In a recent Scientific American article, novelist and psychology professor Keith Oatley talked about a variety of studies that proved a link between reading fiction and exhibiting heightened social skills. Avid readers of fiction are better able to pick up on social cues and empathize with others than are people who don’t read much fiction. This, of course, flies in the face of the cliché of the shy bookworm who has no friends and has trouble relating to other people. In fact, fiction (and this includes movies, by the way, though not, interestingly enough, TV shows) broadens our understanding of the vast spectrum of human experience. By reading a lot of fiction, we are better able to understand and care about people whose lives, backgrounds, and personalities are nothing like our own.

We English teachers already knew this, or at least, we had an inkling. I can usually tell whether or not a student reads much just by how much a student seems to understand and be able to relate to people with viewpoints different from their own. Students who don’t read for pleasure at all tend to be far less able to mentally put themselves in someone else’s shoes, to use another cliché (and students who announce proudly that they read nothing but the Bible in their spare time are even worst, but I digress).

As the Scientific American article was written by a fiction writer (who happens, also, to be a cognitive psychology professor), I couldn’t help but wonder where the writing of fiction might fall in to all of this. Now I have to tread lightly here because I certainly don’t want to suggest that fiction writers are somehow better people. First of all, too many writers are pretentious and self-absorbed, suffering from delusions of grandeur, for writers to be better than other people. Plus, I would apply my speculations about how writing might have a similar effect not just to fiction writers, but to writers in any genre. But I do feel that writing can help you process things you don’t yet know how you feel about. Writing can help you understand the world around you.

That’s definitely how it’s always been for me, anyway. One of the main reasons I write is so that I can climb into other people’s heads and learn what makes them tick. I write, often, so that I won’t judge, so that I can remind myself that we’re all human beings, and we all—or most of us, anyway—believe that we are “good.” Writing forces me to empathize in a way that just thinking about other people and their situations doesn’t. When I write, I have to become someone else for a while. I have to understand not only who my characters are but also why they do the things they do, how they justify their actions to themselves.

And when you’ve so fully become someone else, it becomes impossible to judge them quite so harshly. When you understand someone, you can’t hate them. Just like reading can change your personality, so can writing. And for me, that’s reason enough to do it right there.