On the Importance of Oatmeal: Why Fiction and Nonfiction Are Not as Different as We Think

When I was younger, I often thought of works of fiction and nonfiction as completely separate—opposite even. The rows of fiction in the library were filled with stories that made my imagination run wild while the nonfiction section was the place I visited whenever I needed to find objective facts. In my mind, the Venn diagram of fiction and nonfiction looked like two completely separated circles; to be part of one would automatically preclude inclusion in the other.

(When Life Haunts Art.)

The truth, though, seems far more complicated.

Now—perhaps more than ever—I question the neutrality of what I read, not just in fiction but in nonfiction as well. In the same way that art can evoke different emotions for different people, facts can also be seen in a different light based on our views and the contextual lens in which they are presented.

Let’s consider medical textbooks for a classic example. Humans have searched for a better understanding of illness for a very long time. During the fifth century BCE, Hippocrates put forth the theory that diseases were caused by “miasma,” a poisonous vapor created by rotting organic matter. This theory was widely accepted and even included in many scientific texts until the late 1800s, when the germ theory of disease increased in popularity, thanks to the work of Lois Pasteur and Robert Koch. The germ theory revolutionized our understanding of illness and due to this change, a nonfiction text about diseases from the early 1800s would probably look very different from one published in the late 1800s, even though both were supposed to be entirely factual.

So, as we’ve seen, the objective observations of nonfiction were forced to fit within framework of the prevailing scientific theories at that time. This sounds a lot like a character’s backstory in works of fiction. Backstory is essentially a character’s history; it’s their context and it helps to shape our understanding of who they are. Think of iconic characters like Boromir (Lord of the Rings), Kaz Brekker (Six of Crows), and Zuko (Avatar: The Last Airbender). As we learned more about them and their past, their actions in the present became much more palatable. Understanding their actions did not make them acceptable or excusable, but it did make them comprehensible. Their backstory gave us a better understanding of their motivations—it gave us context—so it was easier for us to explain the actions that we observed within the story.

Of course all of that backstory was created by design. Authors find the moments that best serve the stories they’re trying to tell, and they pepper in details that are fashioned specifically to show that a character is not evil for the sake of being evil or kind just to be kind—this information gives readers the “why” and helps us understand the pushes and pulls that the characters feel.

Perhaps an under-appreciated part of storytelling is all of the information that is deliberately withheld from a narrative. It would be impossible to include every bit of information about a character’s life and story, so the author has to pick and choose. Does it matter that a certain character ate oatmeal for breakfast? Maybe not. The author probably wouldn’t include a detail like that unless, for some reason, the character hates oatmeal because it reminds him of the day that his tragic backstory kicked into high gear. In that case, the character’s breakfast choice, all those years after the unthinkable happened, would be of the utmost importance and would need to be included.

But what would happen if we didn’t have that backstory? What if the oatmeal didn’t seem all that important? Well, the author probably wouldn’t include that detail in their story because there’s no point in boring the audience with extraneous information. And while that is perfectly acceptable in fiction because the author knows exactly what is or is not important for the characters they’ve created, the problem is this: The boring oatmeal exists in nonfiction too.

It looks a little different, though. It’s that weird detail that nobody can quite figure out, and it doesn’t seem that important to the matters at hand, so it’s excluded from the text. Understandably, since it seems irrelevant, but perhaps with a better comprehension of the world, we’d see the importance of the oatmeal and realize it should have been included all along.

Let’s revisit our miasma versus germ theory example from earlier. Even though the miasma theory was popular in Europe until approximately the late 1880s, the smallpox vaccine was quite commonplace in Europe by the early 1800s. Doctors didn’t understand how it worked, though, since the miasma theory still prevailed. These results only made sense once the germ theory was accepted. Until then, the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine simply had to be accepted, not explained.

The mechanism of action was the bowl of oatmeal, hidden in plain sight.

But now that the miasma theory has been fully debunked, should we shelve the medical texts from before the mid-1800s with the works of fiction? I don’t think so. They still contain a wealth of information and observations; however, they can only be considered accurate for the time, and I think this holds true for books written in the present as well. It’s true that we have the advantage of hindsight, and we can often see things more clearly now than we could in the past; however, that does not make the present infallible. If anything, it should make us more aware of the bias of the lens of the prevailing beliefs of today, and we should approach nonfiction with both an eagerness to learn while also scrutinizing the threads that are holding things together to see if they can stand up to a challenge from the opposite force. We should take the time to look for the bowl of oatmeal that’s been forgotten or neglected.

Because, as it turns out, nonfiction has a backstory too.

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