Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

in Books, Literature, Writing | February 19th, 2013 Leave a Comment

Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction.  He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing.

We’ve selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and readers alike–find them fascinating.

1: To get started, write one true sentence.

Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer’s block. In a memorable passage in A Moveable Feast, he writes:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

There is a difference between stopping and foundering. To make steady progress, having a daily word-count quota was far less important to Hemingway than making sure he never emptied the well of his imagination. In an October 1935 article in Esquire ( “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter”) Hemingway offers this advice to a young writer:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.

Building on his previous advice, Hemingway says never to think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Moveable Feast:

When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.

T0 maintain continuity, Hemingway made a habit of reading over what he had already written before going further. In the 1935 Esquire article, he writes:

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.

Close observation of life is critical to good writing, said Hemingway. The key is to not only watch and listen closely to external events, but to also notice any emotion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and identify precisely what it was that caused the emotion. If you can identify the concrete action or sensation that caused the emotion and present it accurately and fully rounded in your story, your readers should feel the same emotion. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about his early struggle to master this:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.

6: Use a pencil.

Hemingway often used a typewriter when composing letters or magazine pieces, but for serious work he preferred a pencil. In the Esquire article (which shows signs of having been written on a typewriter) Hemingway says:

When you start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none. So you might as well use a typewriter because it is that much easier and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.

7: Be Brief.

Hemingway was contemptuous of writers who, as he put it, “never learned how to say no to a typewriter.” In a 1945 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway writes:

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

Top tips for writing a strong female hero

Moira Young

The Costa award-winning author of Blood Red Road shares her top tips for creating fictional female heroes that live, breathe and fight on the page

• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 August 2012 11.15 BST

'Sacrifice is the hallmark of the best heroes': Moira Young, winner of the Costa children's book prize for Blood Red Road

The first female hero I ever met was six inches tall, lived inside our tiny black and white TV, and danced and sang her way along the yellow brick road with her friends. It was, of course, Dorothy in the movie of The Wizard of Oz. I was four years old. There it was, the hero's journey with its archetypal elements – the call to adventure, the road of trials with its allies and enemies, the ordeal, seizing the sword (in Dorothy's case, the broomstick of the Wicked Witch) and the hero's return – all to a catchy musical score. Little wonder that female heroes and the hero's journey sank deep into my psyche and that my first books star a strong teenage girl hero.

1. Rebel Heart (Dustlands)
2. by Moira Young
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Those are my credentials. So here it is, my Cut-Out-And-Keep Guide to Knitting Your Own Female Hero.

1. Make the stakes high

Give your hero a pressing dilemma, an important problem to solve, an urgent need that must be met. This will kick off the action and drive her through the story. It's her quest. We need to identify with her and root for her, page after page, so it should be a universal concern: success, love, death, survival, freedom, revenge, justice. At the same time, we need the quest to be deeply personal to the hero. We won't give a toss if she risks all to save the kidnapped uncle of her next-door neighbour's best friend. We might if it's her twin brother.

Not all heroes accept the high-stakes challenge willingly. A reluctant hero is fine, but if the story is to engage, they have to commit to the adventure sooner rather than later. Dorothy is a reluctant hero. She backs off from adventure, but it grabs her anyway and flings her into Oz. She's just a farm girl from Kansas, ordinary like most of us. But her desire to get back home is so great that, with the help of her friends, she overcomes her fears, conquers every obstacle in her path, kills the witch and is hailed a hero.

Oh, and if you want to make the stakes for your hero even higher, ratchet up the tension by setting the clock ticking. Trigger the timer on the bomb, either literally or metaphorically.

2. Keep her at the centre of the action

Remember, her need to succeed in her quest is what's powering the story. She makes the decisions, for good or ill, that move the story on. I write in scenes. For each scene, I ask myself the same series of questions, including: Is the main character at the centre of the action? Is it from her point of view? If the answer is no, I rewrite it. If there's some reason she can't be at the centre and there's a danger of her being sidelined, I ensure that I don't lose her for more than five or six lines. If it isn't appropriate for her to speak or act, I give her an inner reaction or thought.

3. Put your hero in extremis

Have your plot choices push her to the edge and beyond. She needs to be tested and challenged, psychologically, emotionally and physically, over and over again as her story progresses. Her true heroic character – determined, resourceful, courageous and self-sacrificing – will be revealed by the choices she makes under pressure. Sacrifice is the hallmark of the best heroes. They're willing to give up something of value for the greater good, up to and including their own life.

4. Make her multi-layered

You want your readers to sympathise and identify with your hero. So, like a real person, she should be a complex personality. She needs to be an entire symphony, not just one note. Give her some interesting flaws: fears, weaknesses, internal contradictions and quirks. Set up conflicts in her character that will be impediments to her achieving her goal.

5. Look for real female heroes, past and present

A hero is someone we admire for their courage or outstanding achievements. They don't have to be warriors like Ripley, battling aliens in outer space, or my own character, Saba, fighting to save her brother in the future world of Blood Red Road. They're in your own family and community. Browse the biographies, autobiographies, newspapers and magazines at the library. Listen to the radio, watch the news. We live in a world where women and girls are heroes every day, in big ways and small ways. Write their stories down. You'll be inspired.

Moira Young is the author of the Dust Land trilogy, a dystopian series set in a post-apocalyptic world. The first in the trilogy, Blood Red Road, won the Costa children's book award. The second, Rebel Heart, picks up exactly where the Blood Red Road ended, with the colourful and opinionated main character, Saba, crossing a barren land, keeping her family safe from the Tonton and hoping to be reunited with Jack. The film rights for the series have been optioned by Ridley Scott's production company.

Why you should begin well

Vikram Kapur in The Hindu

In life as in literature, there is nothing like making a great first impression.It is hard to overstress the importance of beginnings. I once heard the Booker Prize-winning Nigerian writer Ben Okri
say that if the first sentence of a book does not grab him, he is liable to close the book then and there. A bit extreme, perhaps, but it does illustrate how crucial beginnings are.


There are all kinds of first sentences — atmospheric, interrogative, informational, reflective, action-packed… One thing, however, all of them have in common is that they set the tone for the book that follows. This month let us look at some first sentences to see how they help forge an effective beginning.


Haruki Murakami’s novel Sputnik Sweetheart begins: “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.” Over the course of this short sentence, Murakami introduces us to his main character and tells us that she is a young woman of 22. He also lets us know that this is going to be a novel about first love. While most of the sentence is literal, the use of the word “spring” lends it a deeper meaning. Instead of “spring”, Murakami could have said “April” which would have been a more accurate reflection of exactly when Sumire fell in love for the first time. However, he chose to use the more metaphoric “spring”. The season of spring, in many cultures, symbolizes passion. The use of the word here sets the tone for the extreme passion that Sumire goes on to feel for the object of her affection.


Beginning in the middle

On the other hand, instead of beginning with a statement, you can begin right in the midst of action. Take a look at this first sentence from Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity: “The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.” A sentence like that instantly summons images of darkness, frenetic action, and the trawler being tossed about haplessly in the midst of it all. It isn’t surprising that Ludlum wrote thrillers. You would hardly expect a story of first love to ensue after reading such a beginning. 


Then there is this first sentence from the iconic Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The most interesting thing here is how Garcia Marquez instantly places the reader in two time frames. He is going to tell us about what happened on that afternoon. At the same time, however, he is inserting the burning question — how did Aureliano Buendia come to face a firing squad? — in the reader’s mind. Furthermore, Aureliano Buendia is being taken to “discover” ice. By using the word “discover”, Garcia Marquez captures the sense of wonder someone feels at seeing ice for the first time. Since the discovery was made many years ago when Aureliano Buendia was a boy, the whole effect of it on him would be magical.


From a completely different sensibility comes this first sentence from the prolific British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi’s novel Intimacy: “It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.” Unlike Garcia Marquez’s two time frames, Kureishi is firmly entrenched in one time frame — the night before the parting. The despondent tone of the sentence instantly communicates the mental state of the narrator. He is suffused with regret and guilt, and is clearly talking about leaving loved ones. The tone suggests a failed marriage, and reading on, one is not surprised to learn that the narrator has decided to leave his wife and children the next morning for a younger woman.


Finally, here is the first sentence of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time.” The sentence is, at once, a play on words, cleverly inverting the old way of beginning a story: “Once upon a time…” It also places the novel in Bombay and, consequently, in India. Finally, it tells us that the novel is going to take the form of a fictional autobiography. Only in this case it is an autobiography that tells us about the life of a person, as well as a country.


These are just five examples of beginnings. There are several more, and it would be worth your while to study them. Think of the beginning of a novel like a serve in tennis. It is, perhaps, the only time where you have the reader’s undivided attention. Hence, everything is in your hands. You can hit an ace, which will allow you to win over the reader. Or you can lose it all by hitting a fault.


-----

In the last week of February, I was writer-in-residence at Pondicherry Central University. There, during one of the lectures, a student asked: How should a writer live? Should a writer be a hermit? Or live out in the world?

As far as I am concerned, a writer must live out in the world. It is only when you engage in the world that you gather its sights, sounds and smells; that you get to experience its various paradoxes. Experience, as the great Latin American writer Roberto Bolano reminds us, is the seed from which great writing sprouts. A hermit can only write from memory, or what he or she can glean from books. The only current experience that he or she has to share is that of being a hermit, which most of the world does not care about. True, you have to retreat into your cave from time to time to be able to write. But a cave is not the place to live.

Riveting conversation

After coming home from Puducherry, I attended a discussion between the novelist and short story writer Bulbul Sharma and V.K. Karthika, Editor-in-chief of HarperCollins India, at the Alliance Francaise in New Delhi. It was a telling reminder of how enjoyable a literary conversation can be when the moderator and writer are in concert. At the Jaipur Literature Festival, the two often seemed to be on different planes. More often than not, that occurred because the moderator had not bothered to acquaint himself with the writer's body of work, and was clearly winging it. Thankfully, there was no chance of that happening here. Karthika is Bulbul Sharma's editor, and, therefore, knows her fiction intimately.

Bulbul's fiction illustrates the value of writing what you know. Bulbul, who is currently 60, got married at 19. In her stories, she deals chiefly with women in families. These are ordinary women, drawn mostly from her generation, who live caged lives within the confines of a traditional Indian family. Many of them only get to see the outside world after they are widowed. One of the stories from her collection My Sainted Aunts is about a character going abroad for the first time at the age of 70.

Listening to Bulbul read from her work, I was reminded of how compelling simplicity can be in fiction. Bubul's characters are ordinary people. Her prose is pared back rather than purple. Her stories deal with the small defeats and victories of people living a run-of-the-mill existence. They instantly evoke the iconic Hindi writer Premchand, who Bulbul mentioned as an influence. To me they are also reminiscent of Jane Austen in the way they hone in on women in family situations. They exemplify how resonant simplicity can be even in an age where writers are known more for their bag of tricks than what they write.

Two weeks after Bulbul's event, I wandered into the amphitheatre of the India Habitat Centre where Penguin India was holding its Spring Fever festival. That night Rahul Bhattacharya, who won The Hindu Literary Prize last year, and acclaimed fiction writer Anjum Hasan were in conversation with the critic Sunil Sethi. Regrettably, I could not stay for the entire discussion. But I did hear Rahul Bhattacharya read from his first book Pundits From Pakistan which has been re-issued by Penguin.

Characters come alive

Pundits From Pakistan is a cricket book dealing with the Indian team's historic tour of Pakistan in 2004. The passage the author read from dealt with an instance in the first Test match where Rahul Dravid, filling in for an injured Saurav Ganguly as captain, declared with Sachin Tendulkar close to a double hundred. While describing the reaction to that momentous declaration, the author effectively mimicked the voices of Tendulkar, V.V.S. Laxman, Imran Khan, Ian Chappell, and other well-known cricket personalities. He was using ventriloquism in a bid to enhance the audience's enjoyment of his performance. In the same way, a writer can employ his or her ability as a ventriloquist to bring various characters to life in a book. Many of the great writers are superb ventriloquists. Salman Rushdie gets into the skin of his characters in that manner. So does J.D. Salinger. The best ventriloquists in literature, though, are the playwrights for whom writing dialogue is their chief stock-in-trade. Most prose writers use dialogue in its most basic form, which is to move the story forward. They lack the ear to do anything more with it. Playwrights, on the other hand, utilise it as a key ingredient for building character, as well as negotiating between status shifts. As one of my old professors told me: If you want to learn how to write good dialogue, then read a good playwright.

Bankers are the dictators of the West

Robert Fisk in The Independent

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

Was Isaac Newton A 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist?

By Robin Davis

11 September, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Strange isn't it? To be labelled a 9/11 "conspiracy theorist" you don't even
need to have a theory. It's enough to express any doubt about the official
version of events.

Stranger still, those who consider themselves too wise to entertain such
"nonsense" forget that they, too, are conspiracy theorists. They either
believe the official version, which by definition is a conspiracy theory, or
they have no view. But having no view doesn't let them off the hook. The 911
events had to be caused by a conspiracy of some sort. So, just to
acknowledge that 911 happened is to be a conspiracy theorist.

So, what's really going on here? Could it be that those dismissive of
alternative views are so short on knowledge and the inclination to acquire
it that they have nothing to contribute but ridicule? Could it be that they
simply don't care? Could it be that alternative views are so scary that it's
safer to stifle debate? Could it be simply easier to go with the flow than
to risk the discomfort inflicted upon those who doubt the status quo?

My doubt and discomfort began as it happened, ten years ago while I watched
the towers come down on TV.

I'm not a physicist, but I can do simple maths. Simple maths tells me that a
building can't fall at close to free fall speed unless all but the tiniest
resistance posed by the structure below has first been removed.

I wonder if they called Isaac Newton a conspiracy theorist when that apple
hit him on the noggin and he started babbling about something called
gravity? Probably.

Ask yourself: Could the aircraft impacts and jet fuel fires really render
the structures so feeble that they offered little more resistance than air?
If common sense doesn't provide the answer, do a little research and you'll
find that it couldn't. And if it couldn't, the whole official narrative
falls apart as quickly as the buildings.

If, since 2001, you haven't watched a video of the three towers (yes, three)
coming down, do so again. Just watch. Really watch. Use your stopwatch if
you like. Do some simple maths (the acceleration of gravity is 9.81 metres
per second/per second).

Consider the structures - marvels of architectural engineering. Picture the
thousands of tonnes of steel beams and girders that held those buildings up
for decades. Watch those thousands of tonnes of steel beams and girders
offering next to no resistance as the buildings come down, defying the laws
of physics if the official explanation is to be believed - not once, but
three times in one day.

There's more, much more, and the implications are horrific. Just how
horrific will be all too obvious when future generations marvel at how
easily and eagerly so many were deceived.

Some of us would rather not wait for the bright light of hindsight. Call us
"conspiracy theorists" or "thruthers" or nut cases if you like, but know
that all we want is the truth, because without truth there can be no
justice.

Anything less dishonours the people killed on that day and the millions
killed, maimed, demonised, kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, widowed,
orphaned, traumatised, and made homeless in the wars raging still in their
name and ours.

Robin Davis lives in Victoria, Australia. He is a freelance writer and
graphic designer. He can be contacted at: robindavis@hotkey.net.au

Fiction takes you to places that life can't

Philip Hensher in The Independent:

It takes a novelist, not a psychologist, to explain why people sometimes behave out of character

Saturday, 9 July 2011

 

What's it like to die? There's no answer to this cheerful question, or there shouldn't be.

People have told us what it's like nearly to die, to come back from the brink. The external process of death has been gone over in great detail. But no one has definitively returned from the other side, to tell us what it's like to feel the last breath leaving your body. We don't know anything about it.

Or rather, we shouldn't know anything about it. In 1886, Tolstoy published a short story called "The Death of Ivan Ilych", which follows a fairly unremarkable man to the complete extinction of life. After reading that, you feel you know what death will be like: "Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction." How could Tolstoy possibly know that? You will read any number of academic studies of the processes of death without coming near the novelist's instinctive understanding.

A wonderful Canadian academic and psychologist, Keith Oatley, has carried out some research on readers and non-readers of fiction, and has questioned this widespread assumption. Speaking to the Today programme this week, he shared his conclusion that habitual readers of novels were much better at coping with social situations and with a wide range of human beings. The usual image of the thick-lensed bookworm who can't cope with people – Philip Larkin's character who says "when getting my nose in a book/cured most things short of school" – is far from reality.

Well, all of us Dewey-botherers knew that. I guess from day one, I had a general sense that novels were going to introduce me to more sorts of people than life would. There was Mummy and Daddy and my big sister; there was Mr and Mrs Griffiths next door, and there were the Skittles at the end of the garden. On the other hand, if you opened a book, there wasDorothy and her friends the lion and the tinman and a boy called Tip, later transformed into Princess Glinda of Oz.

Later on, there were girls who went away to a super school called Malory Towers, not very much like anyone I knew; there were robots and Boy Detectives and a talking spider called Charlotte (who died) and a foul-tempered talking pudding and a larrikin koala, some rather intimidating children called Bastable and a boy called Philip Pirrip.

Whenever I hear someone say "I don't read novels – I prefer to read about the truth," I wonder about their notion of "the truth". The conviction that reading fiction is a dispensable part of a rich, full life is a widely held one. Members of my own family, to this day, will say to me if they find me engrossed in a thriller, "If you're not doing anything...".

The saddest expression of this attitude must be Quentin Crisp's famous landlady, who was always commenting on his actions. If she came across him having his lunch, she would say "Eating." If she saw him sewing a button on, she would say "Mending. Once, she found him reading a novel. She looked at him, and said "Waiting."

I don't suppose any reader complains for a moment that his life is failing to introduce him to as interesting a collection of people as he will find in 10 minutes in the nearest bookshop. On the other hand, real life has a way of intruding itself. You can't live your life entirely within the pages of a novel, as much as some of us attempt to. And when real life starts to expand beyond the small domestic circle, then your reading of novels is going to prepare you for what life can hold. India is not completely strange if you have read Narayan; nor is old age after Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.

Fiction won't tell you the whole story, but it will take you to places that life won't – Sicilian ducal houses, 13th-century convents, cities in Calvino that never existed. And sometimes with a shock of recognition, you meet in real life a friend from a book. I have a dear old German friend who, the very first time I met him, I thought "Snufkin". He really was Tove Jansson's charismatic, silent, solitary wanderer to the life. I wouldn't have known what to make of him without those magical novels.

How do novelists do it? They throw themselves into lives very unlike their own; their imaginative reconstructions are as apt to be as convincing as reports back from experience. Tolstoy knows what it is like to die; Stephen Crane tells us what war is like in The Red Badge of Courage, only experiencing battle after writing it. Conrad undoubtedly knew what it was like to endure a stupendous tropical storm. Thousands of sailors went through events like the ones described in Typhoon, but only one had the imaginative sympathy to write it down.

As Martin Amis has said, we still have no real idea what it is like to go into space. No one who has done so has had the ability to write well about the experience. Whatever systematic analysis is undertaken of a human experience, still the novelist's human spread seems the most substantial, authentic, accurate account.
Psychologists can offer explanations of behaviour, but they can't explain why people sometimes act out of character, or against their own interests. Even so subtle an analyst of behaviour as Erving Goffman, say, would struggle to account for the moment at the end of Vanity Fair where Becky Sharp hands Amelia Osborne the letter, destroying her own interests. And yet we know it to be true in the deepest sense.

The writer Marc Abrahams has shared an amusing encounter with a psychologist, who told him: "Whenever any group of really good research psychologists gets together socially, after a few drinks they always – and I do mean always – talk about why novelists are so much better at it than we are."

It's true. No psychologist is as good a psychologist as Graham Greene, let alone Tolstoy. And it's also true that no social life contains the range and interest of a shelf of novels. We love our friends: human beings fascinate us endlessly; and to teach us how they work, there are always novels. I've never met anyone remotely like Emma Bovary, Miss Flite, or Belinda, the madcap genius of the Fourth Form at Malory Towers. But one day, they'll come along, and when they do, I'll recognise them instantly.