual stories that goes beyond the facts. We watch a documentary about Bernie Madoff and think, “yeah, he had a really good life for a while, but when the hammer came down, they even took his underwear. Maybe stealing from people isn’t worth it.” We read a biography about a great political figure and walk away with a perspective of hope. We watch a 30-second clip on the Internet of a guy rescuing a doe from a frozen lake, and our faith in humanity is restored.
Fictional stories access these same larger truths even though they may be based on fabrications and fantasy. Fiction, despite being totally made up, contains truth or truths.
For me, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried made this distinction clear when I read it for the first time in an undergraduate literature class. The book presents itself to the reader as a Vietnam War veteran telling stories about his time during the conflict. However, about halfway through the book, O’Brien interrupts the storytelling with a confession and an essay about truth. He tells the reader everything they’ve read thus far was, to varying degrees, totally made up. He’d based his stories on what he’d actually experienced, but when he wrote the book, he found his factual retellings insufficient for conveying the truth of his experiences. O’Brien discovered, to really communicate what he wanted, he had to fictionalize his stories to better convey their truths.
“I want you to feel what I felt,” O’Brien writes. “I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” This is from the chapter titled “Good Form.”
Fiction tends to get a bad rap from readers (and nonreaders) who don’t see the importance of stories about events that never happened and people who never existed. For me, fiction’s power comes from precisely that. Fiction gives a skilled writer full control of their story, and they can use that power—that freedom from fact—to explore truth. As a storytelling discipline, fiction seeks to create experiences for readers that otherwise would be impossible, and there, in those stories, we can find truth to benefit our lives.
You already evaluate stories this way even if you don’t know it. It’s innate. A guy drunkenly listing on his stool at a crowded pub tells you a story that seems like bull shit because the pieces just don’t add up. There are holes in the narrative, and people in his story act irrationally or illogically. You don’t believe it. We apply that same scrutiny to fictional stories. Things have to add up in fictional stories; otherwise, audiences walk out. Those people are using the same bull shit detector as they’d use for a drunk in a pub.
I like to think I have a bit more credibility than that guy, though.
The value of fiction is, by experiencing a story that resonates with us as true—if we believe it—we can make sense of our world where we might otherwise be confounded. In Shrinking, Jimmy is so compelled by love that he is willing to help someone even if it’s the most difficult thing he’s ever done. Even though Jimmy is not a person who exists, we recognize the humanity in him, and on some level, we see that humanity in ourselves. It’s inspiring. There is something deeply heartening in the humanity of that because, even in a work of fiction, the humanity of it makes sense. It shines a light on a very good part of humanity even if these events never actually transpired in reality. We see that they plausibly could, and that’s enough for us to nod our heads and say, “I believe it.”
These truths are evident in any great story. At the end of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, when Jake and Brett ride off in a taxi together, we’re left with the suspicion that they might have found love with each other if not for the war, and the story then portrays deep realities about how the biggest of wars can affect people at the most intimate of levels. When Michael Corleone lies to Kay at the end of The Godfather, we understand it’s to protect her but also, to some extent, protect himself from the fact that he’s become a monster just like his father. Frankenstein shows us the lengths we’ll go for revenge even if we bear the responsibility for tragedy, even if it leads to our demise, or rather how much we would much prefer to hurt another living being than face a grueling reality that a loved one has died because of us. Speaking of love, one of my favorites is the 2010 Breck Eisner remake of George Romero’s film, The Crazies. In the end, Judy (who’s a doctor) most certainly knows her husband is infected. David (the town sheriff and film’s hero) probably knows it, too. Still, because they love each other, they escape the quarantined town in hopes for a cure, and we understand they’ve doomed the whole world because they love each other.
Who among us doesn’t understand, on some deeply human level, the truth that we would let the whole world burn before giving up on someone we love? The needs of the many wither to dust in seconds when the sacrifice is someone we love. In that way, love is a terrible thing. Truth.
Perhaps by running that thought experiment of what we might do if our life partner were infected with a contagion and we had the chance to escape a quarantined town, we might learn something frightening about ourselves. Would you set fire to the world if there was a chance to save your partner? Your answer doesn’t matter. What matters is some people wouldn’t hesitate. That’s a truth.
But how long can the effects of a good story last? Can they achieve any lasting change? Maybe Shrinking changed me for that one night. Maybe its effects will last the rest of my life. Maybe it’ll be somewhere in between, the effects radiating and rippling throughout my years in invisible, unnoticeable ways. Who’s to say? But I’m absolutely certain it enriched my life, and because experiences are cumulative, at least a part of who I am and what my life has been and will be is because of the stories I’ve had the good fortune to encounter.
I love storytelling because it has the power to change people, and I believe, if a story reaches enough people with meaningful experiences, it can change the world. Imagine that. Not just one story, but millions, weaving their way through billions of people, pushing and pulling, nudging and squeezing, burrowing in and refusing to come out, begging for the attention of a consciousness, even just one, to swallow them down and do something with them, even if it’s only to take an extra moment to hold on to someone you love.