I have a close family member who is pretty well educated and intelligent, who absolutely abhors and detests all fiction. He watches plenty of TV, but only news, magazine-type shows, documentaries, and the like; he has shelves upon shelves of books, but not a single novel among them; and won’t see any movies unless they’re about real people and things.
His motivations for these preferences are probably beyond the scope of this thread. I’ll just say they’re lifelong, resulting from a decision in adolescence that anything that isn’t capital-T TRUE is an utter waste of time. But without psychoanalyzing this person, I’m wondering how common the preference is. I don’t know a single other person so disconnected from culture as it’s expressed in novels, stories, TV programs and movies, but perhaps they’re everywhere.
I read very little fiction now. I did up through maybe age 30. But now there’s so much else to read. I watch substantially no movies. Right now my wife is watching a DVD of a period murder mystery and I’m glancing up from this now and again to see fictional people behaving badly. Why would I want garbage like that in my head?
So unlike your relative who’s hooked on truth for truth’s sake, I just don’t have much use for fictionalized bad behavior. There’s enough bad in the real world without filling one’s head with fake tales of violence, greed, and anger.
I read very little fiction, although I do watch TV and will watch the occasional movie.
For some reason, a plot hole or inconsistency in a novel takes me out of the story entirely. Excellent writing makes up somewhat for that, but my tastes in writing are somewhat quirky, and at this point I don’t want to plow through a dozen novels I can nitpick to death just to find one that can grab me like a decent history or biography.
It’s always struck me as a shame – maybe, maybe most fiction is just for entertainment, suitable only for time-wasters and flibbertigibbets, not Serious People, but doesn’t some fiction* uplift and instruct? King Lear. Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Grapes of Wrath. To dismiss it – all of it – out of hand because it’s not literally true is to cut yourself off from some great wisdom.
*This is not exactly the right word. “Literature,” maybe, but I need a word that encompasses all non-literally-true material of any medium, both High, like Shakespeare, and Low, like I Love Lucy.
Last weekend I went to our library’s used book sale. Our of the eight books that I dragged home (the limit set by my wife grrr), six were nonfiction, and the other two were science fiction. One of those two was science fiction as written by “the world’s greatest scientists”, so that’s almost nonfiction too.
About 75% of our TV viewing is also nonfiction, from singing competitions (my wife’s favorite), HGTV shows, Hoarders, Dateline, baking shows, Nova and Frontline, etc.
I think it’s partly because I have engineering and computer degrees, and my wife has a chemistry degree. If we watch some fiction, it has to be really good, based on IMDB or newspaper reviews. Otherwise, if it’s not great, why bother when the real world offers so much.
To be fair, there’s nothing in a meaningful fictional novel that you couldn’t write as a simple, straightforward essay. You can make the argument that in some scenario, you believe that X would happen, give some relevant examples from the world, and you’ve basically written the key elements of your whole book in a few pages.
I avoid documentaries, simply because I know that they are, often, edited with an intent to tell a story or to force a message onto reality that just ain’t so, that it’s as well as fictional.
I want my fiction to be fiction and my reality to be reality. The middle zone is what’s currently wreaking havoc on the world (IMHO).
I don’t actively avoid the idea of fiction as I play plenty of video games with narrative elements, but if I’m going to be consuming something that’s not interactive, I’d prefer to be learning something (which makes it slightly interactive in a way). Sitting on the couch and watching whatever new show came out is not interesting to me in general, nor is reading any sort of fiction that hasn’t stood the test of time as a classic of literature. The latter I basically haven’t engaged with at all either any time recently, but if someone told me I had to read a novel, I’d make it something classic I hadn’t read yet rather than seeking out some recent genre novel.
Many people find reading a struggle. Maybe they have a minor learning disorder, short attention span, limited vocabulary. Maybe they absorb information through images or sound, rather than words.
In any case, they don’t get a lot of pleasure from reading, so they won’t enjoy “stories.” Plowing through an instruction manual, or maybe a newspaper is quite enough for them.
My Dad is that way. He doesn’t read any fiction and limits TV to only war/military shows. Like some above, he just doesn’t see the point of storytelling unless it’s a stylized account of an actual event.
My reading list is almost 100% fiction, since I get enough reality daily. Ditto for TV and movies, although I’m interested in true crime stuff (like Forensic Files, etc.).
Sheesh, he sounds dry and boring. He sounds like the kind of date where you excuse yourself to go to bathroom but, instead, call for an Uber to take you home.
I watch plenty of fictional TV, but sometimes I say to myself “They’re just making it up as they go along!” I mean, of course they are! But if I’m saying that to myself, that means that I’m noticing some inconsistency that is bothering me. And as I get older, I think I’m getting fussier about inconsistencies.
For instance, I think I would have loved the Harry Potter books if I had read them as a child, but as an adult I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and I thought “Wait – the school had a working time machine all along and they didn’t use it in the first two movies??”
Fiction is like sleep. It allows the mind to escape and not worry about true life drama.
It also gives the mind new paths to think about. A lot of ‘What if?’
After a day of toil and trouble, it’s good to let go. My Wife and I do it by playing chess. I’m not thinking about current events when in a chess game. Fiction does the same thing.
