What Stories Teach Us About Ourselves & Life

“After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

Philip Pullman

Stories are as old as humankind itself and aren’t just something external to us that we discovered in prehistory. Stories are hardwired into the genetic code of the human-animal.

Humans are beings of fiction. They’re like fish and water. They can’t survive without stories. Stories are a cultural universal - there isn’t a single country, from Angola to Zanzibar, that isn’t steeped in stories and storytelling. If something is universal, there’s a good chance it’s more than just culture but evolution.

And as we evolve, storytelling can teach us about ourselves through the eyes of the characters we admire. Some stories show us how people make sacrifices and how they pay for mistakes. Lessons and inspiration are embedded in the stories we consume, so the creators of these stories have a responsibility to entertain and enlighten.

We are the only sentient beings who can model our lives off the stories we are told and extract lessons from them. We are the characters in our own stories, and they allow us to use our imagination in ways that make us better. People love stories, and no matter what you think, your life is an intriguing one. Some people think they don’t have a story to tell but think again. Everyone has a story.

If you’re struggling with your story, think about what you do and why you do it. Think about the hard lessons you’ve learned and how they’ve shaped the person you are today. Think about your fears and how you can help others to overcome theirs.

People are driven by emotion, and a good story allows them to see the human side of others. This is where true connection lies: in our challenges, our vulnerabilities, our suffering, and our pain. We are living a story, and we can learn from the stories of others,

That’s why I love reading and writing Science Fiction and Fantasy because they do this better than any other genre. You have the ability to break free of “real life” and immerse yourself in the vast possibilities that exist in the worlds that you have created. They allow you to ask questions and to positively express our emotions. Speculative Fiction makes it possible for us to change the rules in whatever way we wish, and we can apply those lessons to life itself.

Check out these examples:

Kindred is a novel written by Octavia E. Butler and published in 1979. It’s a harrowing novel about Dana, a Black woman mysteriously transported to her family’s past over and over again. She learns she’s connected to Rufus, a white slave owner in Maryland, and she gets pulled back to instances when he’s in danger. Butler reimagines the time travel narrative and takes us back to the antebellum South, where she witnesses the savagery of American slavery. This tale transformed my thinking as any good story should especially as it spoke about my ancestors whose narratives were lost to the brutality and destruction of slavery.

In A Song of Ice and Fire series, George R. R. Martin upturns convention by making things unpredictable. The author adds magic, dragons, white walkers, and a giant wall. The book is complicated, smart, unpredictable, and the world-building is brilliant.

He doesn’t change the people, though. They are the same. They are still us.

Why?

Because that’s what he’s exploring – human nature. He’s putting us in unusual situations and exploring how we would behave. How you would behave.

Frank Herbert’s Dune similarly explores humanity and how they relate to challenges. It places humans in a far-flung future setting where giant worms create a powerful spice that allows us to fold space. By using the spice, one of the main characters is able to experience the past, present, and future all at once.

In these three examples, the authors have created complex worlds with their own fantastic elements and then set humans loose so that we can learn who we once were or who we could be as a species.

I’d like to mention Stephen King here because, in my estimation, when it comes to bringing characters to life, he is one of the best. He has a knack for choosing points of interest in a character’s personality that not just interests you but asks questions about your own life. I think that’s because he’s able to make his human creations relatable; we can learn something of who we are. I love that about him.

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

Stephen King, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”

And that is the power of stories. The ability to see ourselves in the characters we read about or view and then take away lessons we can apply in our own life.

Wonderful things happen in our minds when we listen to stories. Words associated with smells engage the part of our brains that deal with smells. Words related to moving limbs do the same. The brain treats reading about an experience almost as if it’s living the experience in real life.

Never underestimate the power of story and its ability to make us understand other people and other world views. I believe that stories act as a kind of inoculation against the emotional effects of living. A book might make us angry, turn us on. We may feel sorrow or grief, and so learn about it in the pages of a book or on-screen. But it’s safe, a contained world that ultimately isn’t real. But it’s still a story. And if we ever have to face something similar in the real world, then perhaps we are a little more prepared for it?
And that can only be a good thing.