What Are Stories For?

Stories are an integral part of human existence. We create stories from the time we are old enough to understand words until the time we can no longer understand them. Our dreams are filled with stories, whether everyday or fantastic. Stories define how we understand the world. But what are they for, and why are they so important?

I’m no psychologist, nor am I a neurologist or an anthropologist (with the exception of my single semester of grad school in anthropology). What I am is a writer, and stories are my stock-in-trade. I understand the importance of stories on a visceral level; I have been telling them ever since I learned to speak. But what is it about them that resonates so intensely with the human experience? Why are we creatures of story and metaphor?

Stories are metaphors. They explain our lives by drawing out the threads of others through which we can see the similarities and contrasts. The ragged girl who becomes a princess tells us that changes can happen in our lives. The boy whose gentleness and wit win him a kingdom tells us that fighting is not the only way to achieve success. The child who must kill the giant tells us that courage can be rewarded. The best stories have some kernel of universality, and draw upon themes and circumstances that are mirrored in our true lives.

They also help us understand ourselves by understanding others. There have been studies done showing that, taken as a group, those who read fiction are more empathetic than those who do not. By immersing themselves in the feelings of others, readers learn that others have feelings like theirs, and generalize that into real life. If the people on the page have real feelings, just like the reader, then perhaps real people have those same feelings. And if the writer can write about real feelings, then that writer must have them as well.

I don’t know about such studies of plays, television, movies, and more recently, video games. I suspect that because the medium is different the effect might be somewhat different as well. But these things are, even given the difference in media, still storytelling. The first tales were oral, so the written word isn’t the first iteration of story; the fact that stories have jumped the gap into so many new media testifies instead to their power to change with human culture.

However, it’s not simply emotions that we learn from stories. We measure ourselves by the lives of others, contrast our choices with those fictional people. We say, “They should do something differently,” or “That is the perfect choice, and I would never have thought of it.” We see persistence in the face of danger, or react to the meaninglessness we perceive in the world around us. We identify with those who are trapped, those who are searching, those who are in pain. We see issues in other contexts, which helps us to identify them in our lives.

Not all stories have universality. Some are explorations of culture, questioning moral and ethical values, plowing into the ground of questions about the world. Some are very culturally specific. The point is that we respond to them in similar ways, and broaden our minds and understandings to accommodate them. That is why, though there are a finite number of possible plots, there are always new stories to be told; as culture advances, new understandings can also advance and creep into our unconscious minds as tales, lore, stories.

But I think it goes even deeper than that. Our most basic hopes and dreams, fears and terrors, are reflected in the circumstances of tales. We build up our heroes and take down our enemies. The webwork of story creates a template from which, though we do not follow it in every particular, affects how we perceive our entire world. We expend pain through catharsis, understand joy by proxy. The archetypes expressed by tales haunt the back of our minds and take shape through our words. Those things that make us human are bolstered by the existence of that mirror. It is not only that we create stories, but in a sense the stories create us. They teach us our first values and our ethics, and more subtly, what it truly means to be human.

Those archetypal structures and beings are the links that connect us with each other. They are the template of our minds, and their outward semblance is that of tales, lore, and expressed wisdom. They are passed down through time, and connect us to those who have gone before us, and those who will come after us. They link us both to our own nature, and to the social nature of humankind, through that which transcends culture to become uniquely human.

And perhaps it is the very differences of the metaphors that make us see truth reflected in the mirror’s cracked glass. As we piece it together, we understand how we ourselves are built, and how we can take these lessons and apply them to our lives. In the final analysis, the power and scope of stories pattern us just as we pattern them. They are the ultimate human expression, and we cannot do without them.