Last week I wrote about why leaders should read fiction. The core argument was that stories build empathy in ways that case studies and frameworks cannot. When you inhabit a character’s inner world, you practice the very thing leadership demands: the ability to see from inside someone else’s experience.
Its been in my mind all week. Because the best communicators I most admire in history never stayed in one lane. They crossed between story and direct testimony, between parable and proposition, between showing and telling. And I think that crossing reveals something important about how human beings actually change.
Three writers keep coming back to me. Aldous Huxley. Leo Tolstoy. C.S. Lewis. Each of them mastered fiction. Each of them felt compelled to step outside it. And each time they did, it cost them something. But the work that resulted has arguably shaped more lives than their novels ever did.
Huxley: The Novelist Who Needed to Say “I”
Brave New World remains one of the most prescient pieces of fiction ever written. A warning about pleasure as control, about distraction as tyranny, about the subtle enslavement that comes when we are given everything we want and deprived of everything we need. It carries more philosophical weight than most philosophy. His utopian answer Island truly changed me. And yet Huxley could not stop there.
He wrote The Doors of Perception because the mescaline experiments were not fiction. They were his actual encounter with consciousness stripped of its filters, with perception expanded beyond its usual limits. Jim Morrison and the other founding members of The Doors took the band’s name directly from the title of Huxley’s book. Huxley himself had borrowed the phrase from William Blake’s poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” which contains the line about cleansing the doors of perception so that everything appears as it truly is. He was trying to communicate something that had happened to him, something that changed how he understood reality itself.
I find it significant that Huxley, a master storyteller, felt compelled to write nonfiction for this. The experience was too strange, too immediate, too personal to hide behind characters. He needed to say “I” and mean it. He needed the reader to know this was not imagination but testimony.
And yet even in The Doors of Perception, he keeps reaching for metaphor. He quotes Blake. He invokes the visionary traditions. He cannot help but tell stories even when the form is essay. The boundary between fiction and nonfiction, it turns out, is thinner than we pretend.
Tolstoy: The Novelist Who Needed to Make Demands
Leo Tolstoy followed a different path to the same crossing. War and Peace and Anna Karenina are monuments of human observation, novels so full in their vision that they seem to contain entire civilizations. He could inhabit a character so fully that readers forget they are reading.
But then came The Kingdom of God Is Within You. This is not a novel. It is Tolstoy wrestling directly with Jesus, with the Sermon on the Mount, with the radical implications of nonviolent resistance. He had spent decades telling stories and finally felt he needed to say plainly what he meant. “Plainly” might be a stretch as I wrestled with that book a few times and I am sure I still missed a lot. But its an amazing read.
I think Tolstoy realized that fiction, for all its power, allows readers to keep their distance. You can admire Anna Karenina’s tragedy without changing your own life. You can weep for characters and then return to your comfortable assumptions. But The Kingdom of God Is Within You makes demands. It looks directly at the reader and asks: What are you going to do about this?
Gandhi read it and his life changed. Martin Luther King Jr. read it and found language for what he already sensed. The book shaped history in ways that even War and Peace has not. Tolstoy knew he had to stop hiding behind characters. The truth he had encountered was too urgent for indirection.
Lewis: The Apologist Who Needed Narnia
C.S. Lewis is perhaps the most deliberate crosser of all, because he did not stumble between forms. He moved between them consciously, and he wrote about why.
In the same period that he wrote Mere Christianity, one of the most lucid works of rational apologetics in the English language, he was also writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He was making the same case about longing, redemption, and the nature of reality in two completely different registers at the same time. He understood that some readers would enter through argument and others would only enter through story. He wanted both doors open.
Lewis believed that the imagination had to be reached before the intellect could follow. He described his own conversion not as being argued into faith but as finding that the stories he loved most, the great myths of death and resurrection, turned out to be true in a way he had not expected. He called it his imagination being baptized long before his reason caught up. That phrase matters. It suggests that story does not just illustrate truth. Sometimes it prepares the ground for truth in ways that argument cannot.
But then came A Grief Observed. After his wife Joy died, Lewis stopped theorizing about suffering. He had already written The Problem of Pain, a careful and tidy theological treatment of why God allows suffering. And then suffering arrived in his own house, and the tidy treatment fell apart.
A Grief Observed is his rawest book. It is barely a book at all. It is journal entries, written in grief, full of doubt and anger and the terrifying silence he felt when he prayed. He published it under a pseudonym at first, perhaps because it felt too exposed, too far from the confident apologist he was known to be.
Many readers have said it is the most convincing thing he ever wrote. Not because the argument is stronger, but because the cost is visible. He was not explaining suffering from a safe distance. He was inside it. And that changed what the words could do.
Lewis crossed in both directions. Narnia for those who needed story. Mere Christianity for those who needed logic. A Grief Observed for those who needed to know that faith costs something and doubts honestly.
The Philosophers Who Also Needed Stories
These three are not alone. The crossing happens across disciplines and centuries.
Plato spent his life doing philosophy and yet kept inventing dialogues, myths, and allegories. The Cave. The Chariot. The Ring of Gyges. He clearly felt that pure argument could not carry what he needed to say, which is ironic given how much later philosophy tried to strip his work down to propositions.
When I think about this boundary between story and statement, I keep returning to Jesus.
Here was someone who could have spoken in systematic theology. He knew the law. He could cite scripture with precision. Instead he told parables. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. A sower went out to sow. A father had two sons.
These are not arguments. They are invitations. They create a space where the listener has to participate, has to decide what the story means, has to locate themselves within the narrative. Lewis understood this instinctively. It is why he built a wardrobe.
But then: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Not a parable. A statement. Testimony. Someone crossing the boundary between showing and telling because the moment required it.
Why This Matters for Leaders
Last week I argued that leaders should read fiction to build empathy and inner range. I stand by that. But the lesson from these writers is that reading fiction is only part of the practice.
The books that have actually transformed me were not always the ones with the best arguments. Sometimes they were novels that let me inhabit a consciousness so different from my own that I could never quite return to my previous assumptions. And sometimes they were people who stopped telling stories and simply said: This is what I experienced. This is what I now believe. This is what I am asking you to consider.
There is risk in staying only with fiction. You can become so skilled at creating worlds that you never commit to this one. Readers can consume your work without being changed.
There is risk in staying only with argument. You can become so attached to being right that you forget to be present. People can agree with your logic while their hearts remain untouched.
Huxley, Tolstoy, and Lewis all understood both risks. They had each mastered one register. They could have stayed there, comfortable in their reputations. Instead they ventured into territory where they were more exposed. The Doors of Perception was mocked as the ramblings of a drug user. The Kingdom of God Is Within You was banned in Russia. A Grief Observed was published anonymously because it felt too raw. These books cost their authors something. They were not safe.
But they were honest.
An Invitation
These are more wanderings than arguments. But I find myself thinking about what forms of expression leaders choose, and why, and what happens when we cross the boundaries we have set for ourselves.
If you tend to argue and instruct, perhaps there is a story waiting. A parable that would carry what your propositions cannot.
If you tend to tell stories, perhaps there is a moment of direct testimony waiting. A time to stop hiding behind characters and simply say: This is what I have seen. This is what I believe.
The best leaders and teachers, the ones who actually change us, understand when to tell a story and when to make a statement. They move between forms because they are more committed to truth than to genre.
That seems worth aspiring to.
I have written more about these themes in my book Better Places. If this kind of reflection resonates with you, I think you might find it a worthwhile companion for your own journey.
