226. How Fiction Books Influence Our Reality with Aurora Winter

This episode is for you if you want to learn how to use reading fiction books to influece and change your real life. 

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Aurora Winter, MBA, is a creative entrepreneur who has built several 7-figure companies, bestselling author, TV writer-producer and the founder of SamePagePublishing. Using her expertise in film and neuroscience, she helps people tell memorable stories that build brands, books, and businesses. A popular media guest, Aurora has been featured on ABC, CBS, KTLA, Huffington Post, Oprah Radio and more. 

Things talked about:

• What is the relationship between fiction and reality?

• Benefits of reading fiction books

• and so much more…

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

And the reason for this topic is I am avid reader of nonfictions, I mean, I read at least two nonfiction books a month. And I, I know you write both fiction and nonfiction books. I mean, I love both genres and I don’t know about you, Aurora. I could not have survived COVID without reading my fiction books. Like I was not able to read any nonfiction books when I was stressed out during the worst times of the pandemic.

Well, the pandemic or why I started writing fiction again, and I’ve, I wanted to just share this, how fiction can change reality topic for your busy, successful female entrepreneurs.

Because I think sometimes we don’t give ourselves permission to read fiction because we think we’re just wasting time and we should read nonfiction. But actually we need to have both inputs, the logical, sensible, how to input, but also the inspirational or the emotional input. And during COVID I asked myself, you know, if not now, when.

Specifically, I had always wanted to write a fantasy series like C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe inspired me so much. I realized reading that book that gosh, writers are kind of like wizards and they can transport us to another place and time just with words on a piece of paper. And so when COVID hit, reminding us all that life is not guaranteed and you might not even have tomorrow, decided to give myself permission to write fantasy.

So I have this new fantasy series called Magic, Mystery and the Multiverse, and it’s on Kickstarter. The first book is available. The next book’s coming out on Kickstarter, but the themes in the book underneath an entertaining, inspiring story that actually BBC’s expressed interest in turning into a TV series is a message that really matters to me.

So good books or good movies or good songs are like that. There’s a message that matters. And the message that matter to me, matters to me, is about freedom of speech.

So the evil people in Magic, Mystery and the Multiverse are censors. And I feel strongly that by, it’s for young adults. So, you know, kids 10 and up could really enjoy the book.

And I think, you know, if you lecture somebody as a mom or dad, that doesn’t go so well, but if you give them something interesting and engaging and entertaining to read, that perhaps opens their mind to something new. So I feel like not only is the book entertaining, but it matters to me to, to help cancel the cancel culture, which I’m totally against and how fiction can change reality. Just one more quick, and then I want to hear Lucy’s timing in on this is everything is twice created.

First, you need a blueprint and then you can create the thing. And fiction is brilliant at showing us either what not to create like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. Those were warning us, don’t go there kind of stories or a song like Katy Perry’s Roar, you know, kind of became like, yeah, you’re a woman, you can roar.

And so we need to tap into the emotion. We can launch movement with something that dramatizes whatever you care about. So this is why I believe and know that fiction can change reality from Animal Forum to 1984 to various different stories that have often been in banned books.

But they’ve helped to do great things like women, seeing that there could be women as the boss of the home, women voting, women running businesses. Yeah, things that are reality today used to be only possible in books. Yeah, yeah.

And now, well, for example, Star Trek was a great leader in that. The Gene Roddenberry’s TV series helped people to think about equal opportunity. You know, Uhura was like a woman.

She was wearing a short skirt, but she was a woman and she was a woman of color. And yet she was in a position of power. And so I, I see that I love it to be part of my responsibility as an author to usher in books that can make a difference.

I also write nonfiction, but I think we need to rest our brains and we also need to be inspired and encouraged and see some other, some other possibilities.

Yeah, absolutely. Especially for busy women.

I think we get so caught up in the notion and feeling of not enough. Like I’m behind, I’m lacking more information. Let me read this other nonfiction book, which is great.

We’re learning, right? I’m an incessant learner myself. I’m constantly reading nonfiction books, but yet at the same time, it’s really important to have those fiction, me time, down times, because that’s self love right there. That’s self worth.

You are worthy of having the luxury of indulging in your favorite fiction series.

Yeah. And it can be self care.

It can be an indulgence. It can be relaxation and it can also fuel you and inspire you. Like I hope in the book, Magic, Mystery in the Multiverse, I have created some invitational things that, that were in Harry Potter.

Like Harry Potter helped us remember and reconnect to the value of friendship, right? And the courage that it takes to stand up to your friends with Neville Longbottom standing up to Harry Potter. So the fiction can also help remind us, you know, why are we a mom? Why are we a business owner? Why are we doing whatever? The values that we care about can fuel us so much more than just how much money did I make this month? How about you, Lucy? What kind of books do you like reading? What genre do you like reading? Fantasy or Thriller, Romance or Mystery? I’m a sucker for mystery. A good old murder.

But you know what? Like I tell my teenage daughter, she just started, I mean, she refused to read. I tried to give her all types of books when she was younger and she just hates picture books. She hated reading period.

I’m like, how could this happen? I love reading. Reading is like one of my most fun hobbies. And once she became like, she’s like 12 now, once she became 10, I’m like, okay, well, let’s start you up with some young, like teenage murder books.

And then immediately she fell in love. So it’s not about if you love a certain genre or not. There’s a book out there for you.

There’s a book out there for you. It’s a puzzle. I just got to find your thing.

Right? So now when she read the back cover, she’s like FBI. Okay. I don’t even need to think about it.

I’m in.

She’d probably like the Inheritance Games. That’s kind of fun.

You might enjoy a book that I helped a client produce and publish, Confessions of an Accidental Lawyer, which has got almost 3000 reviews on Amazon. So it’s a great whodunit sort of thing. That’s inspired by a true story.

Confessions of an Accidental Lawyer, but it’s a legal drama.

I don’t have the book with me right now, but I think the book she’s reading right now is the Confession of the Accident Murder. So it’s just one word off, but one word off, one word off.

But, and the point is, I think we really have to have a different perspective and also know that even when fiction books are written, the author has to give so much work to writing enough evidence and nonfiction facts into the book as well, just like how all these murder mysteries, they are written alongside of tons of police officers and government workers so that the details, even though the storyline might be made up, you’re learning about all different genres and departments of the world and of our society. And that’s important. I think that’s another way of learning, but it’s an entertaining one.

And it’s kind of a puzzle. So it challenges your mind. Like one of the things I love is that, is neuroscience with the study of how the brain works and how it works in communication.

And one thing that I just love learning is that struggle actually grows, our brain grows the myelin in our brain. So when we are deeply focused on something and we’re challenged, like you might be challenged when you’re trying to figure out who done it in a murder mystery, you’re trying to solve that puzzle, you’re actually growing your brain. So myelin can go at Billy goat trail speed, like two miles an hour.

But if you keep practicing or you keep focusing right on the edge of, of your area of competence, like just 2% or 4% over where you’re competent, you can grow the myelin sheath and it can change the speed by a hundred fold or more. So instead of your response for, it could be for thinking, or it could also be for sports, like for an activity, like hitting that ball can go from two miles an hour to 200 miles an hour. So that’s another benefit of fiction that it actually changes reality and can help you get a sharper brain, which you can then use on your everyday problems.

Absolutely. And something else that’s true is that the fiction books have most of the time heroes as well, right? Your favorite character or a character you’re rooting for that, that you actually look up to that’s saving the world or saving the story or storyline. But because we look up to these characters, we tend to try to behave in a similar pattern.

We see their heroism and their power. And that actually empowers us.

I’m so glad that you brought that up, Lucy.

So the hero’s journey is behind many books and many movies. And I believe that stories are like the DNA of humanity and it’s how humanity tries to teach the next generation and the generation after that, the right way to live. Actually, data doesn’t tell you how to live.

Doesn’t tell you how to be a good person. Doesn’t tell you what matters. Data only tells you what is the information, but the information needs to be filtered by what is the right thing to do or what are we attempting to do here? And those values are coming mostly from stories.

It’s stories that tell us, like you said, Lucy, what does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be the person with the white hat? Who’s doing the good things? What does it mean to, to deal with challenge? Like heroes are always facing incredible challenges and they struggle and they struggle growing their myelin, changing their brain, but then they have the epiphany and always the hero’s journey results in coming back basically with the Holy Grail, which you’re supposed to bring back to the community and help others. So this story, Joseph Campbell wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And it’s basically, he made the point, he was a professor that throughout humanity’s history, there’ve been so many different versions of this hero’s journey.

Why is this story structure so prevalent? And it’s exactly what you said, Lucy. We want to be guided, be inspired to be heroic, and we need to be reminded that life has struggle. It has suffering, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not a hero.

A hero pushes through in spite of the dragon and saves the day, right? Yeah. It’s so funny that you mentioned the hero’s journey. I love every hero’s journey.

And I think just like our lives, it goes through ups and downs, just like the hero’s journey. And that’s exactly why we need to remind ourselves. We want to live.

I always say that we want to live the epic life, right? Just how, how you have an epic scene from a movie or a book. That epicness does not come until you choose to develop yourself, right? To go through that journey, that development of yourself. So that is exactly what we want for every listener here is to, to be open to different scenes, right? Be open to the ending and not attached to what’s going to happen in the story, but just be open minded to be entertained by this life.

Exactly. Well, Magic Mystery of the Multiverse is a trilogy of books and it is about a young girl, Anna, who’s 13 years old and she’s from Los Angeles, like you, Lucy. And she’s an aspiring actress.

So she is a very confident, bold, physical, athletic girl. And she always thinks what could go right. She doesn’t ever imagine what could go wrong.

Her younger brother is 11 years old and he’s the opposite. He’s more of an Eeyore kind of character. He’s always thinking what could go wrong.

And he’s also recovering from cancer. So his health is frail. So we’ve got these two dramatically opposed characters.

One is confident and outgoing and optimistic. The other one is frail and pessimistic. And they go on this adventure, kind of a Doctor Who sort of adventure through the multiverse, and they face these incredible challenges dealing with the censors who want to chop out their tongues and do other horrific things to them and the planets that they visit, but throughout there’s this theme of the siblings looking after each other.

The brother is surprisingly heroic. We’ve come to get used to the sister always rescuing her brother who’s younger and frailer, but in a dramatic scene, it’s a role reversal. And the brother does something extremely heroic and surprising facing the adversary, facing the evil censor and saves his sister’s life.

And so that’s important to me. I want kids and everyone to think about the love and loyalty between siblings. And I have that kind of relationship with my brother sometimes.

I feel like I’m always the one looking after him. But then every now and again, it’s the role reversal. And I want us to also be open to that possibility.

Things don’t always have to be the way that you expect them. And to just honor that anybody can be a hero, even the most unexpected person, even the youngest, weakest, sickest person can be heroic if they so choose. Wow.

Amazing. My daughter’s name is Annabelle and she’s almost 13. So I’m heading to Kickstarter now and it’s yeah, I got my copy.

We go to Kickstarter and just search magic mystery in the multiverse. And I would appreciate that support. But on Kickstarter, you can offer extra things.

So I had full color designs of the characters and bookmarks and extra things that you couldn’t offer or can’t easily offer just on Amazon. So Kickstarter is a fun, a fun platform. Perfect.

Well, in your days running your multi businesses, what is a favorite quote that you go by? You can do it. I think that the favorite quote I go by is really that you can do it attitude. If there’s a will, there is a way.

And that what I learned, what I just shared with you a few minutes ago about Mylan is like, if it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean you’re going the wrong way. It means you are learning. Actually, you know, what I often say is the quote that my mother always said to me is there’s no growth in the comfort zone.

So beware the comfort zone. There’s no growth there. And it’s easy for us to to coast.

Right. I’ve reinvented myself every decade or every couple of years with different businesses because I’m kind of a restless or curious or creative person. But it’s every time I reinvent myself or start a new business like now I’ve got the same page publishing, which helps people with their books.

It’s like, oh, well, I’m comfortable doing the old thing. I could just keep on doing that. But then you end up living a groundhog day life.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to have multiple experiences? So beware the comfort zone. There’s no growth there. That’s a quote from my mother.

What about you, Lucy? What’s a favorite quote that that you live by or perhaps that your mother passed on to you?

For me, it’s yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is the gift, which is why we call it the present.

I love that. That’s great.

All Aurora’s links are in the show notes so you can connect with her and check out and support her Kickstarter.

Thank you so much, Lucy. I really appreciate the connecting with you. What a great show you’ve got.

Thank you.