Stories and Transformations: Part 1

Let’s say I wake up one day and decide to become a painter. I throw my head back and my hands in the air and shout, “I want to be an artist!” What is the bare minimum that I need to achieve this goal?

There’s actually only one thing I really need: paint. It would be good to have some other tools as well, like a paintbrush, easel, canvas, and other things. But, as long as I have paint, I can do a Jackson Pollock impersonation and call myself a painter. Without paint, however, I cannot be a painter.

Let’s run through the same hypothetical, only now I wake up one day, throw my hands in the air and exclaim, “I want to be a storyteller!” What is the bare minimum I need to achieve this goal?

Well, thanks to the wonders of human anatomy, I am the owner of a pair of functioning vocal chords that can be used to produce sound waves that others recognise as words of the English language. Those words can be grouped into utterances allowing me to produce statements, exclamations, warnings, questions, threats, praise, congratulations, and, of course, stories. Therefore, I don’t need any extra physical objects to become a storyteller. My vocal chords will get the job done.

Still, there is something that I need. I need the ability to produce the kind of utterance that is recognised as a “story”. Fortunately, I almost certainly already have that because a knowledge of stories appears to be an innate, and therefore universal, human trait. We learn to recognise and produce stories as children at the same time that we learn our native tongue. If that’s true, then it should be possible to study the underlying structure of stories just as linguists can reverse engineer the grammar of languages.

Herein lies a startling fact. Linguists have now traversed the world writing grammars of the majority of languages, but our knowledge of what constitutes a story is still barely formulated. Perhaps the major reason why that is the case is because the study of stories has been split across numerous disciplines that are superficially independent of each other. Aristotle was the first to try and figure out the structure of stories, but he was studying Greek tragedy. Joseph Campbell is the most important modern thinker on the subject, but he was studying mythology. I’m prepared to be proven wrong, but as far as I can tell, nobody has ever set out to define the common properties of stories in general.

It’s for this reason that the dictionary definitions of the word tend to be misleading almost to the point of being wrong. The Cambridge University Dictionary defines a story as “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events.” Really? Here is a series of events that are connected. Ask yourself whether you think it is a “story”.

“The leaf fell from the oak tree. On the ground, a caterpillar crawled towards it. A nearby bird’s eye flickered with intent. Another bird called to it. The wind blew and a couple more leaves fell earthward.”

This “story” fulfils the definition in the Cambridge Dictionary, but I think we would all agree that it sucks. It turns out that just stringing events together does not constitute a story. The “connection” has to be meaningful. That raises the big question: what makes a story meaningful?

Trying to answer that leads into some of the most fundamental questions of human existence. Perhaps that is the real reason why we still don’t have much of an understanding of what a story really is.

Well, in this series of posts, we will attempt to find out. It’s going to be an exploratory exercise since I haven’t had time to map it out in any detail. That’s fitting, though, because every good story features a hero who thinks he knows where he is going but ends up somewhere unexpected. Maybe we’ll arrive at a definition of what a story is. Maybe we’ll solve the secret to the meaning of life. Maybe we’ll fail completely and end up wandering aimlessly in the semantic desert, thirsting for the tiniest drop of meaning. Time will tell. In any case, put on your metaphorical walking shoes and let’s go on a (hero’s) journey in search of the essence of stories.