Reading and Creativity: How Fiction Trains Creative Thinking
Reading and creativity are linked by a mechanism that most creative workers don't consider deliberately. Keith Oatley, a novelist and cognitive psychologist at the University of Toronto, has spent decades studying what fiction does to the people who read it. One finding stands out: exposure to fiction predicts theory of mind — the ability to accurately model other people's mental states — more robustly than exposure to non-fiction. Not any reading. Fiction specifically.
The mechanism Oatley proposed is that fiction is the only widely practiced activity requiring sustained simulation of another person's internal world. You inhabit a character's perspective, track their goals, infer their emotional states, and model their beliefs across hundreds of pages. The neural processes involved in reading about a character thinking closely overlap with processes involved in actually thinking about that person. Reading fiction is, in a functional sense, social simulation practice — and social simulation is foundational to creative thinking, because generating varied ideas requires inhabiting multiple perspectives.
Fiction as Social Simulation
In a 2006 study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, de la Paz, and Peterson compared fiction and non-fiction readers on two social reasoning tasks: the Eyes Test (inferring emotional states from photographs of eyes) and a social inference battery. Fiction exposure predicted performance on both tasks. Non-fiction exposure did not.
The researchers proposed the "simulation hypothesis" of fiction: reading narrative works like a simulator for social cognition. The reader repeatedly runs simulations — how does this character respond to betrayal, or loss, or unexpected kindness? — and accumulates a model of human motivation that extends well beyond their direct personal experience.
This connects to divergent thinking in a direct way. Generating varied, original ideas requires perspective flexibility — the ability to inhabit different cognitive positions, consider alternative framings, and resist locking onto a single interpretation. A person with a richer model of how different minds work has more mental positions to think from. They are more likely to recognize an assumption as an assumption rather than a fact.
Narrative Transportation and Cognitive Change
In 1999, Melanie Green and Timothy Brock introduced the concept of "narrative transportation" — the degree to which a reader becomes absorbed in a story, attention and imagery focused on the narrative world rather than the reading environment. High transportation produces reduced awareness of surroundings, strong emotional response to story events, and vivid mental imagery of characters and settings.
Green and Brock found that highly transported readers showed greater attitude change than low-transportation readers — not just emotional engagement, but genuine belief updating. Narrative processed in a state of simulative engagement was persuasive in ways that argument was not.
Later research connected transportation to openness to experience, one of the Big Five personality traits. Openness — which captures curiosity, imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, and receptivity to novel ideas — correlates consistently with creative output across domains. In a 2013 study, Djikic, Oatley, and Moldoveanu found that reading a Chekhov story produced measurable increases in openness scores immediately afterward, compared to reading the same content restructured as a factual document. The narrative form changed something that information alone did not.
Metaphorical Thinking and Cross-Domain Transfer
Reading across literary domains builds a library of cognitive schemas applicable to new situations — what psychologists call "far transfer." Every compelling metaphor in fiction is a bisociation in Arthur Koestler's sense: a familiar concept illuminating an unfamiliar one through structural analogy. Readers who process thousands of such cross-domain mappings accumulate a dense network of schemas they can draw on when facing novel problems.
This is why practiced readers often develop a form of analogical reasoning that feels almost automatic. Fiction saturates the mind with structural mappings across domains. When a novel problem arrives, the practiced reader has more conceptual handles — more associative paths — to reach for. A reader who has encountered dozens of fictional stories about resource allocation, collective action, and betrayal has richer structural schemas than someone who encounters those dynamics only in professional life.
The creative process depends heavily on this kind of cross-domain transfer. Solutions to problems in one domain often map onto structures from distant domains. The person with the widest exposure to the range of human situations — the literary record of how different people in different circumstances have navigated constraints and uncertainty — has more raw material when facing novel challenges.
What Kind of Reading Produces the Largest Effect
Not all reading produces equivalent cognitive results.
Literary over genre fiction. A 2013 study by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano in Science found that reading literary fiction — featuring psychologically complex, ambiguous characters — improved theory of mind scores immediately afterward, while genre fiction did not show the same effect. Literary fiction demands more inference to model characters — and that demand appears to be what produces the benefit. When character psychology is unpredictable, the reader must work harder to simulate it.
Deep reading over skimming. Maryanne Wolf distinguishes "deep reading" — extended literary engagement involving inference, analogy, critical analysis, and imaginative projection — from the rapid scanning mode that dominates digital reading. The cognitive effects of fiction require the former. Speed and cognitive benefit run in opposite directions. Reading in fragments between notifications doesn't produce narrative transportation or the absorption that drives cognitive change.
Diverse genres over specialization. Reading within a single genre builds rich within-domain schemas but limited cross-domain ones. A programmer who reads poetry, a scientist who reads biography, a designer who reads history — the cross-domain schema library each builds is more generative for unexpected creative connections than a narrower diet would produce. Divergent thinking specifically benefits from breadth of conceptual exposure.
Building a Reading Practice for Creative Thinking
Prioritize psychologically complex characters. Literary fiction produces the largest theory of mind gains. Author examples across tradition: Chekhov, George Eliot, Alice Munro, Richard Powers, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson. These aren't prescriptions — they represent the range of fiction where character psychology is genuinely ambiguous and the reader must work to infer it.
Read in sustained blocks. High narrative transportation requires extended, uninterrupted attention. Thirty to forty-five minutes minimum. Reading in five-minute fragments between distractions doesn't produce the transportation state or the sustained simulation that drives cognitive benefit.
Read outside your professional domain. The most valuable cross-domain schemas are ones you don't already have. Fiction operating in domains distant from your professional expertise builds conceptual bridges that reading within your area cannot. This is deliberate exposure to unfamiliar structural patterns.
Treat strong metaphors as data. When a striking image or analogy surfaces in fiction — the kind that makes you stop and reread — note it. These are the bisociative moments: places where a structure from one domain suddenly illuminates another. Returning to them and asking what problem they might apply to is a form of analogical thinking you can practice deliberately.
Reading is slower and less measurable than most creativity techniques. But the cognitive infrastructure it builds — perspective flexibility, cross-domain schemas, comfort with ambiguity and unresolved complexity — is exactly the material that more targeted creative exercises process. The wider that infrastructure, the more the exercises have to work with.
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