ROBIN BLACK: I think it's really important that not just students, but everybody who is able to read, read. I think it's a way of taking us out of ourselves a little bit. I'll talk about writing students particularly, even though I know you said even if they don't want to do that, but I'll just say that when I'm stuck and I can't produce something or I just feel like I don't have any more ideas, my husband will always say to me, Robin, go read a book, because he knows that that's where my ideas come from. Not that I'm going to write about what the other person is writing about, but that there's something about being in that imaginative space with another writer that makes me start thinking like a writer again.
And for people who aren't writers, what it does is it can, with fiction in particular, it kind of helps you look at the other guy's story, I guess is how I would put it. They've actually done studies that show that reading fiction makes people more compassionate and have more empathy.
But if you think about it, what you're doing is really learning to care about another person with no self-interest, because always in interactions in our real lives, not our fictional lives, you may not be selfish or self-interested in any bad ways, but you're always there, you're in the room. Whereas when you're reading a story about people, you can really think about the values, think about what people are doing without necessarily thinking about yourself. And I think just that time of empathy and compassion directed towards other people without you in the equation is good for everybody.
And that's just fiction. I mean, reading just to learn stuff is one of the great things you discover when you're out of school. If you don't happen to be someone who loves doing it in school, it's actually fun because nobody's grading you and you learn things. And I mean, it just makes you a more interesting person.