Didactic Fiction - Some thoughts

This is a follow up to yesterday's post. What did I learn about key aspects of didactic fiction by reading a small selection of novels within the genre?

1. Storyline
One of the challenges faced by these books is that their focus is clearly on the didactic element and they treat the storyline or plot as secondary. The result is that unless you're really interested in learning about the method or the approach being presented, the storyline may not keep you reading.

2. Style or format
Who Moved My Cheese? is different in nature. It's a parable and it's shorter than a novel. There's no need to stick to a novel format if another format might work better.

3. Topics
The Celestine Prophecy requires a certain openness to mystical experiences and New Age philosophies. The Goal and The Deadline are a little difficult to follow unless you're into factory process improvement and software development projects respectively.

4. Continuum
On a continuum of "didacticism", with non-didactic at one end and didactic at the other end, these book would be very close to the didactic end. There are, however, many, many novels that are not within this genre and have a strong didactic element. The key difference is that they don't try to teach a method or an approach to a problem, they tend to make you reflect on some aspect of society or history. You read them for the story and in the process you learn something about the period in history, a social movement, a country, etc...

Many high school and college courses integrate some fiction in their reading lists. Historical fiction is a specific example of a genre that has great learning potential. It is fiction, however, so some degree of fact checking may be useful.

Next, more about fiction for development, one of my earlier areas of interest...