The fictional element is accidental, depending only upon the circumstance that actual life fails, usually, to furnish the story-teller with a completely satisfying narrative of strange and unusual reactions. Actual life is so conditioned by the usual and routine that even when the unusual thrusts up its head and people get into unusual situations, the routine and the usual quickly submerge the unusual—in fine, the story fails consistently to maintain our exaltation to a logical end. Hence the story-teller finds that in order completely to satisfy his hearers he must thwart this tendency of actuality by continually substituting and supplying. He does not take anything not found in life—else at once his art is defective. But he uses materials of life that never were actually found together in life, so far as he knows. He may find two-thirds of a story ready to hand in an actual life story, and then he needs to supply from his mind's storehouse of general-life happenings (i. e., things that are so natural that they either have happened or may happen at any time) enough to form the remaining third. The aim is merely to carry out as well as possible the aim of the story-desire he seeks to allay which is to experience vicariously sorts of life and living which, either because of their novelty to us, or because of special urgings and aptitudes, are grateful and satisfying to us.
Fiction, then, in the sense of its elemental hold on us, is that conscious modification of the actual occurrences of life by rearrangement of them so that they present to us complete experiences of the sort for which we yearn. The more perfectly we are enabled to visualize ourselves as actually going through these experiences—and to visualize the characters going through them amounts precisely to this—the stronger the hold of the fiction because the more completely and perfectly it satisfies the desire to which it is directed. Hence the vital necessity of naturalness, whether the matter be of realism or romanticism.
Raymond S. Spears: Fiction is an adventure to the mind.
Norman Springer: An escape from reality, or, at least, from environment; and in fiction the reader realizes in a sense the wishes and ambitions that are thwarted in life. It is the power to make-believe.
T. S. Stribling: I think the main hold fiction has on human beings is that it gives them imaginary experiences which they could neither get nor think by themselves. It is first aid to the mentally lazy and dull. As proof of this, take the "movies." These are even more obvious and require less concentration than fiction, so they are correspondingly more popular.
I am speaking now of the appeal of popular fiction. It is the same thing to the public that the leg show is to the tired business man—born tired.
However, one should differentiate the stages of the human mind. Children read fiction out of curiosity about the world they are to enter, grown-ups read it to escape from the world they have entered, old age reads it to recall the world they have left behind.
Lucille Van Slyke: Oh, but you've asked a mouthful! What are Yonkers, anyhow? If you knew the answer to that you wouldn't be an editor and if I did, I'd weave it so hard into everything I write that even the most blasé editor in Christendom—or out of it—would be walking about waving the manuscript with sheer joy when he got to the end of it! But I'll venture a guess—that it's the same thing that made E. nibble the apple.
Atreus von Schrader: It is probably the same hold as that of liquor or drugs; it takes the addict away from himself, his troubles and his ennui.
T. Von Ziekursch: Perhaps to entertain, but I believe it goes further than this; the average person's life is a narrow thing—not what that person would choose at all probably. Fiction to the mass offers the opportunity to lift out of that close circle of existence, to live, to see, to mingle with the world, to do the things which they are physically, mentally or morally unable to do.