I’m glad I went to college and majored in English. 

But Ray Bradbury(1920–2012) might have had a point when he told a couple of students that “education isn’t good for writers.” You can lose touch with the emotion, the joy, and the unselfconsciousness involved in simply writing “for fun.” Now your work is getting graded. It’s getting leafed through in workshops and shrugged at. It’s getting criticized for missing the human gestalt. It’s getting sucked into an academic whirlpool that’s always looking for the writer’s secret and ulterior motivations and what ideology that author might be hinting toward in the prose.

There are a lot of opinions about the benefits and “uses” of the MFA program, for example, when it comes to getting an education in writing. But for fiction writers in particular, what can often happen, and what happened to me, is forgetting that novels and stories….drum roll please…are meant to be enjoyed. 

There are plenty of others who have articulated this better than I can. Chief among them is the polymath C.S. Lewis (of course, who else?) who chided those adults who might become too sophisticated, or “educated”, to properly enjoy the fairy tales they loved when they were seven. But it seems worth revisiting, especially in a literary climate that seems overly enamored with political statement, or with reading literature mainly for the elusive underlying theme that can tell us something profound about the world and ourselves within it. 

Fiction has become light propaganda, and what’s more, it’s not really being read that much anyway. Maybe it’s fair to say books are now meant to be talked about on places like BookTok or Bookstagram, but not enjoyed as a transportive experience. People are still reading, but not as much as they used to; or we’re reading by scrolling, which is often a maddening mixture of visual, audio, and semantic content. To simply read quietly alone under a 25 watt bulb is what is nearing extinction in the 21st century. This is what novelist David Foster Wallace said about why even some of his “intelligent friends” get uncomfortable reading because it requires sitting alone in a silent room. 

Roger Scruton, the British philosopher who passed away in 2020, thought that we’d replaced joy with pleasure in the modern western world. Beauty with dopamine. Love with lust.

I can feel it in my bones, how I’d rather check my email again instead of patiently enjoy the curry chicken on the plate. How’d I try to hurry through interactions with other human beings so I can catch up on Twitter. How I can waste more time on YouTube instead of picking up a pencil and writing a letter to my German pen pal. 

Lewis himself seemed to suggest that modern humanity’s problem was not an excess of pleasure but our failure to truly enjoy anything in the first place. In The Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape scolds his nephew for allowing his human “patient” to enjoy two actual pleasures. One of the pleasures was “reading a book he actually enjoyed.” 

There’s few things better than escaping both the dopamine economy and the academy of proper and erudite opinion and simply enjoying a good book. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t talk about books or investigate whatever deeper meanings they might hold. Far from it! But we should let ourselves take pleasure in story first before jumping back on our phones to make comments on Booktok or Goodreads.