Skilled fiction-writers can guide readers to imagine from multiple perspectives at once.

Combined visual and somatosensory cues can show simultaneously what one character sees and another feels.

Identifying with characters engages readers, but readers can imagine things protagonists can't perceive.

Fiction-reading can develop much-needed skills to imagine situations from multiple viewpoints.

Have you ever been called a pig? Insults can push us to imagine. When you were compared to a grunting animal, did you experimentally plant your mind in a pig’s body? Or did you maybe picture a snout emerging on the person trying to hurt you?

Skilled fiction-writers can guide the imagination, cuing readers to use their senses so that they fantasize more richly than they could alone (Scarry 1999, 3-9). If it serves a storyteller’s artistic aims, a writer can prompt readers to imagine a scene from several perspectives at once. Creative writers can accomplish this goal by blending appeals to readers’ visual and somatosensory (bodily) senses.

Madeline Miller’s novel Circe is all about point of view. In Greek mythology, Circe has a bad reputation—because readers know her from Homer’s Odyssey as a love-hungry witch who turns men to pigs. As an expert on ancient Greek culture, Miller uses literary craft to let Circe tell her own story.

Daughter of the sun god Helios and the ocean nymph Perse, Circe is scorned by her divine relatives, then exiled to an island for using her powers. She learns that she has a knack for transformation and can use........

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