Part One
Why do we tell stories?
I am a storyteller.
It has been an intrinsic part of me for longer than I can remember. Stories make inherent sense to me. It’s the way my brain is wired. When I look at the world, I see it through the lens of how I might use words to describe it, to convey what I see into the mind’s eye of another person.
For me, there is a certain magic to writing. The way words will dance across my mind and then be made manifest upon the page (or screen) is a beautiful act. Without transgressing into the realm of the overly sappy, it makes me feel as though I’m taking a part of myself and transforming it into something that can reach beyond the limitations imposed by a single body and a single mind.
Before I was a storyteller myself, I was a consumer of stories. The first stories told to me were those of my parents as they taught me to talk, walk, understand the world and my place in it. They were storytellers, too, even if they didn’t realise it.
That’s the thing – we are all storytellers. We all navigate the world through narrative, through the tales we spin and which are spun for us.
Reading was not just something I learned to do. It was something I learned I could not live without.
Like many, when I discovered the capacity for a book to pull me into a world that was wholly different from the one I inhabited, I voraciously consumed everything within reach. Books had – and still have – a way of absorbing me completely. Once I am in the world of the narrative, speaking with me becomes impossible; I simply have to know what happens.
Under my greedy eyes and impatient fingers, tomes tumbled.
When I think about my time in primary school in suburban Melbourne, Australia, in the late nineties, I remember heaving stacks of books to and from the library, and sitting on concrete steps outside a classroom at recess and lunchtime because I didn’t want any more distraction from what I was reading than was necessary. It’s not the whole portrait of my time at primary school, but it’s the story that I tell most frequently about how I remember the formation of this vital aspect to my personhood.
This is not a unique experience. In any primary school class, there is a child who can barely be pried away from a book, but it’s a story that’s important to me and my understanding of who I am.
Books aren’t the only kinds of stories to be told and heard. Stories are everywhere. In movies, on our TV shows, in artwork, in newspapers, and in the simple day-to-day information that we relay to one another.
We all tell stories, all the time.
Like many, when I discovered the capacity for a book to pull me into a world that was wholly different from the one I inhabited, I voraciously consumed everything within reach. Books had – and still have – a way of absorbing me completely. Once I am in the world of the narrative, speaking with me becomes impossible; I simply have to know what happens.
It’s not radical to claim stories are integral to how we communicate. If we want to be very technical, we could define story as a coherently organised series of information units that are conveyed through a medium whose meanings are pre-agreed upon by the recipient/s and the teller.
This means simply relaying a piece of information is a form of storytelling.
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The act of telling that story not only gives people information about who we are, but affirms for ourselves touchstone elements to our identity that drive not only our worldview, but our actions, too. Storytelling can therefore also be understood as a performance of identity. As a result, we could say that the concept of ourselves and our society is perpetually being constructed and reconstructed through stories (Ryan 525).
When we speak about ourselves or our families, or even our societies, I’d argue that fundamentally, we tell the version of the facts, elements, and story that we want to tell at that particular time. I have little interest in delving into a naval gazing discussion on the subjectivity of truth. Instead, I’ll say that we frame things in certain ways, omit particular details, or emphasise others. And we do it about ourselves, too.
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So what about books? How exactly does fiction fit in to this? At the most fundamental of levels, I believe the fiction we tell is a reflection of the author’s perspective on the world around them.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to illustrate this point with my own books.
My published books are all fantasy. They are set in a world wholly different to our own. And yet, they are directly inspired by things I see in the environment surrounding me.
In what I wrote, I created a mirror to what I saw. A book reviewer discussing my work (which is always wonderful for my ego!) summarised what I wish I’d articulated. Of the world I’ve built, she said:
“It’s a fantasy world, she’s created a world, but she’s created so much that contextually, from the world around us, that you understand it without having to think about it.” (Mad Cheshire Rabbit)
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I take inspiration directly from the surrounding world. I might flip it, or play with it, or do something unusual with it, but at the core, within the context of my fantasy writing, I play with things I see. Brandon Sanderson (an author I admire) says very specifically that while people often say fantasy writing draws on the past, he believes, in fact, it is fundamentally about the present (Flood). It’s certainly true of my writing, and I think it’s even true about science and speculative fiction; authors look at truths about the world today and consider how that will play out in ten, twenty, one hundred years. Books and stories – they’re a mirror to who we are and where we are now.
I attended the Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne a few years ago, and one of the festival patrons in the opening address said something to this effect: “Nobody is as maligned a group as writers are. Wherever you go, when you tell people that you’re a writer, you will always hear the reply oh yeah, I write, too.”
There are several truths behind that comment, but perhaps not all of them are what he intended to convey. While some of us are sufficiently deranged to stick at storytelling to transform the private act of putting down words into something for public consumption, that doesn’t minimise the significance of the fact that so many people write. Be it for leisure, as an outlet, or even as an aspiration, the prevalence of people who write tells us about the power of stories – the ones we read, watch, hear, and tell ourselves.
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Iser wrote in one of his more seminal texts, The Fictive and Imaginary… well, he wrote a lot of things, and I’ll be honest, it’s a hard read. But one of the things I easily understood was the comment that the need to marginalise fiction speaks to its power (Iser 112).
Stories are powerful things. Books are powerful things. This is why people burn and ban them. To appropriate a quote from V for Vendetta, books and stories contain ideas, and ideas are bulletproof.
We write and tell stories not only to express ourselves, but to help understand a huge, often-scary, complex, multifaceted and multilayered world, of which even the most well-travelled of us only manage to see a tiny fragment. Stories give us the power to not only see a different world, but to inhabit it. This immersion has a power that is often referred to, but infrequently unpacked. Empathy – true empathy – is the ability to understand the experience and feelings of another.
This is powerful.
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