Why Fiction and Storytelling Matters

Fiction is something you build from twenty-six letters of the alphabet and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and the people in it. It transcends boundaries, geographical, and even those of death. It is as if a conduit opens, unique to each one of us, and as if the writer whispers the story in your ears, which is yours and yours alone. And when you finally return to your own world, you're slightly changed, for the better.

Fiction is about the drive, the very familiar longing for all fellow readers -- the drive to turn the page, to know what happens next, the need to keep going and to know how it all ends. It is that one moment, when you discover reading as a pleasurable activity, the moment when you realise you don’t want to stop. And after that one moment, you’re never the same ever again.

As an avid reader myself, I am biased. Totally and enormously. I have always found solace in books, and I consider myself lucky to have found the right book at the right time. I have had parents who, though not being readers themselves, didn’t mind me hoarding books on every birthday and dropping me off to libraries during summer holidays. I’ve had good librarians, who didn’t bother having a little girl, eyes wide with wonder, flipping through the pages, looking for ghosts and pirates and vampires and witches or wonders.

Fiction is about empathy or the ability to feel, feel deeply and open your heart to the world which allows us to function more than mere self-obsessed individuals. In stories, you enter a world of your own, of which you are in sole control, something that can never be taken away from you. You get to visit places, to feel things, to meet people (books are real places, make no mistake), to know them and often at times, we are discontented with the reality. However, this discontentment allows us to believe that the world doesn't have to be like this, that things can be better and most importantly, that we can change it for the better.

As Neil Gailman once said - “Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told...”

Through all these years of human civilisation, we have gone from being an information scarce world to a world loaded with information, and we’re accumulating more and more each day. To many, libraries may now seem a thing of the past. I have always believed that libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication, of dialogue. They are about education, about entertainment, about making safe spaces and about access to information. Quoting Douglas Adams who said, twenty years before the first Kindle turned up that “A physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content”. Even though it seems that the ever-growing information age threatens to gobble up books and stories, take my word on it -- Books are no more threatened by Kindles than stairs are by elevators. As long as there are curious children wanting to explore the world and readers like you and me, books are here to stay.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales - Albert Einstein

I believe that the simplest way to raise literate children is to teach them how to read books and to portray reading as a pleasurable activity. It is about giving children access to these books, and letting them read it. I have often observed that ‘well-meaning’ adults destroy a child’s love for reading. Those, who I believe, look down upon fiction as a genre. By handing children worthy but ‘dull’ books that they would like to read, or maybe just because the world is reading them, those 21st century equivalents of Victorian literature. And soon they have moulded a generation of children who are convinced that reading is uncool and unworthy. We often divide the world into readers and non-readers. But, for me, there are readers and there are people who just haven't found the right book yet.

Stories, through all these years, have become a way for us to learn about people, their experiences, and their world. And these have immense power. The power to motivate, to inspire, to create ripples of change. If hateful stories can start genocides, stories of love can protect us from them. Stories are magic, they can create other worlds, emotions, ideas and make the mundane seem incredible. Storytelling does have a real purpose, the purpose of stories is to heal, since you have someone who is telling you something that is of deep interest to them. They don't just want to come and give you plain advice. This is where storytelling differs from advice -- once you get them, they become an inseparable part of your soul, and that is how they heal and liberate you.

Why am I telling you this? Because, to me, the magic of stories and storytelling--their brave, exquisite, wondrous power -- matters most now, more than any other time. Author Philip Pullman once said, "After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world." I would argue stories, in a sense, offer all of these. In a world that is at war with itself, we need to find love, hope and compassion. My experience of reading 'The Nightingale', a book about the stories of women during the Second World War has been unparalleled. In these times, the value of such stories has never been more profound.

And what’s more, when stories are told aloud, rather than read, it adds a measure of delight to the narrative. The experience of being told a story by a captivating storyteller is nothing short of fascinating. And moreover, it allows us to chronicle different versions of the same story -- making the process of storytelling infinitely more layered and intricate.

All this strengthens my belief in the magic that is storytelling. As a generation, I feel we have certain obligations to society -- the obligation to read aloud and read for pleasure, the obligation to tell stories to children, tell stories we have been told, to pass them over generations, tell stories that we are tired of and yet do the voices, as well as to value culture and information. We have an obligation to support libraries, to protest their closure, to use language and to let it flow. And most importantly, the obligation to teach children to read, read for pleasure, read whatever they want to, read as if the world depends on it -- because it does.

-A.