Discernment in Fiction

I have recently returned from vending at the UTCH homeschooling conference. It was an interesting experience, as always, with its usual mix of encouraging and discouraging.

One of the biggest challenges I always face is helping the conferees to understand why I promote fiction at an education venue.

This year I finally boiled my answer down to one sentence: Because fiction is the easiest and most practical way to practice discernment.

For most people agree that we need discernment more than ever in a world that excels at blurring the lines between right and wrong. Rather, the question is how do we learn discernment?

How do we learn anything, whether a foreign language or sports or music? Through practice.

However, practice is usually done under controlled and limited circumstances. But life is not controllable. It is not limited or focused or any of the other things that practice is.

This is where fiction comes in.

Fiction gives us hypothetical situations that mirror real life. We can vicariously experience things we’ve not yet encountered, and we can think through how we wish to respond if faced with a similar circumstance.

Fiction is limited. We can choose which books or movies we indulge in; we can decide which topics to broach.

Fiction provides time and room to ponder. Unlike life, we can set aside a book or pause a movie. We can stop and think about it for awhile before resuming the progress.

But perhaps most of all, fiction is repeatable. We can rewind a movie. We can reread a book. We can examine, compare, and then document our conclusions.

And this is why I believe fiction to be a necessary part of life.