By Aaron Gansky, @adgansky

I don’t want to get into what’s better: non-fiction or fiction. Both have equal merit. I’ve written both. But here’s what I’ve found. When I really want to relay the truth to someone, when I want them to believe it in their gut, I roll up my sleeves and write fiction.

This may sound contradictory: fiction is not true, right? How then can it reveal truth?

To understand, you have to be able to distinguish between true fact and factual truth. America declared its independence in 1776. We agree on that. But that’s not the truth.

Here’s a true story that never happened: overcome with grief at the murder of his son, an American colonist, a former pacifist, took up his rifle and joined the fight. He, too, died. His wife, who had been a wife and mother for nearly twenty years, no longer knew what she was. She had no language to categorize herself or what her role in society was anymore. She refused to eat, and died days later.

Did this happen? Who’s to say? Does it matter if it happened or not? No. The truth of it remains—grief is a killer.

But simply saying that, simply trying to categorize grief, it’s hard to believe as a reader. But the truth is no less true. So you add detail. You add character. These details—the smoke of gunfire tickling nostrils, the rumbling of the earth as 112 pounds of mortar smashed into the soil, sending the damp earth thirty feet into the air so that the soldiers thought it was raining mud, the crack of rifle fire and the kick of the stock thumping hard into the shoulder which held it so tightly, the empty tea kettle on an iron stove, the empty wooden chair favored by a beloved husband, the particular grain of the door through which he’d never walk again—you add these in so that the reader will not simply understand the truth, but feel it.

Nonfiction may teach us something, and it often moves us. But there are few better vehicles for emotional truth and resonance than fiction.

Throughout the Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes several short stories that, within themselves, explore the relationship between fiction and truth. In Notes, he writes:

“By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the … field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur, but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”

In this way, fiction is meant to illuminate. And sometimes, we turn on a light and make shadow puppets, not for the sake of the puppet, but to point to the hands and fingers intertwining, merging, creating. The reader watches the shadow and understands that hands have made them. They understand the truth.

If you’ve ever heard that fiction doesn’t matter because it’s not true, don’t believe it. That is a very old, very terrible lie. Even Jesus used fiction to explain hard-to-grasp truths. These “parables” are no less “true” simply because they didn’t happen.

There are few things that are truer than fiction. Few things move us like fiction does. Few stories stay with us longer than what we read in novels. Think of The Grapes of Wrath, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Moby Dick, or 1984, or War and Peace, or Crime and Punishment, or Anna Karenina, or Huckleberry Finn, or The Scarlet Letter, or The Great Gatsby, or The Old Man and the Sea, or To Kill a Mockinbird, or Beloved, or the Jungle, or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or The Things They Carried, or Slaughterhouse Five.

Bottom line: fiction matters. What you do matters. You’re in the business of imparting truth, making truth known through the heart, not just the mind.

In addition to being a loving father and husband, Aaron Gansky is an award-winning novelist and author, teacher, and podcast host. In 2009, he earned his M.F.A in Fiction at the prestigious Antioch University of Los Angeles, one of the top five low-residency writing schools in the nation. Prior to that, he attained his Bachelor of Arts degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from California State University of San Bernardino. He lives in quiet little town in the high desert of southern California with his family.