Why We Tell Stories, Why You Should Write

My PO keeps asking about my mental health. I think it is a very relevant question to 2009. Today, I take my Zoloft and see my counselor, but most importantly, in my opinion, I keep writing. Putting words into sentences helps me stay rational, to defend myself from again plunging into despair born of depression. Therefore, much of  How Stories Help Us Make Sense of the World I found out on my own.

The stories we tell in daily conversations almost always center on disruptions from the normal flow of life. But they aren’t usually the epic disruptions we see in novels and movies. Just about any little departure will do. If something is out of the ordinary, or otherwise seems unlikely, this gives us license to talk about it. The very fact that people are telling a story about something shows that they regard it as out of the ordinary. This is how we learn about social norms. It is how we learn about other people. When people show us what they find remarkable and why, they show us who they are.

If you’re telling me something, it should be news. It wouldn’t be a conversation if I just kept saying the same things. One of the strongest principles that has been discovered about language use by philosophers and psychologists of language is the cooperative maxim in communication: Be relevant. In part, this means: Don’t tell people things that they already know. At each point, what you say should be informative.
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This kind of simulation — written by one person, run by another — exploits the fundamental and unique trick of language: the fact that words can inform you about events you cannot witness for yourself. When I tell you, say, what happened on my subway ride this morning, my words are instructions for your imagination, to use linguist Daniel Dor’s phrase. This can be useful for obvious practical reasons. I can tell that it’s raining at our destination, and you will know to carry an umbrella and raincoat. But in the case of fiction, what can you do with the contents of a novel or screenplay? An answer is found in the kinds of thing that fictional stories tend to be about.

The problems that fictional stories depict aren’t just any disruption of norms. They tend to involve personal ordeals, of much greater intensity and scale than we experience in real life.

 I hope this points you towards the whole essay. Even better, take up pen and paper.

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