Why Do We Tell Stories?

So, why is it that we are ‘natural storytellers’? Recent scientific evidence backs up what we, as writers, know in our guts. Telling stories is not a luxury for human beings, it is vital to our survival and flourishing. If the wild animal has senses, bodily sensation, emotion, action and most probably some powers of imagining and ‘thinking’, to keep it alive, we have all this plus a more developed rational mind, and the ability to tell stories. 

There are stories everywhere around us, in films, on TV, and in books. Adverts tell us stories to persuade us to buy their products. Televised sports are also stories. Our heroes face the opponents, with a clear aim, and battle it out to the bitter end. Stories rescue human beings when life is too harsh, too fast, too heavy. We default into daydreaming whenever we are not involved in an immediate, absorbing task.  Stories provide rest and relief. They calm our body and mind.

I see the extreme of storytelling as a life-saving strategy in my work as a psychotherapist. Many people who experience traumatic or abusive situations, use storytelling to survive emotionally, when contact with ‘reality’ would be overwhelming for body and mind. Indeed, the state of ‘dissociation’, of feeling detached from a situation that would otherwise be unbearable, often involves elements of storytelling. Below is the account of an abuse survivor.

I could see the window from where I lay. When it was happening, I would look out of the window at the birds flying. I would imagine I too was flying, and that I could go anywhere, do anything. I would visit beautiful places and talk to kind people who reassured me that I would survive. I believe this is what stopped me from going crazy, or from killing myself.

In recent studies of dreams it has been found that 80 percent are about ‘a problem that needs to be solved’. So, it may be that the primary evolutionary role of stories is as, psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley puts it, to be...

…the flight simulators of human social life.

Writing, telling, reading, or listening to stories, activates the same biological process as living out the actions would do. The same neurons fire, and neural pathways are strengthened when we think about performing an action, as when we perform it for real. That’s the reason that professional sports people use visualisation as a key part of their training. Stories allow us to encounter various life obstacles in symbolic guise and to practice ways of solving them, without endangering ourselves. Stories train us for life.

Certainly, stories also play other crucial roles in our lives: They allow us to process emotions. They allow us to feel in control of, and gain perspective on our lives. They can lead to public recognition and (sometimes) money. Autobiographical work can pass information on to future generations, and provide closure to our lives. Stories entertain. They inspire and they motivate.

As I wrote as part of the content for a University of Exeter creative writing course,

When we tell our stories details unfold like flowers, clues become moments of epiphany, feelings are processed, and stuck energy is discharged. We begin to notice the patterns that repeat through our lives, called ‘Repetition Compulsion’ by Sigmund Freud. We see which of those serve us, and which don’t. We can bring closure to the unfinished aspects of our lives. We can grieve and move on. We can find or create our self in the writing.

Storytelling, on the very physical level of our nervous systems, discharges energy. This energy, if it remains trapped, can disable our effective functioning in the world, as well as lead to ill health.

Above all, writing is a fabulous thing to do, because, as poet John Keats so clearly elucidated, the great beauty of the art and craft of it is that ‘it makes everything interesting’.

What I’d like you to take away this month, is the following:

Your job- that of being a wordsmith- is sacred, because without it, the human species cannot survive.

What we need to do as storytellers is to rest in the knowledge that not everything has to come from the rational mind. If we can trust our innate ability to tell stories, to allow our organic movement towards health, then we have truly set out on the trail to re-finding our wild words. So, as the unanswered emails pile up, and as your partner, parents, and children tug relentlessly on your sleeve, remember this: you’re doing war-work. Writing saves lives.

Now how are your mind and body feeling? Would you know how to put the strength of your embodied experience into words?

Onward and upward!

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Spoken Word, Written Word

Photograph by Noel Harvey

As a writer, I’ve often asked myself: how can I get the maximum aliveness into a product that sits flat on the page? It’s not an easy task. (Here’s a poem about my sometime frustration in this respect.)

Stories are alive. They are ever-evolving creatures. In my experience, they often resist being reduced to a ‘definitive version’.  At a certain point, we usually just have to make a deal with our subject matter that it’s time to part ways. Then we take courage in both hands, and let go of the re-writing.

I’d long suspected the value of looking at how words are used in language, and stage performance, and then find ways to transfer that power on to the page. So, I watched a range of spoken-word stage performances, as well as listening to conversations in the street, with that lens in mind.

Now I understand much more about how writers can learn from spoken word poets and oral storytellers, and vice versa. And how invaluable that learning can be.

The differences

Certainly, there are fundamental differences between language and writing. They are different creatures, rather than (as used to be assumed) one just being the descendent of the other.  When we speak to someone, there’s a limit to how much information they can process in any one instant. If they’re reading a text we’ve written, there isn’t the same problem. They can take time to unpack and digest. Language therefore, tends to come in bite-sized fragments, with the written word in general being more elaborate, embedded, and closely packed.

Who is better at what?

Spoken-word sometimes lacks durability, complexity, subtlety, and beauty of form. I’ve found that spoken-word artists on the Wild Words courses revel in taking the range of tools and techniques that writers have, and applying them to the creation of a spoken-word-baby-to-be. They enjoy mining the written words alone, to get maximum impact into them, before the extraordinary power of performance is added. They record, on paper, their spoken word gems for posterity.

Those who work only with the written word, can sometimes struggle to unleash spontaneity and aliveness on the page. Writers easily lose touch with their embodied experience, without which, in my opinion no story can flourish. The utilisation of body-awareness and physicality, is something that performance poets often excel at.

Writers learning from performers

Over time, writing has become increasingly distanced from its roots in oral storytelling.

Pauses

For example, when first introduced, the hierarchy of punctuation marks on the page seems to have been thought of as representing pauses of different lengths, that is, as reflecting purely phonetic facts.

It was recording what master storytellers did in front of their audiences, to raise tension, and set up patterns of tension and release. They paused their speech at key moments in a story, or use a drum roll of other musical instrument, clap their hands, stamp their feet, or changing position on stage.

Writing, gradually, over time, honed its invaluable ability to display the logical structure of a passage, independently of how it might be read aloud.

Remembering it’s roots, it seems to me an interesting experiment to do as a writer, to take a step back into the history of writing, and think about how we might rediscover how to create pauses, and therefore raise tension in a story, through punctuation.

And punctuation isn’t the only way to do it. When we use language on stage, or in everyday life, it is always accompanied by gestures, mannerisms, movement and changes in facial expression. So, when we write a piece of dialogue, and want to create a dramatic pause, describing physicality is often the best way to go.

Intonation

A major aspect of spoken language that there is no satisfactory way to put on to the page, is intonation, or pitch. The intonation in someone’s voice contains vital information about the mood, and intention of the speaker. The best we’ve managed to come up with on the page, is the of use punctuation to partially convey those things. When, in linguistics, the speaker’s voice rises,

a question mark (?), or exclamation mark (!) is the equivalent on the page. When a speaker’s voice falls, the equivalent in writing is quite often a full stop (.)

On Wild Words courses I have an ‘experiment’ I like to suggest to writers. Us writers can be a timid, body-static lot, but I’ve often suspected that inside most writers, is a frustrated performer trying to get out. So, with the upmost respect for your love of sitting quietly in your room and imaginative space, how about trying the following, just to see what happens?

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Connected to this fascinating subject (and I’m rubbing my hands in anticipation), is a discussion on the links between embodiment, music, the sung word, and the written word. But that’s for another blog…