We love stories. We tell stories, read stories, listen to and watch them every day of our lives. Not just the big, majestic stories, like the ones we were assigned to read in literature class. We enjoy the stories about the hair stylist's fourteen year old granddaughter's arrest on charges of DUI.
More importantly, we tell stories about our own lives and, in the process of the telling, we create ourselves. Often, the stories we tell are based on the most mundane things, such as making morning coffee, getting the car inspected, or paying the mortgage. Not very exciting? Think about the morning you were making coffee and discovered you'd run out of hazelnut-cream and had to settle for that generic breakfast blend stuffed in the back of the refrigerator, behind the milk you meant to throw away two days ago. Didn't that get you started on the wrong track and didn't you yell at everyone who nudged in front of your car on the way to work? Hadn't the twinge in your head blossomed into a full headache by lunch? That's how an everyday event becomes a story.
Why do we prefer to convey life experiences in stories? We live in a storied culture. Some of our most cherished beliefs are shaped by ancient mythology, religious and political ideals, passed down to us in the form of stories. Granted, we aren't aren't mythical gods or goddesses, and most of have never met a prophet or apostle, but some of our life battles could make Odysseus rethink the notion of war. Thankfully, we live quieter lives, but we still have a penchant, a need for story on a daily basis.Most of us begin the day with news from a local or national newspaper. Then, we tune into the weather channel for meteorological predictions (some of which seem more mythological than meteorological) on which we base our daily routines, read letters from family and friends, compose email messages (or blogs), partake in office gossip, listen to headlines and Hollywood gossip, and, with family and friends, share the stories that unfolded (partially or completely) during the day.
It's the process of constructing these stories about daily, weekly, monthly, or lifetime experiences that helps us to see connections between the menial and more dramatic events of our lives. Trying to turn life experiences into stories demands that we come to terms with them, even if in a linguistic way. As we select the details we want to share, we begin to incorporate these experiences into our concept of who we are and how others fit into our lives. As we give shape to stories about the unexpected and unpredictable, we begin to feel a sense of power. Although some insist that we have no real power over life, I believe we have the power to shape the stories that constitute our lived experiences. We have the power of selection over the stories to be told, over the emphasis we want to place on one event and the point of view from which the story is told. As we tell these stories, we gain some control by choosing sentences, phrases, ideas, concepts, questions to contain them. We do this as a process of trying to make sense out of them and, sometimes, inadvertently, create some meaning for ourselves. As we construct these stories we reveal ourselves, our character, whatever that may be.
As we tell stories, we create and re-create ourselves as characters in our daily lives. So, as Chinua Achebe suggests (strongly), we need to pay attention to stories to see who's doing the creating--the story or the person telling the story. What do you think?
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