Fiction as Soul Fuel: Why Stories Move Us
by Angelica Walker-Werth
Author’s Note: This article is adapted from a talk I gave at LevelUp 2025 in Orlando.
Since before I can remember, I’ve been a bookworm. My mom tells me that I taught myself how to read and has sent photos of me as a young girl reading everywhere—even in a laundry basket. I don’t recall that instance, but I do recall spending as much time as I could with my nose in a book and teaching my younger sisters to read when they were old enough. I also remember the awe and peace I felt in a library, the excitement I felt when I received a book as a present, and the comfort of carrying books with me to school every day.
Then, life happened. While in college, I was studying for two different degrees alongside working full-time. I had almost no time for fiction, especially when I became interested in philosophy and Objectivism. I learned that philosophy affects every area of a person’s life, so clearly it was important, and part of what little time I had outside work and school went toward studying Ayn Rand’s works and the big questions of philosophy. After graduating, I took courses in philosophy, Objectivism, and writing, and I began writing nonfiction articles about current events and complicated ethical debates such as abortion. Still, I wasn’t consuming much fiction.
Now, I consider myself a professional bookworm. I write articles, make short- and long-form video content, and give talks about ideas in fiction. My understanding of philosophy has enabled me to engage with fiction more deeply than ever before, and to enjoy what I read and watch even more. Though I prefer to engage with fiction via books, the lessons I’ve learned also apply to thoughtful movies, TV shows, video games, comics, and any other form of fiction.
To distill what I’ve learned so far about engaging more deeply with fiction, I aim to answer two questions: First, why does fiction affect us so much? And second, why does the answer to the first question matter? The brief answer to the second question is that if we understand explicitly and clearly the benefits of fiction, we can enhance them by looking for them and engaging with fiction more thoughtfully.
Fiction fuels our souls—that is, our nonphysical parts. The best stories touch us emotionally and intellectually, and some even give us something to strive for. Just as we need to take care of our bodies, we also need to take care of our mental faculties and our emotional well-being—our spiritual side. We can employ lots of methods to do this, and fiction is a broad and deep well we can pull from. Fiction can help fuel our souls through, for example, connection, learning, and immersion. Fiction connects us with others by engaging our empathy, illustrating universal values, and giving us content to bond over. It helps us learn how to live by offering cognitive technology, a chance to exercise our moral imagination, and facilitating introspection. And it offers the experience of immersion—which some term “escapism” but is better thought of as mental travel—along with the opportunity to savor beauty. Let’s take each of those in turn.
Fiction Connects Us to Others
In 1761, a French journalist wrote that only the coldhearted could resist the “torrents of emotion that so ravage the soul, that so imperiously, so tyrannically extract such bitter tears.”[1] The emotions he refers to are those evoked by a book written by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—but not one of the philosophic treatises he’s famous for today. That year, Rousseau had published a novel called Julie. At a time when few novels had achieved mainstream popularity and none were considered serious art, Julie was a sensation. It was a tragedy written from the perspective of a young woman (the eponymous Julie), but it touched the hearts of people from all walks of life. Clergymen, housemaids, lawyers, mothers, politicians, and many more spoke and wrote about how the sad ending found them not merely crying but “shrieking, howling like an animal.”[2] The book had such a wide impact that Enlightenment historian Lynn Hunt argues that it was instrumental in developing the widespread recognition of individual rights because it contributed to the deep understanding that every person—regardless of gender, wealth, or social class—shares the same core elements of humanity. This was possible, Hunt suggests, because in a time when most rarely engaged with others who were different from themselves due to strict social stratification and norms about how to interact with people of the opposite sex, Julie taught readers to empathize with someone who was unlike them in every superficial way.[3] It taught them that people from totally different walks of life could have the same needs, values, and feelings as themselves.
Nor is this the only historical case in which well-drawn fictional characters engaged readers’ empathy, which then contributed to political change. Many of Tsar Alexander II’s biographers claim that the reason he decided to formally end serfdom in Russia was a novel: A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev. Though it was almost certainly not the only factor in the tsar’s decision (nor did he end serfdom single-handedly), it is a well-documented fact that he read the novel multiple times and discussed it with his wife. The book is a collection of short stories (originally published separately) narrated by a landowner but focusing on various peasants he encounters: their lives, struggles, relationships, and conflicts. That focus on poor people upended Russian social and literary tradition, in which peasants were typically nothing more than background characters or occasionally narrative devices. Turgenev shone a spotlight on them, treating them as individuals whose relationships and values were as worthy of contemplation and study as those of nobles.[4] It is likely that the novel was an emotional touchstone that strengthened Alexander’s resolve.
By being able to imagine ourselves in the situation of, and thus connect with, someone who is completely different from us, we gain a new perspective. Part of the way this works is that when we read, we self-project. The same part of our brain that we use to imagine ourselves in the future is activated when we consume fiction.[5] So it’s easy to feel that a character’s experiences, whether positive or negative, are important, because in a sense, we experience it as though it’s happening to us. And when we take seriously the characters in a fictional work, we can identify what makes them who they are, which enables us to recognize and potentially connect with fundamentally similar people in real life.
But if fiction were not emotionally compelling, this wouldn’t work. So why is fiction so emotionally compelling? To understand that, we must understand where emotions come from. Emotions are based on our values: the things we act to gain and keep. We have positive emotions toward things that are in line with, support, or further our values, and we have negative emotions toward things that seem to threaten, undermine, or oppose our values. Examples of fundamental values include independence, honesty, friendship, and love. These are universal; virtually everyone values them to some extent. People have always told each other stories about these values. For as long as we have records of myths, for instance, key themes have centered around dealing with death and understanding the world around us.[6] Life is the most fundamental value of all, so grief and conceptualizing death emerge as related themes. And knowledge that enables us to act appropriately in our context is also a universal value.
Though good fiction dramatizes its theme through all its aspects, including plot, characterization, and style, it will be helpful to focus on only characters for a moment to see how the emotional connection happens. Thoughtful fiction creators start to indicate what a character’s values are as soon as they introduce the character, and those values become particularly stark when they are at stake in a conflict (and some conflict, regardless of scale or nature, is essential to good fiction). We as readers naturally sympathize with characters who share our values and dislike characters who hold values that are opposed to our own.
But what’s remarkable is how many people who are different from each other in countless ways (career, background, country, culture) can relate to the same character because they hold the same values or have had similar experiences. The characters embody those values or their opposites. This is one of the fundamental purposes of art—it creates a body for abstract values that we can look at. For example, as a teenager, I strongly related to Dagny Taggart from Atlas Shrugged. I felt we were alike in many ways; we were both intelligent, focused on achievement, had high standards, and aimed for clarity in understanding and communication. There were also many ways in which I felt Dagny was a better version of me; for instance, she was much better at maintaining her integrity than my teenage self was, and she was more confident than I was. Though it feels trivial now, she also went through the bewildering struggle of being teased at school for doing well academically. This small—but at the time painful—instance of others’ irrational envy being a challenge for a character I admired made me feel incredibly seen psychologically. Knowing that someone else, a thoughtful creator, had envisioned that struggle, understood what type of person would encounter it, and decided it was important enough to write about and integrate with the rest of the plot and characterization made the book incredibly special to me. And I’m far from the only person who has ever related to Dagny; I’ve spoken to countless people who have seen in her both a reflection of themselves and an ideal. She embodies universal values that people from all backgrounds can appreciate and connect with. Dagny is also an example of how we can connect to people across time; her creator is a woman who died years before I was born, yet she understood and cared about things that I and tens of thousands of other readers also care about.
Further, those very conversations I’ve had with people about Dagny Taggart and how we relate to her are an example of the final way fiction helps us connect with others: by giving us content to bond over. For centuries, humans have been telling each other stories over the campfire; some of us still do. But now, we also have comic book conventions, Jane Austen festivals, theme parks based on wildly popular books and movies, and many more experiences supported by and designed for people who love certain stories to get together and celebrate them.
Fiction helps us connect with others by giving us opportunities to empathize, by reflecting our values, and by providing emotionally compelling stories we can bond over.
Fiction Teaches Us How to Live
Artists create art primarily to be contemplated or enjoyed, not to teach lessons (“art” that is designed to teach a lesson is propaganda). That said, artists necessarily work from their own basic views of the world (metaphysics) and human nature, including how humans should behave (ethics), to decide what to create art about and how to do it. So, many works of art contain moral ideals, and all contain at least an implicit view of metaphysics for the reader to consider and potentially learn from. Of course, the fact that a person is a fiction author does not mean he or she has mystical insights into these important matters, so part of the value of identifying what is being expressed through fiction is enabling you to examine it critically rather than passively absorbing it. But if the author is thoughtful and has presented a view with a significant amount of truth to it, there’s much to gain intellectually and in terms of personal growth from engaging with fiction.
Most fundamentally, art can provide us with thinking tools. A thoughtful fiction writer comes up with manifestations of universal values, such as vivid characters and fascinating plots, by observing the world and condensing what he or she observes into a character, a scene, or a plotline. These become emotionally compelling mental tools that draw on the context of the work and condense many relevant facts or ideas into a character, word, or phrase.[7] Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand described this function of art as “the technology of the soul.” She explained that, in the same way the hard sciences provide the principles and knowledge we need to construct bridges and buildings whereas architects and builders are needed to erect them, “ethics is the engineering that provides the principles and blueprints. Art creates the final product. It builds the model.”[8] Thoughtful art offers us condensations of an artist’s ideas about certain elements of what it’s like to be human, which provides the audience with tangible symbols to think about and reference. It creates a bridge between abstract philosophy and how we actually live.
Consider a few examples I’ve seen people reference to explain the essence of someone’s character, a certain mind-set, a type of error and what it might lead to, or how to make a good decision that would be in line with a value. First, Javert from Les Miserables is a misguided police officer whose whole sense of morality depends on what’s legal. He believes he is acting in the name of justice, which makes him more dangerous, because what is legal and what is objectively moral are not always the same thing. Javert becomes a symbol for a misguided zealot who wants to behave justly. Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, is the embodiment of independence and artistic integrity, never letting anyone else dictate his standards or his work. Through the course of the novel, we see him handle a variety of situations including friendships, media persecution, various levels of his career, and more while staying true to his firsthanded values. He is a symbol readers can look up to when their integrity is tested. Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter series starts as a young girl who feverishly pursues knowledge to the exclusion of almost all else. By the end, she also appreciates other life-serving values such as friendship and courage, and she develops the wisdom to put her considerable intelligence to work in defending them.
Now, imagine that you have read all the novels just referenced or seen their movie adaptations. If I were describing a new coworker to you and said he was like Javert, you would instantly know something significant and important about him. It would be more powerful than if I simply said he seems like too much of a rule follower or that he has a well-intentioned but incorrect view of justice. And that immediate, intense impression would be totally different from the one you’d get if I told you he was like Howard Roark. In fact, Roark’s creator, Ayn Rand, who later wrote extensively and clearly about her view of ethics, found that many readers didn’t think about her explicitly spelled-out virtues or ethical principles when they faced a difficult decision. Rather, they asked themselves, “What would Howard Roark do?”[9] In other words, well-drawn characters can not only help us by serving as a shorthand in our thinking, but they can also guide our decisions more directly.
Fiction can offer food for thought to guide our actions in other ways, too. It can help us prepare to behave in ways that align with our values by putting ourselves in the position of characters who must make difficult choices. Philosophy professors Carrie-Ann Biondi and Irfan Khawaja described this as moral imagination in their introduction to the special edition of their journal dedicated to exploring philosophic questions in the Harry Potter series. They wrote:
When faced with adversity and even horror, what choices can we make, or should we make? Visualizing ourselves at both our worst and our best allows us to confront and explore possible choices, so that when faced with a possibility made reality, we are prepared to take the path we know is best.[10]
For example, many readers admire Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. Early in the dystopia, Katniss protects her younger sister by taking the girl’s place in a horrific government-created and -enforced competition. This is but one example of Katniss’s integrity, manifested multiple times throughout the books as she takes serious risks to protect the people she loves. Many of us look up to Katniss because we want to be the kind of people who would take such risks for our highest values. Likely none of us will be in the nightmare situation created by the intensely authoritarian regime she lives under—but by imagining ourselves in Katniss’s shoes, we prepare for times when it may take courage to defend what we love.
Engaging with fiction can also offer ways to get to know ourselves better by facilitating introspection. As I mentioned before, I make short-form videos about the ideas in fiction, and one commenter on TikTok mentioned that her therapist encourages her to talk about which parts of the fiction books she reads touch her emotionally or make her cry, asking questions such as, “How does that relate to your life? What about it triggered that emotion?” These are excellent questions; fiction is designed to be emotionally compelling, and the better we understand why we react emotionally to a particular part of a work, the better we understand ourselves. Some questions I recommend asking yourself to start this process are:
What am I emotionally reacting to here, and why?
Which characters do I connect with? Why?
Does this answer any questions about anything I’m thinking about or struggling with in my life? Does the answer it offers make sense?
Another aspect of the work to consider is its sense of life and how it compares to your own. Your sense of life is your fundamental attitude to the world, and it’s often felt rather than ponderously articulated. When you encounter a work of art that has a similar sense of life to yours, you feel, Yes, this is what the world is like. This is how I see the world. And when you come across a work with a sense of life opposite to yours, it might feel a little gross or even repulsive; you probably won’t want to spend time in that world. Identifying which reaction you’re having, and perhaps one or two elements of the work and of your own thinking that caused it, can help you to better understand your own sense of life and what kinds of works you enjoy.
An example of a work that I was not expecting to love the way that I did, but that affirmed my sense of life, was a fantasy series about a woman who studied dragons: The Memoirs of Lady Trent. I described it to a friend as “a benevolent place to hang out.” That fictional world is a place where hard work, determination, love, and passion matter more than anything else. That world includes risks, danger, and conflict, but if you keep going after what you love and you keep trying to learn, then things will work out, often in ways you could never have imagined. And that’s core to how I see the world, too.
By engaging intellectually with fiction—such as seeing thoughtful fiction as a source of cognitive tools, fuel for moral imagination, and opportunities for introspection—we can learn about others and ourselves, as well as improve our thinking and decision making.
Immersion
Many people claim that they read fiction or watch movies or TV shows to “escape the real world.” This doesn’t seem like a healthy coping mechanism—and yet, when thinking about the way we feel when we consume good fiction, it’s an understandable claim. So, is fiction inherently escapist? Let’s consider a couple thoughtful views on the subject.
In explaining the purpose of fantasy, J. R. R. Tolkien argued that escapism was one of its essential functions. He thought it was perfectly reasonable to want to escape bad situations that you couldn’t physically get out of, whether tragedies caused by world events (Tolkien lived through both world wars and fought in the first one) or more mundane difficulties. Because bad things can happen to good people, this needn’t imply that you’re trying to hide from your own guilt or responsibility. Tolkien also condemned modernity and viewed such things as factories and electric streetlights as something a sensible person would want to escape—an irrational view I reject. But he also pointed out that sometimes it’s important deliberately to step away from the trivial, limited, and transient hustle and bustle of daily life to focus on what is important, universal, and lasting—and excellent fiction can help with that.[11]
Rand argued that the purpose of romantic art (i.e., art that depicts humans as agents with free will and chosen values) is to project not people or the world as they are but as they could and should be: in other words, to imagine and project an ideal, at least in part. In response to the charge that such art is escapism, she wrote,
If the projection of value-goals—the projection of an improvement on the given, the known, the immediately available—is an “escape,” then medicine is an “escape” from disease, agriculture is an “escape” from hunger, knowledge is an “escape” from ignorance, ambition is an “escape” from sloth, and life is an “escape” from death.[12]
So, is good fiction escapism? Through offering an experience of something else, it can serve as a temporary respite. But to an active-minded person, well-crafted fiction that projects rational values can be not only a break from your struggles but a means to improve your life. In other words, escaping into fiction is healthy if you’re doing it not to avoid facing reality but so that you can face reality.
The immersive quality of good fiction not only offers us a break; it also offers us experiences we wouldn’t otherwise have. Tolkien pointed out that it can vicariously satisfy desires that are impossible, such as being able to fly. But we also live in a huge, wonderful world with tons of places and things to see; we cannot possibly experience it all. There are also countless life paths we can take—but as the saying goes, “you can be anything but not everything.” However, through fiction you can experience countless other careers, relationships, times, and places, as well as trying on the more fundamental elements of a character, such as his values and goals. I think of this aspect of fiction somewhat like going on vacation. It’s rejuvenating to be somewhere totally different from the norm, even if we love where we live. Similarly, fiction can offer us the experience of being somewhere or someone else, if only internally.
Good fiction can also offer us the experience of enjoying beauty in at least two ways. First, the craftsmanship of the fiction itself: the cinematography of a movie, the acting in a TV show, the use of language in a book or short story, and so on. For an example of a modern book whose use of language I savored, consider the following excerpt from This Is How You Lose the Time War (for context, Red is one of the main characters, and she has arranged some bones in a cavern):
A rush of wind splits the earth, a roar in darkness. Red clutches the petrified trunk closer than a lover. The wind peaks, screams, tosses bones about. A new note rises above the ossuary clatter, woken by the cavern’s wind whistling over precise fluted pits in the bones Red has hung. The note grows, shifts, and swells into a voice.[13]
The imagery in that passage gives me shivers. But the actual craft of fiction is only one way it can offer us beauty; the second way is through its subject. Many wonderful works of fiction deal with such subjects as romantic, platonic, and familial love; achievement; overcoming adversity; personal growth; and triumph. These are all beautiful concepts to see manifested and to contemplate, and fiction enables us to do so anytime, anywhere, regardless of what is happening in our own lives.
By immersing ourselves in great stories, we find means of rejuvenating our spirits, aspiring for more, exploring the wide world, and experiencing beauty—all of which fuels our souls to enable us to thrive in real life.
A Caveat and Some Advice
Most of this discussion has referred to fiction that is good—fiction that contains some life-serving value and is at least somewhat well-executed. But what if the fiction you encounter is bad?
Many people can easily see when a work of fiction is poorly executed: They find the work boring, they can’t connect with the characters, they can point out obvious flaws in the plot or writing, and so on. But not everyone stops to assess the ideas being expressed in a work of fiction and whether they’re life-serving or life-destroying (or a mixture). The first step to ensure you’re consuming soul-fueling fiction is to make those kinds of evaluations. If you don’t, the emotionally compelling nature of art means that it may affect your thoughts, feelings, and even behavior in ways you may not notice or approve of. This effect can be downright insidious, but the good news is that it only takes some thought to banish from your life. Start asking yourself what values are at stake in the works you’re consuming, how the conflicts are being resolved, and why you care about the works you care about. You are the agent, and by asking and answering these types of questions, you can take control of how the art you consume affects you.
What should you do when you’ve noticed that a work contains morally bad ideas or have good reason to believe it does before consuming it? There’s immense value in engaging with ideas that challenge your own, especially when they’re presented in their strongest form. This kind of engagement can help you better understand other people and their views, and it can even help you better understand your own views. That said, reading a book or watching a TV show with ideas that disgust you can feel like an uphill battle. It’s an experience you’re not drawn to because you feel you must constantly find fault in the work and defend your ideas in your mind. So, I recommend engaging only sparingly with works you expect to contain bad ideas (or continuing to engage with such works, if you discover partway through that they contain life-destroying ideas), being mindful of your own experience with them.
To maximize your enjoyment of fiction that contains at least some life-serving value, here are a few things you can do to further engage your mind. While you are consuming the work, curiously examine your emotional responses to it. Don’t try to enjoy the work “as an Objectivist” or according to any ideology, no matter how rational. Simply notice your emotional reactions and ask questions about them. This introspection could be invaluable to you. Another technique: try to make connections between the work and your life, current events, history, and other works you’ve read. You’ll greatly improve your ability to understand what the creator is saying about the human experience through making such connections.
When you have finished a work, look for what the work represents and briefly evaluate it. If you have never done this before, the easiest way to start is to articulate the theme of a piece of fiction in your own words after you have consumed it. Don’t put pressure on yourself to do this perfectly; just do your best to identify the values at stake in any conflicts and note how the conflicts were resolved. If you consumed the fiction with someone else (e.g., you watched a movie with a friend or partner, or read a book with a book club), you can compare the themes each of you come up with; discussing the differences between them may help you think about aspects of the work you hadn’t noticed before. Once you have done that, it can be helpful to evaluate your overall experience of the work in a couple sentences. (For books specifically, I recommend using apps such as Fable or Goodreads that encourage posting short reviews and archives them for you.) The most important thing is to process what the work meant to you and how you experienced it; there is no Platonic ideal of a perfect review you should be struggling to reach. In the two years or so since I started writing such reviews more regularly, I’ve noticed that I’m able to talk about my views on fiction in a way that’s much clearer and more coherent, even in casual conversation.
***
Fiction engages our emotions by appealing to universal values and potentially, the audience’s sense of life. In doing so, it helps us connect with others as it provides a fun and interesting experience. Thoughtful fiction can also offer us cognitive tools and the experience of immersion; and in the best cases, it can provide heroes for us to look up to and emulate and perhaps speak to questions we’ve been grappling with. In short, fiction engages our emotions—but if we engage our minds when we consume it, we can reap even more fuel for our souls.
This article appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.
[1] Journal des Savants, quoted by Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 35.
[2] Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 37.
[3] Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 37.
[4] Michael Hanne, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change (Oxford: Berghahn, 1994), chap. 2.
[5] Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt, “Emotional Responses to Fiction: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Richard Joyce, The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2018), 387–98.
[6] Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (New York: Viking, 1972), 22–23.
[7] When artists create something that represents or symbolizes an abstraction, they draw on all their knowledge and experience of that abstraction to do so. For a full explanation of this process, see Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition,” in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1975).
[8] Ayn Rand, “The Goal of My Writing,” The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1975), 163.
[9] Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, 10.
[10] Carrie-Ann Biondi and Irfan Khawaja, editorial, Reason Papers 34, no. 1 (June 2012): 6.
[11] J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf.
[12] Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, 161.
[13] Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (London: Jo Fletcher, 2019), 19.