Others on the thread have also responded as if non-fiction is the powerful form of writing which, Spiderman-style, demands great responsibility. But my own behavior – and I’d venture most other people’s – has been much more shaped by stories than by didactic writing.
I learned how to communicate and relate to other people through stories (and a lot about how not to). I learned more of ethics through literature that illustrated tragic choices and the consequences of choice than from reading moral theory. As a Christian, I encountered what I believe to be the most important truths through stories (and the Big Story in which the others find themselves); and if I weren’t a Believer, I’d be one of the Matthew Arnold/Alain de Botton types who insist that fiction is all the more important as a source of social and ethical guidance in a civilization that no longer has a Scripture. And my faith gets far more shaky reading Of Human Bondage than The God Delusion or similar polemics.
Animal Farm is a work of fiction that tells us more important things about dictatorship than a dozen histories. James Bond is a more influential icon of conventional masculinity than any non-fiction list of how to be a Man’s Man. Choice of Robots won’t help me build an AI, but I learned a lot from it on the more important topic of what it would mean if I did.
And that’s just focusing on what I’m (mostly) conscious of learning. As others have said, the influence of what we read – fiction or non-fiction – is something of which we’re often only partly conscious, perhaps especially if we’re confident in our own immunity to the subliminal and implicit. I’m under no illusion that Tolkien was writing non-fiction. But when I was working in Afghanistan in the relative calm of 2004, I realized that a large part of the sense of threat I felt in the hills around Uruzgan, Qandahar, and Ghor was the sheer orcishness of the names.
Not in a whole lot of cultures modern and historical, sadly. “No means no” is a hard-won triumph of contemporary gender-egalitarian culture. And any culture is conveyed primarily by the stories we tell.
Thanks to everyone who (on thread and PM) has expressed sympathy for my friend. While I can’t speak to how the experience may still affect her, I can say that she’s a person who exudes joy and love of life like few others I know.
Of course you can’t do that. That’s impossible. What you can do as an author is take responsibility for what’s problematic in your work, rather than getting your boxers in a twist because someone’s pointed out that it’s problematic. Nor is anyone saying that “everyone will be impacted in the exact same way.” Just that authors share responsibility for the (variety of) impacts of their work.
