“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”  ~Ursula LeGuin

The Power Of Story

Stories are powerful.  I think most of us intuitively understand this.  We can be deeply moved by story, whether it is a tale told around a dinner table, a book that makes us laugh or cry, or a movie that haunts us for days after seeing it. Heck, I’ve been brought to tears by cell phone commercials, and I’m sure it’s because it told a poignant, 30-second story.  The fact is, however, making the jump from knowing the story to writing it is a big leap. Let’s face it,  for a lot of people – myself included – writing is a lot of work.  It takes effort, thought, and time.

Why bother?

The purpose of this site is to answer that question, to provide you with the reasons why paying attention to your own personal narrative is worth the bother, as well as giving you ideas, tools and support to get it done.

Stories seem to be hard-wired into us as humans.  But now we’re getting support from brain researchers, and it’s very exciting stuff.  95% of what we know about neuroscience and brain health and memory has been learned in the past 30 years, and I would guess that a large percentage of that has come along in the past 10 or 12 years.  Guess what they’re finding?  That our brains are story-making machines.   Our stories about our lives are how we make sense of our experience. Our brains have a built-in story “grammar.”  We literally think in story.

So, why bother? Because we are, at a very basic level, the stories we tell—to ourselves and to others.  If we truly want to understand the lives we are living, we need to understand our stories.

But that’s not all.  It turns out that our stories provide us with the best method to connect to other people. The beautiful thing about telling a story instead of just sharing facts is that a story combines the information along with the emotions attached to it better than anything else.  Information is easier to remember if it’s told in a story. Think about it.  If you really want to communicate an idea or a thought or an emotion to someone else, tell a story about it.  You’ll get so much further than you would with a lecture.

And the last reason it’s worth the effort to remember and tell your stories is that it captures the meaning of your life for yourself.  As my co-author and I wrote in our book Half Past Perfect,

Through writing about our lives, we assign significance to the past. “Story-ing” requires us to pay attention to our experiences. This is the unique authority of storytelling, which is embedded in every culture. Whether through pictures on a cave wall, Egyptian hieroglyphs, or the Dead Sea Scrolls, humans are drawn to share the events of their lives. Without stories, the links to our past would be broken.

Regardless of which reason prompts you to pay attention to your own story, I hope the resources on this site will help you get started. But then we face the next troublesome question:

Which stories do I tell?

The short answer is that you can tell any story you want.  In fact, for some of you, you may already have a story that you are burning to tell.  You may be ready to run right out and write it down.  If so, that’s terrific!

This is not, I am sad to say, the usual way it happens.  Often we struggle, not because we don’t have enough to say.  We just can’t think of WHICH story to tell.

So here are some links to help you decide.

LIFELINES