We The Storytellers

The sense we have of ourselves, of our connections to others, of our place in the world, and of the events within it come from stories. We need the stories; we create and consume them: we cannot live without them. Through them we view the past - and it is becoming more and more apparent that they also shape our futures.

"The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative." This is from Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize lecture upon receiving the Nobel Prize in literature.

And here is Reynolds Price: "A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

We honor the great storytellers with prizes. We pay money to buy their books; the "high" storytellers are thrust upon us at school - some continue to read them, others not ; the "low" storytellers fill our pulp fiction and its cousin the big screen, and the little screen of our livingrooms; stories fill our lunches with gossip; they cement our family connections (good ones have lots - deficient ones are lacking); and they help us justify our decisions - both right and wrong. Stories are the links between the impulses of our soul and the stumbling attempts of our rational mind to explain.

James Pennebaker in his book Opening Up reveals the important part that storytelling has in expressing emotion and healing. Pennebaker did experiments where he had students write for short periods of time on painful traumas of their lives, and contrasted them with other students who wrote on trivial matters. He found that there was a surprising amount of undisclosed trauma in these students' lives, and he also found that writing about it had healthy repercussions: both physically and psychologically. These experiments, which occurred some twenty years ago, have been repeately validated by others. Could it be that what is good for the individual's health and well-being is also true of a culture or society; perhaps it also needs its stories told in order to maintain its health.

And is it useful to note that what we ourselves put into these stories in many ways is more important than the events, the facts as it were, that inhabit them. Not only are we making sense of our pasts via our stories, but in more than one way we are creating our futures. The way that we view our lives is constantly undergoing revisions. The way we do this not only determines how we view ourselves, but has immense influence on our behavior. We really are creating ourselves through the stories we tell about ourselves.