There are no true stories.

Why would you read a novel? It's not even true.

Do you believe that non-fiction books are "better" because they are "true?"  NLP (neurolinguistic programming) offers an interesting perspective on how language works. It uses words to anchor experience, so that every communication with language is completed by the receiver. The words are not the point: the connection is the point.


In the meta-model, it is understood that language necessarily distorts experience because it cannot create a one-to-one correspondence between what the words say and the experience represented by the words. This isn't because people are trying to be misleading. It's the way language works. There is no evolutionary advantage to being able to predict the past or to being so accurate that no one else can connect with what you are saying.

Stories are never true (even if they really happened) because they are all experiences that are communicated through language. Language necessarily changes and shapes what you say with it. This doesn't mean there is no point to talking. It means that language is about shaping connection and cooperation so you can change the future. It's not about representing the past in a way that is accurate.

Language is a tool that helps us live forward, not backwards. Novels help you do that by showing you potential experiences and patterns of experience. So do memoirs and non-fiction books. Non-fiction is not "more true" because it starts from something that 'actually happened.' It is a crafted, curated, artificial version of life that may help you connect, cooperate or imagine the future. Just like fiction.

The advantage to reading fiction is that we don't expect it to be a true representation of life; we expect it to offer true possibilities for life. That means that we hope to use stories about people who don't exist and events that haven't happened so we can think about how to live our own lives with clearer intentions. We give our hearts to made-up characters because we know they hold the key that opens something important in us.

Non-fiction can also engage our emotions and trigger our sense of possibility. It does this when it tells a good story that carries us through interesting changes in states and connections. Whether or not a story starts out in someone's life is less important than how it turns up in the experience of the reader. You should read whatever engages the most of your attention so that you can make the most of what you read. 

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