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The number of times I have heard over the years, when I ask my students about the nature of fiction, that it isn’t true or, even, that it is lies.

Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. It is not hard to understand why students might think fiction isn’t true; they attend Science and Maths just as much as they attend English, after all. Both these subjects will emphasise the necessity of evidence-based data – often to the exclusion of all other forms.

So, is fiction just a pack of lies? And even if it isn’t, it remains but a work of the imagination, so it can’t be real, in any sense we understand that term, can it?

Well, yes, it can. And not just in the sense that it is real because the reader is holding the book in her hands.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that there is nothing quite so real as story. The philosophers can say what they like about signifiers and signifieds, that words have no inherent meaning, that language is but a system of sound symbols. Not to say the philosophers are wrong, for who would be so arrogant? Just that stories are not entirely dependent upon language. And certainly don’t gain their meaning from any play of signifiers.

We dream in stories and, while the meaning may not be apparent immediately, the sequence of images that play across our unconscious while we sleep are replete with meaning and purpose. Of course, we resort to language in order to make conscious sense of our dreams but this ain’t necessarily so. That we have experienced the dream is enough, for its import will resonate whether we concretise it in words or not.

The story is enough unto itself.

We are, however, conscious beings, largely dependent on the control that comes with interpreting the dream image into words. This sense of control, to be found in the wielding of words, even appears in such diverse stories as Rumpelstiltskin and Citizen Kane.

The utterly non-scientific belief in magic bestows even greater power upon the word. Those of an unshakeably rational approach to life will dismiss any idea of words having the power to alter reality – and they wouldn’t be entirely mistaken for doing so. But neither was Bulwer-Lytton entirely wrong when he said that the pen is mightier than the sword. After four years of the most barbaric mass slaughter, it was the pen scratching the parchment that actually brought peace in 1918. This is not to deny the complete respect those fighting men so richly deserve, nor is it meant to imply that their sacrifice had no meaning. The pen would never have stained the parchment but for their bravery and willingness to stand for the freedoms we take for granted today. Nevertheless, it is also true to say that the fighting can only pave the way to peace; it is the words spoken that conceptualise and bring into reality the peace that the pen codifies.

To those same students who doubt the veracity of fiction, I teach emotive language and its power, whether in a work of literature or in advertising, to move us, affect us, even cause us to do something we might not otherwise have done. Those who dismiss the magic of words out of hand, don’t fully understand the power of words to alter reality.

So, the power and mystery of the story we encounter in our dreams might lose something in the translation into words – but it also gains something. It gains active power in the conscious world. Despite our less than full understanding, the story offered forth from our unconscious has the power to change our conscious life.

Before all sides reached the moment when, with pen in hand, they scratched their name upon the Versailles Treaty, they had to construct a story in which all could see the possibility of a happy ending. The signatories put their names to a story and war ended.

Maybe the signatories knew and maybe they didn’t, but the story they put their names to was every bit as fictional as Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’. A mere twenty-one years later, the sequel was published.

Does this imply that the Versailles Treaty was indeed a lie? No! What it shows is our stubborn resistance to the truth of story. The greatest of tragedies is our unwillingness to believe our own stories.

We have now reached a point – as far as one can tell, the first time ever in our entire history – where we have deconstructed our grand narratives out of existence; or, at the very least, to the point where they exist merely as quaint reminders of times past. Because we once believed the story of Creation in which God spoke the word that gave existence to an ordered universe, we were confident that we could understand how that universe works. The original goal was that in understanding His work we would better understand Him. Unfortunately, as our knowledge grew so grew our arrogance, to the point where we now no longer believe we need the Creator, for we have become gods in His place. In that book of stories upon which much of Western civilisation was built, we are told right at the beginning that this would happen and it has happened and yet we still will not believe the truth of our own stories.

It is up to each one of us whether we believe in the existence of the God of Creation as a being worthy of our time and resources. What cannot be denied, however, is the truth the story seeks to impart.

It is argued that stories are used selectively, taking the bits we like and ignoring the rest. Quite why this should be seen as a damning criticism is beyond me – isn’t it just a very human approach to almost anything? It is possible to read Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Windhover’ and agree with the view that we can find beauty in the most ordinary things without having to subscribe to Hopkins’ dedication of the poem “To Christ Our Lord”. In much the same way, when I sit down to a roast chicken dinner, I will select the white meat and leave the rest – especially anything attached to a bone.

Of course, stories are used selectively; they always have been. It is the nature of our relationship with stories. I love that section of Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ when Gandalf leads Frodo and the rest into Khazad-dûm. I’m not so keen on the part when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are chasing after Pippin and Merry who have been taken by Saruman’s Orcs. Am I to be taken to task for not treating the whole story with equal reverence? But why?

It is when there are episodes within a story that we don’t like and therefore we give up the whole in order to avoid the offending passages that should be decried!

Or, just as bad, to say the story is without merit because, of course, the characters never really existed! Seriously? Must I believe in the actual existence of superheroes to be able to enjoy and benefit from experiencing the stories being told in modern cinema?

Selecting particular parts of stories over others is no great sin. Deselecting whole collections of stories because one doesn’t like one of the characters is plain stupid! And detrimental to the well-being of the species that is a storyteller before, during and after everything else.