Why Fiction Matters By Nancy Jane Moore

I’ve had several conversations with fiction writers lately on what we should be doing about climate change, the U.S. election, and other important concerns of the day. My immediate response was that now, more than ever, we should write stories.

They dismissed that advice. I got the feeling they thought of fiction as a luxury or even an irrelevance at the current time, even though they’re very fine fiction writers. But I wasn’t advising them to indulge themselves or escape into their work.

I really believe that fiction – telling stories – is one of the most important things we do as human beings. I believe that because reading fiction is one of the things that made me who I am today.

Stories matter. One of the most comforting items in my Facebook feed on the Wednesday after the U.S. election – and I saw it in more than one place – was a few lines from Lord of the Rings:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

That’s fantasy, the supposedly “escapist” literature.

Now I wasn’t telling my fellow writers to write to the exclusion of everything else that needs doing. Other things also matter. Conventional political activity matters, despite our habit in the U.S. of disparaging it. We need good people to run for office and work on campaigns, because it’s hard to get anything done when the people in power are stacked against you.

Activism matters. We need the people who mass in the streets because Black Lives Matter and those who block pipelines. We also need those who are creating new structures – those building the worker co-ops and social justice entrepreneur programs.

Most of all we need a vision, so that we can see where we’re going. And that brings me back to fiction, because stories can give us vision.

In Staying with the Trouble, a manifesto on how to survive the difficult times ahead that includes fiction, Donna Haraway says:
“To study the kind of situated, mortal, germinal wisdom we need, I turn to Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler. It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. It matters wherehow Ouroboros swallows its tale, again.”

Haraway goes on to talk about the “carrier bag theory of fiction”:
“[Le Guin’s] theories, her stories, are capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living.”

One of the things that always delights me in Le Guin’s fiction is her penchant for messy semi-utopias. Not everything works as it ought to; not everyone is happy; there are no saviors that make everything perfect.

We need to think about those kind of utopias these days. Climate change is going to alter our planet, and we cannot count on those with power – both in governments and in the business world – to take the necessary steps to change it. Haraway’s “The Camille Stories: Children of Compost” sets up some ways people might change. Yes, it’s imaginary, but I can see it inspiring someone to try something similar.

Haraway started these stories as part of a group writing project at a symposium. One of the things I’d like to do is bring people together to work on stories in a similar fashion, perhaps at some science fiction conventions, perhaps where I live. Writing is usually a solitary practice, but coming together to imagine ways to stay with the trouble could get a lot of creative juices flowing, not just in writers but in organizers and activists.

I’m going to keep doing my own writing as well, because I have things to say that need to be heard. It’s very important to me that the progress human beings have made toward becoming civilized continues even as we struggle with bad leaders and a warming planet. We have learned so much over our short history on Earth and I don’t want us to have to start over from scratch. I’ve never been a fan of reinventing the wheel.

I can just tell you my ideas, as I’m doing here. Nonfiction is important and I read a lot of it. But I’m found that reading stories changes me in a way that learning ideas does not. There’s something about setting ideas in a world that allows a reader to make them their own.

By the way, not all stories have to change or enlighten us. Sometimes we just need to visit someone else’s world for awhile. I imagine every reader out there has a favorite kind of comfort reading. Mysteries fill the bill for me. Others like their quest novels or romances. Those of us who write shouldn’t neglect those tales, either.

Life is hard enough. We need to have some fun while we’re saving the world.

[An earlier version of this essay appeared on the Book View Café blog]

 

 Nancy Jane Moore is the author of The Weave, a science fiction novel published by Aqueduct Press. Her other books include a collection, Conscientious Inconsistencies, published by PS Publishing, and the novella Changeling, also from Aqueduct. She is a member of the international authors’ co-op Book View Café and has new short fiction out in several recent anthologies. In addition to writing, she trains in martial arts and holds a fourth degree black belt in Aikido. A native Texan, she spent many years in Washington, DC, not working for the U.S. government, and now makes her home in Oakland, California, with her sweetheart and his cats.