I recall a friend telling me that he wanted to start reading more fiction, but he didn’t know where to start because there’s so much of it. I didn’t know where to start either.

For too long I stuck with non-fiction books because each time I would instantly gain knowledge on a topic of my interest. The thing people need to remember about fiction is that, like all written works, it is part of the humanities; the human is at the center of every work of fiction.

It might not be the characters per se, but writers of fiction commit to the craft because they want to nourish the mentality, the consciousness, and perspectives of readers, who, under every circumstance, are all human. There are several things that fiction shares with non-fiction as well as several things that set it apart from non-fiction. Both tell stories, but fiction is more designed to help the human on their quest for meaning.

That being said, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself before you dive into the world of fiction.

First: "what can you relate to personally?" In an ideal world, fiction is designed to make readers relate to experiences they would not otherwise have, but you need to start somewhere familiar. This is why you first need to figure out what you value at the present time. That way the first book you read can either reinforce or begin to alter your values.

Second: "what do you want to get out of a work of fiction?" Do you just want to be entertained, or do you want to understand something beyond your realm of knowledge and experience? Do you want to understand what was happening in a certain time period of history? Do you want to speculate on what could happen in the future?

Your answers to these questions will greatly influence the (next) book you choose to read. It could be romance, historical fiction, science fiction, or drama. Yes, don’t forget that drama counts as fiction.

Third: "are you willing to dedicate time?" Depending on which book you choose to read, you could be reading the same book over the course of a day or over the course of a month. Over the course of a night, "Of Mice & Men" or "Death of a Salesman" will tell the reader a story about the search for the American Dream. But "The Grapes of Wrath" will tell the reader the same story over the course of a couple days or a week.

Why might this difference exist? Some writers want to get the story across as briefly and effectively as possible while others want to spend more time developing the characters, make them more exposed, and therefore compel the reader to either connect with them or be repulsed by them. When a writer exposes details in a story, they’re not just doing it for shits and gigs. The writer chooses every word and arranges every sentence/paragraph/chapter/book part for a reason.

Every writer (at least every good writer) has something to say, and they say it through their rhetoric. This all contributes to the amount of time you spend on reading a book. If you don’t want to spend the next month reading the same book, don’t pick it up. If you "are" ready and willing, then by all means.

Let me continue by giving you a personal story of how I finally began to immerse myself in the world of fiction. In early 2016, I was in the middle of YouTube binge when I discovered a certain film that was supposed to come out later that year. The film was called "Silence," and it was director Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited passion project. The film was based on a novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo, which tells the story of two seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries who, in the face of insurmountable odds, travel to Japan to seek out their mentor who allegedly committed apostasy. The premise alone was so compelling to me that I spent the better half of a year telling everyone I knew about this movie that, when its December release finally came around, was only showing in select theaters.

Since I could not watch it immediately, I bought the book in an effort to immerse myself in the story before watching the film when it finally came to a theater near me. (In case you’re wondering, the film was faithful to the book.)

The book not only painted a vulgar picture of underground Christian communities in Tokugawa Japan; it also raised so many painful but relevant questions that everyone asks themselves at some point in their lives: How can someone believe in God when in the face of crippling adversity and human suffering? What should one do after their master/teacher/mentor has betrayed everything they taught? The solemnity and graphic nature of this story might turn some people off to it completely, but it only drew me closer to it. Besides, how else could the story have illustrated its point? The violence and internal anguish are not the story itself. It drives the story.

After reading that story, I didn’t know what story to read next, so I did a little bit of digging. I was first reading a novel called "Infinite Jest," which, depending on who you ask, is either the best or worst novel ever written. I went from reading a 200+ page novel about holding to one’s faith to reading a 1000+ page novel about the role media and entertainment play in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I, of course, did not finish reading "Infinite Jest," but there was an author in its foreword whom I kept encountering in other cultural references: Jonathan Franzen. Finally, my curiosity piqued and I looked him up on Google (if there’s one thing our technology-driven society is good for, it’s that: looking up authors peppered throughout your cultural tastes). After glimpsing through his oeuvre, I learned that he was a winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction and named by TIME magazine in 2010 “The Great American Novelist.”

What were his stories about? Families and their dysfunction, something which I related to heavily considering that I myself come from a bitterly divorced family. I immediately grew more enticed with what Franzen had to say in his novels and how he so meticulously illustrated the dysfunctional family in his two best-selling books "The Corrections" (2001) and "Freedom" (2010). It soon became my mission to acquire copies of these books and make time to read them. I purchased a copy of "Freedom "for $5.00 and began reading it immediately after returning home from my local mall

I acquainted myself with the world of the Berglunds and dove into each family member’s inner psyche as well as the lives of their longtime friends. I have finally finished the novel, and it is perhaps my favorite book considering how I found myself feeling for and relating to the characters on a deeply personal level. That is what kept me reading the novel because that act alone is something I could be better at doing, and that is why I began to read fiction: to better myself.