Natural Born Storytellers

You were born with the gift of story. Oh, I know, not everyone believes it. When I mention that I like to write speculative fiction, some folks admit to me that they’re just not creative. It’s not really true, though. The fact is, we are wired for story. Only some folks believe their own stories so much that they don’t realize how creative they are.

We all tell stories. To ourselves and others. It’s how we make sense of the world. Not everyone realizes they are doing it, though. Some people mistakenly believe they are just calling it as it is, oblivious to the fact that reality is a subjective phenomenon.

That guy who cut you off in traffic, what’s the story that you made up about him? Is he just an inconsiderate asshole or a grieving son rushing to his mother’s hospital bedside in her last remaining hours? The barista who got your coffee order wrong? An incompetent college dropout with no pride in her dead-end job, or a hard-working kid who just got reamed out by her overbearing manager for something inconsequential three minutes before you stepped through the door?

We’re telling ourselves stories all the time. The problem is, if we believe them, they become invisible to us, and we begin thinking that we’re just observing the world the way it is. Which is not possible. You can’t even see the nose in front of your face. This is not just an expression; it is true. Throughout the majority of your day, your clever brain edits out the nose obscuring your vision as irrelevant information and fills in the space where your nose resides with your brain’s best guess of what should be there.

There are a million ways your brain edits reality. Your senses are tuned to perceive only the details relevant to your survival, not to observe reality objectively. You can’t perceive radio waves, X-rays, or ultraviolet light, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Your senses tell you the world is made up of solid objects, distinguishing matter from energy when, in fact, there is no such thing as a solid object. The closer you peer into the material makeup of our world, the more you discover that particles are made up mostly of empty space. The seemingly solid stuff we refer to as matter turns out to just be slow-moving energy, just like the bulge at the bottom of ancient windowpanes reveals that glass is in fact slow-flowing water.

But back to the stories. From the day you could think in words, you have been constructing a story of self. An ever evolving narrative to justify your choices and your actions. Creating a character on whom to hang your identity. A construct that you believe is you when the truth is, identity is dictated by circumstance. Each shift in context requires new layers of story to provide a veneer of consistency to smooth over your incongruous actions. This is not a character flaw; it is the well-developed adaptive skill required by every advanced social animal.

Externally, modulating personality to match circumstances is necessary for survival. The stories we tell ourselves to explain away context-driven shifts in character create the internal buttressing necessary for the ego to survive.

And then we project those stories outward. We are meaning-making machines. Our social success depends on how accurately our stories about other people match their stories about themselves. We are forever making predictions about how others will respond to changing circumstances, which is very difficult to forecast when we can’t even accurately predict our own responses.

Know thyself is easier said than done. You may know who you want to be in a given situation, but wanting and manifesting are not the same thing. And then we need stories to bridge the gap between how we are and how we want to be lest our fragile ego crumble in the face of reality.

Every moment, creative genius that you are, you’re weaving stories, a fascinating extended narrative that tries to make sense of your lived experience. It may be your truth, but it is not the truth. If you are in denial of this, then you may erroneously believe that you lack creativity.

But storytelling is just the act of intentionally turning the meaning-making mechanisms toward a problem. Provide this machinery an incongruity and it will worry away at the rough edges like an oyster responding to an unwelcome grain of sand. A little time and attention, and you will have produced a pearl of a story. You do this unconsciously everyday already with every interaction. The only difference between the made-up story we call real life and the made-up story we call fiction is intentionality. One we weave on purpose for the sake of entertainment. One we create reflexively and mistake for truth.

Everyone is a creative storyteller with a gift for invention. We all use this skill to get by the best we can in this world. A few of us develop this meaning-making muscle for the purpose of entertaining ourselves and others. And the end of the day, we are all storytellers.

https://brainsoupfic.substack.com/p/uncle-jakes-follies