Why Do We Need Stories?

Last week I talked about a writer’s need to write, about the satisfaction of stringing words together, of seeing them land on the page.  About the fact that some of us are born with the need to do this strange thing and about the way the doing serves us. 

I didn’t mention fiction writing, though, and that involves another layer of need entirely.  The need to turn life into story. Not long ago, I heard Krista Tippet interviewed.  (She is the host of On Being, a podcast I often turn to as an antidote to my despair over today’s political news.)  “Why do we need stories?” she was asked.  And to my surprise, this astute woman who has an answer for just about everything had no reply.  I was listening while walking my dog, and I found myself wanting to jump up and down in the middle of the street, waving my hand like a kid in an elementary school classroom, shouting, “I know the answer!  I know!”

And I do.

Whether or not we recognize why we need story—and we usually read novels without asking that question—I am convinced we are drawn to fiction because story makes sense out of a chaotic world.  Much of the artistry in the creation of fiction is that of selection.  Writers choose.  They give us only what matters in the trajectory of this story, what will carry us to the final scene, what will give meaning to all that has come before.  They take the jumble of life and draw us through it in a way that allows us, not to be told, but to feel the meaning ... at least the meaning that can be drawn from this particular set of events.

In less complex fiction, the meaning is right there on the surface.  Boy gets girl.  Crime doesn’t pay.  They all lived happily ever after.  In more nuanced fiction, it isn’t so easy to name, but readers feel that unnamed meaning in a much deeper, more complex way than they could if it were stated.  They feel it as they would if they had lived it, so the meaning stays. 

(Neuroscience tells us that our brains don’t distinguish between an action performed and a word describing that action.  So when you read “she gasped” your brain gasps.  That’s how powerful words are!)

Children’s fiction impacts in that more subtle way, as well.  At least, the best of it does … unless the adults presenting the story use it to promote a “lesson” instead.  I have received hundreds, probably thousands, of teacher-assigned letters from students saying, “When I read On My Honor I learned never to go swimming in rivers.” Or “always to tell the truth.”  Or “to obey my parents.”  And there is nothing wrong with such a “lesson,” if, indeed, a young reader actually learns it.  I’m skeptical, though.  I think it’s much more likely that the students are saying what they know their teachers want to hear.

What they truly learn when they read On My Honor—or any other story—comes out of all the story causes them to feel.

A truly good story is, as I heard Ken Burns say recently, “a benign Trojan horse.”  And that horse will deliver different riches to different readers, depending on what each brings to the page.  Because the message is conveyed through feeling, not statement, every reader absorbs that meaning in their own way.  When I receive a letter about On My Honor that says something like, “I don’t know why, but I cried,” I know my story has been received ... along with whatever meaning that reader is ready to take on board. 

Sometimes adults write to me to say that a novel of mine still lives in their hearts.  And when that happens, I can guarantee it isn’t a lesson that has stayed with them.  It’s the feelings the story engendered.  Along with the meaning they drew from that felt resolution. 

We fiction writers return, again and again, to writing story for the same reason … to feel our way toward meaning. Since this thing called life doesn’t come with meaning attached, we create that meaning, first for ourselves, then for anyone open to whatever truth we discover.

That truth, even for us—perhaps especially for us—need never be named. We search as we write in the same way our readers come to our stories, searching.  And it is the search that compels, that brings us back to the page, day after day after day.  We are searching for significance, for understanding. 

For meaning.