It is human interest in the virtues and weaknesses of our kind. Fiction is as old as man. Read it on the tomb of Ti or the more-up-to-date "Beowulf."
Is it not curiosity? Perhaps interest in the affairs of the other fellow, for we all love gossip—? Yes, all of us.
Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Putting yourself in his place.
Frank C. Robertson: It satisfies the longing for change. The body at best is a slow and cumbersome thing, and practically stationary compared to the flights of mind. In fiction we live thousands of lives—without it we live but one.
Ruth Sawyer: I should say the same hold that folk tales have had since man developed a mind. The desire for idealizing; the enjoyment of seeing his own human activities re-created for him and the everlasting appeal of adventure. I believe that the adult quite as much as the child reader likes to picture himself as the hero or main actor in the stories. I suppose one could sum this all up in terms of imagination stimuli.
Chester L. Saxby: I can't answer this one, unless you mean the selfish desire in each one of us to picture ourselves as heroes—and the thing called sympathy that we can't disown. But perhaps evolution makes us crave these indirect experiences in lieu of direct ones.
Barry Scobee: Have ideas but I could hardly express them yet. Might be, "A feller wants company." Might be, it suggests strength, success, victory; contains warning. How's this for a theory? The human mind is eternally seeking harmony. A perfect story, or a well done story, gives a subtle sense of harmony, like music but more subtle. I think the answer goes still deeper, and I shall find it sometime.
Robert Simpson: Conflict—the clashing of forces, or the pursuit by one force of another that does not want to be caught. Conflicts may appear in many guises, from a young love interest to a mastodonic fight between prehistoric brutes, but in some form or another conflict must predominate.
Theodore Seixas Solomons: We are immensely curious about life, and in a way that mere description of it from the point of view of psychology, history, past and current, geography, industry and the like, wholly fails to satisfy. For it is man's specific reaction to his environment in his efforts to accomplish his urges in which we are principally interested, and in order that we may make comparison of our own reactions with those of others about us, we crave not those dry, statistical texts setting forth systematically acquired knowledge but instances of actual men's and women's reactions to environment—actual life itself. Thus any narratives of parts of the ordinary life of others are more interesting to us, essentially, than text knowledge, but since life is so largely routine and monotony, since there is so little in any given actually true narrative that is likely to be in the least novel or to afford us the comparisons which we crave, our appetite has been wont to seek satisfaction in narratives specially selected to pretend the exceptional and unusual; and those who satisfy this desire are the story-tellers.
The impulse of the story-teller, then, is to present life in its exceptional and therefore interesting phases and happenings—interesting just in proportion to the degree in which it presents for our personal comparison men and women in situations, and engaged in actions, which lift them—and hence ourselves—out of the common routine. Thus, vicariously, we slake our thirst for varied, high tension living, with its emotional tests and thrills.