Read Fiction

Yes, I confess to being a novelist. Yes this may sound self serving, but bear with me and read on. If you really want to shake things up and inspire your most creative thoughts read fiction.

If you think this only applies to aspiring authors you are wrong.

Story is where ideas are created, dreams hatched, inspiration launched. Story lets us escape and observe in fictional characters how we want our lives to be or don’t. We look at the characters we read about and we ask ourselves if  they live lives we aspire to or  we fear if we are not careful we will be fated to their same doom.

The convention when we want to shake up our lives with the goal of rejuvenation or reinvention is to reach for the non fiction shelf, to wrap our hands and our minds around good old concrete dos and don’ts, take a test or two that might reveal what our logic refuses to offer and start analyzing.

I offer that sometimes the surest cure for creative block, whether you are a writer literally creating the next scene for your character or an entrepreneur looking for an innovative way to grow your business lies in the pages of that novel that you think too frivolous an expenditure of time to sink into. We are all writing the story of our lives. Fiction shows us how.

Story has become underrated in a world of memoirs being written by people who have not yet lived a whole life combined with reality based television. But story is the secret elixir. Try it on and let me know what happens.

Note: This blog was inspired by the first pages of The Winner Stands Alone by Paulo Coelho.