Do you love to read fiction?

Let me tell you why fiction is more valuable than you think!

🕯Diving into a fiction book is diving into a whole new world and whole new being. As you jump back and forth between the real world and the world of the book, the book is like a mirror, reflecting you and your existence here back at you to examine and see with fresh new eyes. The book is like the light of a candle, beckoning you to understand life through the eyes of others.

 🕯The importance of reading fiction is horrendously underrated. Based on the results of countless studies, one can even conclude that reading fiction helps makes us better people. READING fiction has been proven to increase levels of empathy and understanding, in both children and adults. In fact, a few studies even found that empathy levels go up after just finishing one book. Why is that?

📕Reading fiction, unlike watching a film, or listening to someone share their own story, gives you the ability to not just HEAR or SEE a story, but to enter the spirit, soul, body and experience of someone else. You're temporarily transported into their being. “They” being the characters and the author at the same time. You feel their feelings. You see life through their eyes. Their saddness is your sadness, their emotions your emotions. When they laugh, you laugh. Because of this, fiction is incredibly important when it comes to driving understanding and building empathy, more than most other mediums. 

📗Another benefit is that fiction books tend to come with more complex language and sentence structures and more poetic ways to phrase ideas, so reading fiction is a great way to strengthen your vocabulary and eloquence.

📘Reading fiction forces you to imagine things in your head completely, unlike a film which does it for you. This increases your power of imagination and your creativity.

📙Reading fiction allows you to live multiple histories and plots firsthand in your own lifetimes. Being able to jump into many tough processes and existences from a first hand perspective, where you go through the journey of figuring this out yourself through the eyes of others, builds a different way within you in how you look at the world around you and process information. Suddenly, when something happens in your real life, it may not be as it seems. Books you've read may cause you to question more, not take things for face values, see the hidden motives in certain things. Thus reading fiction can help build critical thinking and open your eyes to meanings, possibilities and ways of thinking that you would've never even pondered before.

Interested in diving into some fiction for yourself but want some recommendations? Don't worry, stay tuned, I've got you 😉