Human beings have been telling each other stories for millennia. Why? What, exactly, is a story, and why do we bother?
A story is a narrative about an individual or group in conflict with the universe–another person or people, nature, forces within, etc. A story includes moments of danger and suspense: will the hero(ine) survive? Will they succeed in their mission? How will that success occur?
Stories fulfill a deep need in our natures for our existence to make sense. We want to believe that we can overcome dangers that face us in this universe. We want to believe that the values we defend mean something and that, even if our existence ends, those values will continue on after our death. The interplay of good and evil (or protagonist and antagonist) engages our emotions. The ratcheting up of suspense adds to the suspense of the moment and raises the stakes. All these things tell us what stories do, but they don’t tell us what stories can and do say.
Looking over human history, we’ve had stories that involved gods–superhuman versions of ourselves–as well as human heroes and villains, dragons and other terrifying creatures. We have told stories that challenged the forces of nature; defined ourselves as independent beings; saved villages or nations; fought tyrants or ambitious people like ourselves; and confronted the dark forces of the emotions or motives within ourselves. We continue to tell stories that force us to confront the dangers of the technologies we create or the evil we do in the present day.
Sometimes we tell these stories in the language of the present day. Sometimes we set them in the past. Sometimes we set them in the future. Sometimes we set them in realities completely different from our own. The motives for storytelling–even if the environments, moral structures, heroes/heroines, or tactics and tools change–remain the same. We are always trying to explain ourselves to ourselves. The stories that impressed me the most at an impressionable age were from science fiction and religion, giving me forever an interest in science, technology, and philosophy.
So the question I have for you is: which stories have you read (or written for yourself)? Which stories resonated with you and told you, in a convincing way, “Yes, life is like this, it’s about this, we should be this?”