Fieldnote 04: My personal storytelling curriculum.
I’ve been building and following an in-depth modular course on the history and structure of storytelling. These Fieldnotes are the long-form supplements, one essay per section, written to stand on their own. This is Section 4 of the orientation module, and it asks the question underneath all the others:
Why do human beings tell stories at all?
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To answer it, I am going to do the thing in question and tell you one. It is about a single day. The day is yours.
You wake mid-sentence. Before your eyes open, before you know your own name, the dream is still running, and you are narrating it to yourself in the dark: and then the corridor, and then the water coming under the door, and then. The story dissolves as you reach for it, the way they do. You have already forgotten the plot. But notice that your sleeping brain spent the night doing the one thing it is about to spend the whole day doing. It was telling itself a story.
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Jonathan Gottschall calls us the storytelling animal, and his first piece of evidence is the thing you just did. The human mind does not switch story off when consciousness goes dark. It dreams in scenes, with character and dread, night after night, for free, whether you remember them or not. Before you have made a single choice today, you have already been told a story by your own head.
The habit is installed early, earlier than most of what we call learning. Long before a child can read, she is narrating. She tells herself stories in the crib in the dark, and she demands the same tale a hundred nights running, correcting you if you drop a word. She stages whole dramas with the toys on the floor, the simulator booting up in miniature, a rehearsal for a world she has barely met. None of this is taught. Story arrives in us ahead of arithmetic and most of language, close to the ground floor of the mind.
You reach for the phone. The news is waiting, and it arrives already shaped into a cast. Someone is to blame. Something that happened yesterday is bent into a shape with a direction and a likely end, because raw events do not hold attention and stories do. You scroll. An advertisement slides past, and it is a story too, the smallest complete one ever built: here is a person with a lack, here is the better life on the far side of the purchase. Thirty pixels and two seconds, and still it has a beginning and a turn.
On the way to work a song does something to you and a memory opens, ten years old. You were there for the original afternoon, once, but what you have now is a story about it, edited and re-edited every time you have taken it out, the dialogue tidied, a meaning added that you did not feel at the time. Memory is a story you keep re-telling, and each re-telling quietly rewrites the file. That is how the equipment works.
At work, someone leans in to tell you what someone else did. This is gossip, the oldest narrative technology we own, older than writing itself, and it is doing serious work under the cover of idleness. To follow it you have to track who wanted what and who betrayed whom. You are running a simulation of other minds, and you are doing it for pleasure. The brain treats the social world as the most gripping story there is, because for most of our history it was the one that kept us alive. Robin Dunbar argues that this is why language evolved at all, as a kind of vocal grooming, gossip taking over from the hands-on bonding that holds a primate troop together and scaling it up to the size of a tribe.
Later you have to say a hard thing to someone, and before you say it you rehearse. You run the conversation forward and watch their face fall. Then you try a softer opening and run it again. The confrontation has not happened. It may never happen in the form you are imagining. But you are living through it anyway, at no cost, gathering information about a future that does not exist. The psychologist Keith Oatley calls fiction the mind’s flight simulator, a way to practise the crash without dying in it. You do not need a novel to run the simulator. You are running it right now, about a meeting at four. Every worry you have ever had is a story about the future, told in advance.
In the evening someone asks how your day was, and watch what you do. The day was thousands of undifferentiated minutes, most of them nothing. So you give them a story. You select a few moments and arrange them into something with a mood and a punchline, turning the formless thing you lived into a thing that can be told. And the part that should stop you: you do this for yourself too, constantly, about your whole life. The self you carry around is a story, the long autobiographical narrative you have been composing since childhood, casting yourself as its lead and smoothing it for sense. Jerome Bruner and Dan McAdams gave this a name, narrative identity. You are not a person who has a story. You are a story that thinks it is a person.
Somewhere today the machine misfired, and you did not notice. A coincidence arrived and you made it a sign. A stranger cut in front of you and within a second you had written his whole character, his selfishness and his contempt, from a single move in traffic. The same engine that lets you understand a novel makes you see faces in clouds and intentions in accidents. The instinct that makes us human also makes us credulous. The mind that cannot stop telling stories cannot always tell when it is making one up. It is why a conspiracy theory travels faster than a coincidence. A hidden hand with a plan is a better story than dumb chance, and the better story wins, whether or not it is true. We would rather be the heroes or victims of a plot than the bystanders of an accident, because only the plot gives us a part to play, and a part is easier to live with than pure chance.
At night you lie down and the simulator will not switch off. You re-run the day and argue with someone who is asleep in another house. Then consciousness lets go, and the sleeping brain takes the shift, and the stories go on without you. You wake mid-sentence. You always have.
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You did not just read an argument about why people tell stories. You read a story, about a day, that moved from a morning where you noticed nothing to a night where you could see the machinery: a character moving through time toward a change of state. The essay you are finishing is the thing it describes, because there is no honest way to answer this question from the outside. I could have told you that narrative is universal, found by Barthes in every age and nation. I could have laid out the theories, Gottschall on the social brain and Brian Boyd on story as cognitive play, and admitted that nobody fully knows why a habit this costly evolved, only that every society ever found has had its stories and none has turned up without them. All true, and all of it would have slid off you. So instead I caught you in the act.
Why do we tell stories? Because we cannot do otherwise. It is how the species thinks. You narrate everything, from the dream you wake out of to the self you carry to bed, and you do it so constantly that the water is invisible to the fish. You are a storytelling animal. The only question is whether you will ever catch yourself doing it.
Your task is the simplest in this whole course, and the strangest once you start. For one day, keep a tally of every narrative you meet or make: the dream, the headline, the ad, the gossip, the half-remembered afternoon, the version of the day you hand someone at dinner, the running commentary in the queue. By nightfall the list will frighten you a little. That is the point.
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Further reading for this section: Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, for the case in full and the most enjoyable way into it. Keith Oatley on fiction as the mind’s simulation of social life. Jerome Bruner’s “Life as Narrative” and Dan McAdams on narrative identity, for the self as a story you tell. Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, for the argument that the habit is an evolved adaptation and not an accident.