Why is Fiction?

a step into the past, a truth, and a lie.

Hullo fictioneers of near and far and elsewhere!

The subject of this newsletter might look like a typo. “Don’t you mean What is Fiction?” To that I say no. While I may have a typo every now and then, this is intentional. Because knowing what fiction is is much easier than knowing why fiction is.

Fiction is falsehoods. We know that. Technically, the dictionary definition is:

1. literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people.

2. something that is invented or untrue.

Fiction is lies in story form for the purpose of entertainment. That’s how you could put it. But the question posed here is why is fiction?

The answer is actually not “entertainment”. That’s just a side product, not the actual purpose.

Why is fiction something we not only love, but have been consuming since before history could be recorded. In fact, some of history was only recorded in verbal story form, of events that may have once been true but have been twisted and exaggerated into tales and legends.

It’s evident that fiction is an integral part of every society and at every time, even underdeveloped ones. It’s universal. While certain parts of the world may not have movies on the big screen or even full novels, they still have vocal stories told and plays acted out.

If you’re a writer or storyteller of any kind, knowing the reason we have and use fiction in our existences as humans is integral to your ability to use it well.

I was doing this wrong for years.

YEARS.

I tried to write novels for years and for some reason, it all fell apart after about 40,000 words. Yes, I realize that I could have finished the actual writing of those novels but something was wrong. I knew it wasn’t working. The story wasn’t working because I didn’t understand why fiction is.

To understand why fiction is, you’ll have to understand Tonk, who is actually you, about 300,000 years ago.

Tonk’s cliffside digs

The Story of Tonk, Gronk, Schlapt, and Kurplat

The year is…nonexistent. It’s before years were kept track of. It was before the concept of a year was even discovered, when you kept track of time with nothing more than the rising and setting of the sun and the length of each day. Let’s just say it’s summer because it’s warm out and you don’t have a concept of climate and probably live near-ish to the equator and the days are long. Plus, it’s almost always warm.

Your name it Tonk. Not because of any particular reason other than that’s the sound you made when you popped out of your mother and hit the stone ground, the customary method of naming children during this time.

You don’t remember this happening, of course. This was something you were told by your dad, as he described, in not much other than grunts and noises (barely language), the details of your birth and how this sound that’s not really a name became what everyone called you.

You live in a cliffside with an overhang that makes for good protection from the wind and the rain and wildlife. Your father found this spot after it was told (in more grunts and half-words) that Gronk was discovered in his riverside tree hut by a large, hungry feline. He decided that becoming a cougar’s meal wasn’t something he wanted for himself or his family’s life. You agreed. You liked to breathe, and you enjoyed having your organs inside your body, which is not how Gronk was discovered, unfortunately.

So the cliffside if where you spend your days.

These days begin when the light first comes and you venture out to find something to eat. It doesn’t take long. There are fish in the river far below, plenty of greens to pluck from the ground, and berries hanging plump in bushes.

You’ve never had a problem with berries before. Not until that day.

The day. The one where you found those bright red berries—a whole bush of them. You never find bushes teeming with this many berries as most have been picked through at least a few times. A handful is usually what you get, nothing more. Now though?

Now you take your shirt off, buching the edges together until you have a makeshift basket, which is the only kind of basket anyone has at this point in time. You run your hands down the branches and drop dozens, then hundreds, of those red berries into the shirt.

You don’t eat any yet, oh no. Your thoughts are on how pleased your father will be and how red your younger sibling’s mouth will be when you return home with them.

Shirt-basket full, you dash back up to the cave dwelling, beaming as you leap up rocks, ignoring the slight burning in your legs from the hike. You’re young enough that the effort is quite little right now.

You rush up the little steps, duck into your home, and call everyone over. They scurry in, concern on their faces. Then the shirt full of berries is on the ground and you’re standing next to it, gesturing wildly, picking a few up to pop into your mouth and—

Your father slaps you.

He slaps the berries right out of your hand. His face is red. Furious. He’s pointing his fingers and waving wildly! You’ve seen him angry before but this. This was a combination of anger and something you’ve seldom seen.

Terror.

He takes the shirt with berries, wads it up, and throws it in the waste section of your dwellings off the cliffside and into the tree. Nobody would dare touch them now.

You’re understandably confused right now. Didn’t you just usher in days worth of berry snacks for the family? Shouldn’t father be proud? He was prideful when you snagged that rabbit and brought it home not five sleeps ago.

Your father’s face calms down, and he walks over to you. He asks why you would ever think of eating those berries. Didn’t you hear about Schlapt?

Schlapt, he tells you, ate some of those berries. Schlapt went down to the same river, found the same bush, and collected dozens, just like you did. Schlapt gorged on those berries, his belly full and satisfied. Your father shakes his head. Schlapt was dead before the sun went down.

You hadn’t yet heard that story. Somehow it escaped you. But you did tell that story, again and again, as newcomers found your dwelling and joined your tribe.

As your own children ventured down to the river for the first time.

As you stand over someone else’s child who had not heard the story and was unmoving up the hill from the settlement.

Then you told a different story. The one of Kurplat, the child of no more than waist-height who ate some berries to enjoy on the hilltop, who never left that hilltop. You told it, your partner told it, and your children told the story of Kurplat until “Schlapt” was no longer a name in memory, but a sound the fish made as you plopped it onto the stone to cut up for dinner.

You’re old now, Tonk. Your hair is white. Your skin sags. You rarely venture down from the cliffside for fear of being unable to get back up.

As you lie in bed, unmoving for the third day in a row, your daughter comes to visit you with her daughter. They stoke the fire on this particularly cold night, take your shriveled hand in theirs, and they begin talking of a place.

It’s a place of endless berries—edible ones. It’s a place of warmth and of eternal sunshine. It’s a place where your aches leave you and energy rises again and you do nothing but whatever it is you want every day, with no worry of sickness, of predators, of the ailments that plague you.

It sounds like a nice place, you think as you close your eyes. I would like to go to that place.

Your eyes do not open again.

Not all stories are fiction. But all fiction is story.

Tonk’s story is a story of stories. But there’s a story in Tonk’s story that is a fictional one. Did you spot it? Can you tell which came not from a factual encounter, but from a fiction tale?

I made it a little obvious: it’s the story his daughter and granddaughter tell him as he’s dying. Perhaps to some it’s not fiction. For what we know of life right now, I consider it fiction, because nobody knows the truth. But it still feels real, doesn’t it?

So much so that Tonk wants to go there. We all want to go there.

The stories of Tonk’s life are what allowed him to reach his old age. If his father had not heard a story, his family may have lived by the river and became a large animal’s next meal.

If his father hadn’t told him the story of Schlapt and those berries, he may very well have eaten those berries.

If he had not continued to tell that story and then another like it, others may have perished as well.

When you read about story nowadays, and specifically look into the significance of telling stories when it comes to humans, most of what you’ll find is that it was a bonding mechanism—similar to gossiping.

Gossiping was used to join groups of people together and form communities. Once in these communities, humans had a much higher chance of living and advancing as a species. You had people to take care of you, but you wouldn’t only take care of people who felt like they belonged. Gossiping furthered this.

But what is gossiping if not just telling stories about other people?

And once you have your tribe, the gossiping takes a step further. What many of us envision at this point is sitting around a fire and swapping stories—something we still do to this day. Even now, when someone is telling you a story they swear is “totally legit!” it has likely been tweaked in some way, exaggerated to make them look better or to make those around them approve of the story more. It’s been made more entertaining because every time this story is told, they read the reaction of the room (or gathering).

It’s been made into fiction.

Truth was exaggerated until it became fiction.

So what happened to create fiction from no truths? I’ve read countless books in worlds that don’t and will never exist. I’ve learned of countless characters who aren’t real, but feel real.

When did fiction derived of no truths begin?

Well, it didn’t.

Stories have been told forever for a reason. They keep us alive. They help us learn lessons without us actually having to experience the events in which those lessons are learned.

When we write our fiction, we’re just telling our story of the lessons we’ve learned in our lives because we’ve experienced them. We want others to experience, learn, and grow in a container of fiction entertainment.

Imagine if humans couldn’t remember things and Darwin’s theory of evolution and the idea of Natural Selection was in place for us. Tonk would eat those red berries and die. Then his partner would eat them, and die. Then the children would eat them, and die if they hadn’t already died because their parents died. And that cycle would continue until someone in their tribe smelled the berries and went, “eh, these smell gross. I don’t want to eat these.” That trait of the berries smelling gross would then carry on to his children, so they also wouldn’t eat them. They would all live and continue to pass down the deathly-berries-smell-gross trait.

This is how the theory of Natural Selection works. But humans are different. Humans are more intelligent and we have language and memory infused in our evolution at a level other species lack.

If Tonk ate those berrie and died, his partner and children would probably tell others that those berries caused Tonk to die. Others would avoid those berries without ever having had to try them to see for themselves, until one day a decade later, a kid harvests them and his mother is aghast.

We learned something as a species, us humans.

We learned that stories do not have to be true to serve the same purpose of true stories.

We learned that you can create a made up person in a made up setting and teach a lesson that is still applicable in real life without the tragedy caused by the otherwise true stories.

Nobody really has to die for us to avoid proverbial red berries.

In our world today, fiction is just evolution under the guise of entertainment.

Why is fiction?

It’s twofold.

1.) it’s a method concealing truths in a pretty (eh, sometimes ugly) lie

2.) it’s a necessary evolutionary trait that does not require sacrifice of the species in order to progress

Or it should be, rather. We are finding that much fiction sticks with only the entertainment piece and most of us find these stories to be meaningless. Tell me…what meaning is missing?

The lesson.

The theme.

The stakes.

The story.

Your fiction should be about something bigger. This is why a lot of fiction imitates or pokes fun at real life (Don’t Look Up, anyone?).

It should leave your audience with something to have learned and that something should be something you have learned in your own life—a meaningful piece of your own evolution as a human.

I used to focus only on plot. What happened and to whom. It wasn’t until I started figuring out what I’m about that I realized what my stories were about. Then? Well, then the plotting, characters, and overall story were not only easier, but better and more meaningful. Fulfilling and enriching.

There is a difference between plot and story. Both are necessary for good fiction but most new writers tend to focus on the plot without the substance needed for people to care about it in the first place.

I have a piece coming up about the difference between plot and story, so stay tuned.

And as always, stay fervorous with your fiction!