The value of fiction

1. Human beings have an insatiable appetite for fictional stories. That includes short stories, novels, plays, and epic poems. More recently, that includes movies and TV dramas, as well as interactive video game stories. 

2. Is there any Christian justification for the consumption of fictional stories, especially in such massive quantities? No doubt many people have a skewed sense of priorities. They consume too much fiction to the neglect of Bible study, apologetics, and the practice of the Christian faith. That said:

3. Human beings are prone to boredom. Cultivating the life of the imagination is a form of intellectual playtime and recreation. 

4. Fiction takes us to other times and places. Before we were born. Where we never lived. Fiction exposes us to the imagination of other human beings. So it vastly broadens our mental horizon. We're not confined to our personal, firsthand experience of the world. It creates a collective imagination (not in the Jungian sense). 

5. Fiction is a vehicle Christians can use to filter their own experience. To provide a theological interpretation of their own life and the world round them. A fictional setting is more flexible than individual reality. A way to illustratively think through the practical implications of a Christian worldview. 

6. From the standpoint of Christian metaphysics, there's the question of whether one man's fictional story may be another man's lived reality. When we write a story, God thought of that story before we did. Every story originates in God's imagination. Our fictional stories are just a tiny finite sample drawn from the infinite library of God's illimitable imagination.

7. Between divine omniscience and divine omnipotence, it's possible that some of our fictional stories are true stories. They are fictional in relation to the world history of our particular universe, but from what I can tell, there's no presumption that God only created one timeline. If I write a fictional story, I may unwittingly write about real people in a real time and place. It's fictional in relation to the world history of the universe God put me in, but it may have a realistic counterpart in parallel universe with an alternate world history.

Of course, that's speculation, but it's no less speculative to deny it. Given all the interesting, worthwhile ways in which things might turn out differently, it seems like an arbitrary coin toss if there's only one world history–to the neglect of so many other significant forks in the road. I can't prove that conjecture, so it's not a point of Christian orthodoxy, but conjecture is unavoidable on both sides of the question.