MARY GABLE

A few weeks back, Joel Stein, TIME’s occasionally hilarious humor columnist, wrote on California’s changing Common Core State Standards. By 2014, Golden State public school students will be reading less literature—and instead, consuming a balanced diet of novels and nonfiction.

Even though Stein’s a nonfiction writer himself, he’s not happy about that. And while I don’t necessarily agree with him (I think we have just as much to learn from great creative nonfiction as we do from Faulkner and Fitzgerald), for me, this statement rang true:

The first time I write in a new format–travel essay, screenplay, apology e-mail–I read a bunch of examples. But when I want my writing to improve, I read something that forces me to think about words differently: a novel, a poem, a George W. Bush speech.

As writers, it’s so easy to get stuck in our own ways, our tried-and-true manners of speech. That’s why we should always be in search of the new, the undiscovered—fiction and nonfiction included.

And of course, even as educators seek to strike a balance between the two, fiction will never really go away. As Stein points out,

Fiction also teaches you how to tell a story, which is how we express and remember nearly everything. If you can’t tell a story, you will never, ever get people to wire you the funds you need to pay the fees to get your Nigerian inheritance out of the bank.

And that’s a life skill we can all use. To read the rest of Stein’s article, (TIME subscribers only, sorry), click here.

Tagged: nonfiction writing, writers i admire, writing