My Journey begins with a story, a story we’ve been telling ourselves for over 30.000 years. The story of who we are, what our purpose is and how we fit into this world.
Chapter 22 of John Yorke’s ‘Into the Woods’
I found John Yorke’s explanations of why we tell stories fascinating, especially alongside another book I’m reading at present, ‘Sapiens’ which explains the historical reasons Homo-sapiens outlived other human species due to their ability to create stories.
Societal reason
Societal reasons for storytelling have helped us since the dawn of mankind, to adapt for survival and can be seen as a way to “rid ourselves of … repression and in the process give birth to a new self”. This could be the reason some people prefer Soap Operas whereas others prefer Sci Fi- those already adept at understanding and navigating social norms would rather prepare for an imagined future. Although it could be argued the other way round as in a viewer with no desire to understand social norms in the first place would have little interest in a Soap Opera.
Rehearsal reason
Many of us spend our entire lives trying to improve ourselves, gain knowledge and achieve some kind of success. The boundaries of those possibilities have changed over time, as have our stories. They are all still very similar deep down but the princess in a tower has been replaced with a girl trapped in a tower block like in ‘Fish Tank’ by Andrea Arnold.
Information retrieval reason
We all love telling exciting stories from our past, reliving the great moments, or in some cases the terrible. Re-telling these stories help us to see how far we’ve come and what we have learnt along the way. The stories we tell more often and in more vivid detail will be the ones we remember the most. I often tell stories from my past and have a good memory of the ones I tell regularly. We can also use these anecdotes to help friends asking us for advice by explaining what we did and didn’t do before and how that affected the situation.
Panacea reason and Procreation Reason
I’ve put these together because I feel like they are the antithesis of each other nowadays. Stories of hope for the world don’t go hand in hand with stories of procreation now that we’ve over-populated the world so much. This divide is seen in the genres of stories that envelop each concept, the romances pushing the nuclear family concept whereas I see Panacea stories as giving us the hope that mankind still has it in them to realise the damage it’s doing and try to reverse it.
I would be interested in further exploration of the procreation reason, as on the surface it appears to be an outdated concept that rich old white men try to push for political gain and power.
Psychological reason
I love the concept that all stories are a manifestation of inner psychological wars. The Pixar film ‘Inside Out’ is a literal example of this and was brilliantly envisioned. It works for both children and adults because the premise is how the mind works through issues and everybody can relate to that no matter how old you are.
Using stories to balance the contradicting elements within, finding what is abandoned for need “assimilation of darkness, then, is crucial to growth”. Stories as a model for healing are used in group therapy creative writing groups to work through issues of mental health.
Of course they all work together on some level or another as reasons we tell stories, where would we be without stories? Well we’d probably still be another mammal roaming the countryside, eating, sleeping and existing with no concept of anything else.
