What writing good fiction can teach us about living a good life

I’m not a fiction writer, and I’m not usually drawn to “how to” books. But I have always been drawn to books about how to write, even when their focus is on writing fiction.

This probably has something to do with the fact that the best books on writing tend to be well, if not beautifully, written. But I have also found great books about writing great fiction often contain truths that apply just as much to living.

If Eudora Welty is right when she says “that morality as shown through human relationships is the whole heart of fiction, and the serious writer has never lived who dealt with anything else”, we shouldn’t be surprised if books on writing fiction are, to some degree, studies on how to live.

Welty’s 1965 essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?” is a shining example. In it, she says fiction is made “to show forth human life, in some chosen part and aspect”. Welty knows that when writers want to change the world — to fight injustice and change minds — argument can make their writing less persuasive, not more. Hence, she writes, “I think we need to write with love. Not in self-defense, not in hate, not in the mood of instruction, not in rebuttal, in any kind of militance, or in apology, but with love.” Can we not apply Welty’s imperative to living?

^{American author Eudora Welty poses while at home in Jackson, Mississippi on the 23 January 1988. (Photo by Ulf Andersen / Getty Images)}

E Lily Yu’s Break, Blow, Burn and Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation is a book that is also about writing fiction and is deeply concerned with living. She speaks of the way draft after draft of a novel can, “if the process is carried to its final and most perfect point”, result in a world that’s “richly complicated, well-ordered, and entire”. And she speaks of the capacity of a book to burn through “our preconceptions and our whole way of living” and increase “the complexity, order, and richness of our lives”.

This is the kind of writing she wants to read, to understand, to write: books that use made-up people in made-up worlds to convict, transform and challenge people in the real one.

Yu addresses not only fellow writers and readers, but also fellow believers. Her spiritual convictions could not be more relevant to the subject of writing and reading. Yu is an author who believes in an ultimate author and an ultimate story. She speaks of writing as a spiritual practice, and of God as a collaborator, whose approval she writes for “above all”.

Perhaps a novelist’s moral, ethical and spiritual beliefs, and their intended audience, aren’t just relevant to how they set about inventing worlds and controlling characters, and how they advise other writers. Perhaps they are fundamental. A chef’s values and beliefs might have some influence on how they choose and combine ingredients, but books about how to cook tend to be more about what to eat than how to live. Books about writing, however, seem less about words than they are about life itself.

Discerning truth

It isn’t only stories that we learn from or are changed by. And it isn’t only words through which people speak. But words do have a power that’s unique. When it comes to reading, Welty says fiction can show us “how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean”.

It takes discernment to know what is worth reading, listening, attending to. Welty cautioned that while all novelists writing about human experience draw on the life around them, that life “can be used to show anything, absolutely anything”. Yu speaks of the importance of discernment when deception and trickery abound:

Now more than ever, it is incumbent upon the reader, as it is upon every human being, to learn to distinguish between the various modes of knowing and the proper and improper uses of each.

Yu sees value in reading for pleasure — which she says is not only legitimate but “necessary” — but worries that screen-based entertainment has left people expecting a kind of “spoon-feeding” that might lead them away from the kind of books that are most worthwhile. A series of questions can aid this process of discernment:

Does a novel awaken us to reality and the lovely, hideous, contradictory aspects of being human? Has the author observed human nature with love and wisdom, and does the author relate honestly what he has seen and learned? Or is the book nothing more than propaganda for one viewpoint or another, in which the characters are stamped out of sheet metal and machined to fit a political purpose?

To answer such questions, Yu says, we must “collect enough firsthand knowledge of how human beings behave toward one another, in a mixture of circumstances, to notice when a writer has expressed a new insight about human nature, and when a writer is repeating popular platitudes”.

The experience of others, “filtered and mediated by books, films, television, theater, newspapers, and social media”, won’t suffice; and so it is helpful to know “at least one thing thoroughly, with all the senses, whether that is the flattening of a knife blank on an anvil, the shoeing of a horse”. This increases our chances of detecting “shoddy work, cut corners, or imaginative fraud” when we read.

Collecting knowledge, asking questions, thinking critically — these practices have value for reading, writing and beyond. It is “useful” to ask whether an author is trustworthy, “not from suspicion but from pragmatism”. Yu doesn’t stop at authors, however: “We ought to ask the same about ourselves and others.” The trouble with having to discern truth is that a reader “can recognize falsity in a book” only when they can see it in themselves and in others, “and truth in a book only when that reader has a sense of what is true”, she says.

We must have a hunger for truth and a sense, in Eudora Welty’s words, of “what we are”. We already know “what we are” on some level, but “we may not know nearly so well what we are as when a novel of power reveals this to us”, Welty explains:

For the first time we may, as we read, see ourselves in our own situation, in some curious way reflected. By whatever way the novelist accomplishes it — there are many ways — truth is borne in on us in all its great weight and angelic lightness, and accepted as home truth.

Navigating messiness

Neither Eudora Welty nor E Lily Yu offers one correct way, one magic formula, for writing a novel. Welty says great fiction “abounds in what makes for confusion”, because it mirrors real life:

It is very seldom neat, is given to sprawling and escaping from bounds, is capable of contradicting itself, and is not impervious to humor. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. Humanity itself seems to matter more to the novelist than what humanity thinks it can prove.

The novelist’s work might be “highly organized”, but “it is organized around anything but logic”. Welty warns against “the menace of neatness”, and a tendency of “crusader novelists” to fear confusion: “The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what’s told alive.”

We would do well as readers, and more generally as humans, to resist the temptation — when confronted by the limits of our understanding, or our comfort, or our ability to prove a point — to so fear what we don’t know and understand that we distort the truth to make it more palatable.

Yu marvels at the fact she managed, over many years and much rewriting, to produce a meaningful, ordered whole “saturated” with meaning. “If I, as inconsequential as a spider, could do this small thing, why should I not believe that the One presently revising the world can do the same and more?”

Yu says she has no answers to the questions that she asks, “nor proof of anything, or the questions would not be worth asking”. Asking questions can matter more than answering them; faith matters more than religion, and certainty is overrated.

Fiction is simultaneously personal and universal, Welty notes — something only the author can write, but something that is not only about them. As the civil rights movement and awareness of Southern writers spread, she asked why the Southern writer of fiction in her day should do anything different than before:

We do not need reminding of what our subject is. It is humankind, and we are all part of it. When we write about people, black or white, in the South or anywhere, if our stories are worth the reading, we are writing about everybody.

Keeping our shared humanity in mind fosters a posture of respect and inclusion that can break down barriers. The trick is for a writer to let the reader believe, Welty says — not “ask” or “make” — and to assume “an enlightenment in his reader equal to his own”. Then they will be “taking off together”. Each needs the other, each gives time to the other, each respects and considers the other: “More than one mind and heart go into this.”

Transcending time

In more cases than not, the best writers read widely. They listen deeply and humbly to strangers, on one hand, and to the dead, on the other — to their contemporaries and those who preceded them. Yu talks about how the “singular voices” of authors join “a dialogue across the ages”; Welty says that once William Faulkner had written, “we could never unknow what he told us and showed us”.

Yu quotes T S Eliot: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” She goes on to say that, in order to fully understand a writer, a reader must know and grasp the work of her interlocutors, “some of whom may be centuries gone, but to whom she is still responding”:

The most powerful example is the opening of Psalm 22, which Christ cries out on the cross: “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” That Christ in his moment of greatest agony would quote a poet gives us an idea of what poets are here to do.

Yu notes that reading — even reading the most excellent books — doesn’t guarantee moral growth: “Reading should not be confused with cultivating integrity, which is far harder.”

She says that to read in the way she suggests is “nothing more and nothing less than to live with open eyes and ears, attuned to both the sharp edge of the present and the thick layers of the past”:

It is to see not what we wish to see, or what other people tell us that we see, but what is really in front of us. It is to fully inhabit our bodies and our lives, in order to recognize what is vibrant, vital, and life-giving, whether in people, places, or books.

It might seem strange that people who love to read and write made-up stories would be so concerned with “what is really in front of us”, so concerned with truth. Yet it makes perfect sense. Jesus himself taught in parables, and it was a story that made King David, after gross abuse of power and a crafty cover-up, suddenly, wholeheartedly, repent (2 Samuel 12).

The challenge is to have “ears to hear”; hearts that are not hardened, but are soft. Yu says that for a novel to “burn through our preconceptions” we must let it, by coming “close enough to catch fire”. 

I don’t always expect to learn new truths about “real life” when I read fiction, or books about how to write it, but I should. And the more open and curious, critical and analytical, receptive, reflective and fearless I am, the more I will.

Emma Wilkins is a Tasmanian journalist and freelance writer whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and literary journals in Australia and beyond.