Welcome to How To Theme, chapters posting Tuesday/Thursday weekly, available now in print, in ebook, and on Amazon. All chapters are also up on Patreon, including the bonus information on genre-specific themes that’s in the final book, but won’t be appearing here on the blog.
Chapter Twelve: Empathy
Strangely, though, what it seems that stories most have the power to do is make us better people.
It’s true that stories, particularly group narratives, can have tremendously negative impacts (consider the stories told by racist hate groups, for example), but stories also have the power to shape society for the better.
Despite the continued existence of some detractors (who, I can only imagine, are either not big readers themselves, or else are reading mostly books with themes that encourage them to become worse versions of who they are), a wide range of studies have shown pretty convincingly that consuming stories—reading, in particular, sorry to disappoint—actually makes us more understanding of others, more empathetic, and generally better-quality human beings.
There’s a trick here, though: the kind of story you consume matters.
Generally speaking, when we say that consuming stories can make you a better person, we’re talking about narratives, actual stories with characters and a beginning, a middle and an end.
Narrative non-fiction certainly exists (memoirs, biographies, etc.), and we are probably fairly safe to assume that the generalisations made about fiction apply to narrative non-fiction as well… but generally the research deals more simply with just ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’.
So, when I say that stories have the power to make us better people, the research suggests I’m talking about fiction specifically: made-up stories about events that didn’t actually happen in the real world exactly as they’re stated, stories told through the lens of a particular and identifiable character.
So what can consuming fiction do for our souls?
Generally speaking, consuming fiction is a great way to develop our ‘theory of mind’. A ‘theory of mind’ (sometimes capitalised as Theory of Mind) is the ability we have to recognise that other people think different thoughts to ourselves; our inner life is not the inner life of every person we meet.
Consuming fiction is known to help develop this ability because it gives us practice in observing how people other than us think in a close, intimate way not usually possible with regular people (look, I know I talk to myself a lot, but if you sat in a room listening to me, you still wouldn’t be getting the same kind of access to my inner thoughts as you would if I were a character in a story).
This brings us to the first important point: sorry, everyone, but reading really is superior to other ways of consuming stories in this particular aspect, if only because of our storytelling conventions. In visual media, it’s hard to be ‘in the head’ of the character we’re following; it’s cheesy and unrealistic to have a movie full of voiceovers giving us the character’s thoughts and inner monologue.
In books, on the other hand, this is all perfectly acceptable. We’re used to seeing the character’s thoughts written there on the page, as though we had a magical little connection directly with their brain.
So reading fictional stories can improve our theory of mind. What else can it do?
A 2014 study found that reading fiction generally (as opposed to reading non-fiction) lowered racial bias: after reading the stories provided to them, participants were less likely to assign random photos of racially-ambiguous faces to particular races based solely on their facial expressions (before reading, there’d been a distinct correlation between the face showing a negative emotion, and the participant labelling it as not-the-same-race-as-themselves). After reading the stories, people were more likely to see similarities between ‘people like themselves’ and ‘people like the ones in the story’.
They were also more likely to behave empathetically in real-life situations, such as when the researcher “accidentally” dropped a handful of pens nearby. (The participants who reported being ‘highly absorbed’ in the story were about two times more likely to help than participants who reported not being particularly engaged with the story /stories they’d read.)
So this is the next key point: we need to be ‘highly absorbed’ with what we’re reading. This is because of what I mentioned before about knowing something intellectually and knowing it emotionally: if you’re just skimming, you’re absorbing the story only on an intellectual level, rather than engaging emotionally with it.
(And look, I know it’s really, really hard to engage emotionally with something if you’re a slow reader. I’m genuinely sad to report that I don’t have a solution here, except to say that, as with any other skill, practice really can improve your reading speed.)
And finally, a 2013 study wanted to investigate for-realsies whether some types of books increase empathy better than others, and what they found is that books that are all about the interior narrative of the character, all about experiencing the world the way someone else does, promote empathy best. (Totally shocking, right?)
Books that don’t seek to promote the interior life of the characters have little to no impact on the reader’s natural levels of empathy.
(The way the researchers said it was that literary stories promote empathy better than popular fiction or non-fiction, but given their definition of ‘literary stories’ was ‘narratives that focus on in-depth portrayals of subjects’ inner feelings and thoughts, I think us genre fans can rest assured that there are plenty of ‘literary’ offerings in the genres we love as well—romance and a lot of young adult stories are often quite ‘interior’ as well.)
This all seems nicely logical, of course, so well done them for proving it with science.
PART TWO SUM-UP
So what, exactly, does all this have to do with theme? Okay, I’ve made a case for the important of stories in general, and hopefully convinced you that they hold an important place in society—but why does that discussion belong in a book on theme?
Look, if you’ve been following along closely, you already know the answer: because the meaning we derive from a story, the lessons we learn from it, are the themes. While elements of a plot can be twisty, fundamentally, there are a limited number of plots. While elements of setting can be incredibly cool, the concept of a space whale isn’t going to change the way we live our lives. And while characters can be just as awesome as real, live human beings, it’s what these characters learn, how they change and grow, what they overcome and how they triumph that stays with us—and as you now know, that’s the entire basis of theme.
Stories tell us where we’ve come from; stories tell us who we are; and stories tell us who it’s possible to be. In short, stories give us our identity, forging a sense of belonging, and creating meaning in our lives. And they do this because of theme.