On Writing: What is a Story – and What is it For?
How Story Saves Us From Chaos - An Extended Post
'A story is like a magnet dragged through randomness pulling the chaos of things into some kind of shape and - if we're lucky - into some kind of sense. Every tale is an attempt to lasso a terrifying reality and bring it to heel' - John Yorke.
Stories are the sea in which humans swim. A written, acted or filmed story are just highly visible waves in that sea. A ballet is also a story. So is a song and an opera. Even a purely orchestral work can be a story – think of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ at an obvious level, but all non-verbal music tells a story. It is just a story without words. A novel is just a film played inside the head.
These cultural phenomena are just public, ordered manifestations of a universal, all- encompassing process. When we are not watching or reading or listening to stories a professional storyteller has composed, we tell stories to ourselves in all our waking – and sleeping – hours .
These inner stories, like the external ones which we seek out, enjoy and often pay good money for, try to tame the chaotic and unpredictable facts of our existence, through a narrative that seeks to justify, explain, rationalise and make sense of these facts. Without these inner stories life would be literally unliveable. As John Gardner in his book on fiction, ‘Burning Down the House’ observes, stories are ‘essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy’.
Our inner stories are fabrications, or at the very least, improvisations. They are often confabulations falsehoods that those who employ them are unaware are false. As Jonathan Gottschall, in his book ‘The Storytelling Animal’ observes, ‘research shows that story is constantly nibbling and kneading us, shaping our minds without our knowledge or consent.’
Stories are inevitably fabrications, because our ability to know or control ourselves, others and the world is far more limited than we find it psychologically comfortable to accept. Certainly, the world of external events, which we try to constantly make sense of – politics, news, faraway dramas and tragedies - is apparently limitless and fathomlessly complex. In reality, we cannot hope to much influence or understand it.
Meanwhile, internally, In our everyday life, we cannot see inside one another’s heads (although we like to imagine that we can), so other people, even our nearest and dearest, are mysteries to us. We cannot even see inside our own heads because they are too close to see clearly- its like trying to touch your fingertip with the same fingertip. Thus we can always be surprised by how we behave or react in a certain situation. We do not fully know ourselves, the world, or others – and we usually are not prepared to accept that we don’t.
It is not simply the amount and complexity of the information we are presented with every day that means we are stranded in the dark. The brain, the organ that processes our perceptions, is immensely flawed as an instrument of knowing. It is riddled with distortions such as cognitive dissonance, confirmation biases, rationalisations, unreliable memories, selective attention, negativity effects and much more besides. So, the world we generate inside our head is – while it will certainly correspond to some elements of reality – very far from anything like the complete reality of our lives and the world, which cannot be known. Not even close. The truth is, given the infinite complexity of the world and other people and ourselves and the tremendous limitations and distortions of our brains, we don’t have much of a clue what is going on.
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