Why Stories Matter
THE STORIES SERIES
There is something faintly unreasonable about the human habit of telling stories. We have been doing it for so long that it has acquired the appearance of inevitability, and few of us stop to examine it. Viewed from a slight distance, the practice is rather odd. Faced with the bewildering complexity of existence, our instinct has never been to produce an inventory. We do not gather around a fire to exchange statistical tables, nor do we return from a journey eager to discuss the precise distribution of rainfall along the route. We begin with, "You'll never believe what happened." Somewhere along the way we discovered that experience becomes intelligible only after it has found a narrative, and ever since we have been rearranging the world into stories that help us understand where we have been, who we have become, and, occasionally, why we made the astonishingly poor decision to trust a restaurant advertising "the world's best coffee."
This begins long before anyone learns to read. A child who falls while chasing a ball rarely recounts the incident as an unfortunate interaction between gravity and momentum. By teatime the account has already acquired a villain, an unexpected twist, a heroic recovery, and perhaps a dog that behaved in a manner wholly inconsistent with the facts. Adults smile indulgently at these embellishments, forgetting that we continue the same practice with considerably greater sophistication. We tell ourselves stories about our successes, our failures, our marriages, our careers, and our disappointments until they settle into versions almost impossible to separate from memory itself. Beneath those revised narratives the original events go on existing, though one suspects they occasionally struggle to recognise themselves.
Memory has always been less an archivist than an editor. It removes, condenses, exaggerates, and invents with an enthusiasm that would make certain screenwriters envious. Ask three siblings to describe the same childhood holiday and one will remember endless laughter, another relentless rain, and the third a suspiciously heroic performance involving a cricket bat and an irritable goose that no one else recalls encountering. The strange thing is not that these versions differ. It is that each narrator remains convinced that theirs alone reflects reality. Stories do not merely preserve experience. They interpret it, polishing some moments, softening others, giving shape to events that, when they first occurred, possessed no obvious structure whatsoever.
That may be why our earliest memories resemble scenes from novels rather than records from a surveillance camera. We remember standing beneath a banyan tree whose size increases with every passing decade, a grandmother whose kitchen produced an endless procession of improbable delicacies, a school corridor that seemed to stretch towards infinity whenever an examination waited at the far end. None of these recollections is entirely accurate, yet each holds an emotional truth that resists correction. The dimensions may be unreliable. The feeling rarely is. The medium has changed repeatedly; the instinct has not. Stories moved from oral traditions to epics, from manuscripts to novels, from the stage to cinema, and now to streaming platforms and podcasts. Every technological shift has altered how stories travel without touching why we need them.
Facts, useful as they are, have a way of refusing to stay with us. I cannot remember the population of Rome in the second century, the average rainfall in Coonoor, or the number of bones in a giraffe's neck, despite having encountered each at some point with every intention of remembering it. Yet I remember Atticus Finch standing outside a prison at night, Santiago refusing to surrender to the sea, a lonely boy discovering a secret garden behind a locked gate. They remain vivid because stories attach themselves to our emotional lives in a way facts never manage. We rarely carry away the details of a lecture. We carry away the people.
That attachment begins early. Long before we understand metaphor or symbolism, we recognise courage, jealousy, kindness, and fear on sight. A child listening to a bedtime story has no trouble identifying the lonely giant, the boastful prince, the frightened traveller. No one pauses the tale to explain human psychology. The story does that work on its own. Years later, when we meet those same qualities in colleagues, neighbours, or ourselves, there is often the faint sense that we have met them before. Literature does not invent human nature. It introduces us to it.
This may explain why every civilisation has entrusted its deepest questions to stories rather than arguments. The Mahabharata could have been reduced to a slim volume on ethics. Shakespeare might have produced a respectable handbook on political ambition. Dostoevsky could have summarised guilt in far fewer pages. None of them chose efficiency over imagination. They understood that the human mind rarely changes because it has been instructed. It changes because, somewhere between the first page and the last, it has begun to inhabit another person's world.
If stories have survived so many centuries, it is because they have proved indifferent to the medium through which they travel. Long before writing, they lived on remembered voices, carried from one generation to the next around fires whose locations have long since vanished. They found their way onto cave walls, temple carvings, and illuminated manuscripts before settling for a while inside printed books. Later they learned to inhabit theatres, cinemas, radio broadcasts, and television screens with equal ease. Today they arrive through podcasts on morning walks, audiobooks on long journeys, and increasingly through conversations with artificial intelligence that help readers discover books, films, and ideas they might never otherwise have encountered. The methods of delivery keep changing. The impulse beneath them does not.
That continuity may explain why every generation has predicted, with touching confidence, that the latest technology would diminish storytelling. The novel was once regarded with suspicion. Cinema was dismissed by some as little more than photographed theatre. Television was expected to destroy reading. Streaming platforms were said to shorten attention spans beyond repair. Yet stories have shown a real talent for adapting without surrendering their essential nature. They behave rather like water, taking the shape of each new vessel while remaining recognisably themselves. Technology determines how stories travel. It has never determined why we need them.
Even artificial intelligence, for all the fascination surrounding it, seems likely to continue that tradition rather than interrupt it. Its greatest contribution may prove to be neither writing stories nor replacing those who tell them, but helping readers, viewers, and listeners discover narratives that might otherwise have stayed beyond their horizon. Every age develops new ways of carrying stories forward. The stories themselves go on performing the same ancient task they always have: helping one human being understand another a little better than before.
This willingness to inhabit another consciousness may be one of the most civilising habits we possess. Reading asks us to surrender certainty for a few hours and enter a life governed by unfamiliar hopes, loyalties, and fears. Sometimes that life belongs to an ageing fisherman, a retired butler, a young woman in an unfamiliar city, or a detective whose personal judgement deteriorates in direct proportion to his professional brilliance. Their circumstances may bear little resemblance to ours, yet by the closing pages we recognise fragments of ourselves with slightly embarrassing clarity. It becomes difficult to hold onto the comforting belief that our own experiences are uniquely complicated after an evening spent inside somebody else's.
The result is that stories enlarge us in ways that knowledge alone rarely can. They teach a form of patience that modern life seems determined to eliminate. A novel seldom rewards haste. One cannot skim grief, accelerate love, or rush a moment of moral uncertainty without diminishing the very qualities that make those experiences recognisable. Stories insist that we linger, observe, and occasionally change our minds. They ask us to entertain possibilities rather than conclusions, and in an age that frequently mistakes certainty for wisdom, that may be among their greatest gifts.
I have often wondered whether this explains why the books we love rarely remain the same books throughout our lives. Their words are fixed, their pages unchanged, yet they continue to evolve. A novel encountered at twenty speaks with a different voice at forty, and acquires another altogether at sixty. We return believing we are revisiting familiar territory, only to discover that it is we who have changed. The landscape was waiting all along. It is one of literature's smaller miracles that a story can sit motionless on a shelf while continuing to grow inside the reader.
There is a gentle lesson hidden in this. We often speak of finding the right book, as though books wandered about the world looking for suitable companions before finally settling on one of us. Experience suggests something rather different. Books have impeccable manners. They wait. They let us arrive in our own time, often years later than we intended, and greet us without the faintest hint of reproach. Few human relationships display such generosity.
The same may be said of cinema, theatre, and every other art that depends on narrative. A film lasts two hours, a stage production somewhat longer if the interval queue is particularly ambitious, and a novel perhaps several evenings beside a reading lamp. Their influence has never been measured by duration. There are scenes that continue to accompany us decades after the projector has gone dark. A line of dialogue surfaces unexpectedly while waiting for a train. An image returns during a solitary walk. A melody recalls an entire chapter of life before we have consciously placed the tune. Stories have an inconvenient habit of refusing to end when the final page has been turned. They keep working in private, rearranging opinions with real discretion, until one day we discover that we have become someone slightly different from the person who first encountered them. Cinema has a particular ability to unite several older art forms. Literature contributes narrative, theatre lends performance, music shapes emotion, photography composes the image, editing governs the passage of time. A great film rarely depends on any one of these alone. It succeeds because they disappear into a single act of storytelling.
It is tempting to imagine that stories belong exclusively to novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers. They do not. Every profession is sustained by them. Families possess stories repeated at every gathering with such ceremonial precision that the youngest members begin anticipating the punchline before they are old enough to understand it. Cities are built on stories that explain why one street carries an odd name or why an abandoned bungalow is still spoken of in lowered voices. Nations preserve stories that become history, mythology, and occasionally political argument, depending largely on who happens to be speaking. Even businesses, despite considerable effort to disguise the fact beneath presentations and spreadsheets, survive because someone keeps telling a convincing story about where they came from and where they hope to go.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the places we call home. Every town carries within it an invisible archive that rarely appears in guidebooks. The most interesting stories are seldom attached to monuments. They belong instead to an elderly gentleman who has unlocked the same shop every morning for forty years, to the woman who still remembers the names of families that left decades ago, to the schoolteacher who shaped three generations without ever imagining she had done anything particularly remarkable. Places survive in memory because of people. Once those people disappear, the geography remains but something essential has gone.
I have often felt this while walking through older parts of cities or villages where history survives in fragments rather than declarations. A weathered signboard, a fading cinema facade, the verandah of a colonial bungalow, the smell of old paper drifting from a second-hand bookshop, each looks entirely ordinary until someone tells the story behind it. Suddenly the building acquires depth. Time begins to gather around it. The place stops being merely architecture and becomes memory made visible. Stories have an extraordinary ability to rescue the overlooked from obscurity. They persuade us to look again at what we believed we had already seen.
As a writer, and increasingly as a filmmaker, I have gradually abandoned every tidy explanation I once found comforting about where stories originate. They rarely arrive with the confidence one might expect after causing so much disruption. More often they drift in disguised as passing observations too insignificant to deserve attention. A conversation overheard in a railway station. An elderly gentleman feeding stray dogs outside a tea shop with the solemn concentration of a priest performing a ritual. A woman staring through the window of a departing train with an expression suggesting she has remembered something far too late. Most disappear as fast as they arrived. A few remain. They return the following morning, accompany a walk, intrude on unrelated thoughts, and eventually insist on becoming something larger. A writer's task, I suspect, is less a matter of invention than of recognising which visitor intends to stay.
The process itself is rather less glamorous than readers are sometimes led to believe. People imagine writers waiting for inspiration while gazing thoughtfully through rain-covered windows. Windows certainly feature more often than they deserve, but the greater part of writing consists of discovering that yesterday's brilliant sentence has all the elegance of damp cardboard the following morning. There are days when every paragraph feels inevitable, and rather more days when every adjective begins negotiating aggressively for early retirement. One develops an affectionate respect for persistence. Inspiration, when it appears, generally prefers to find somebody already at work.
The real satisfaction of writing has never resided in constructing elaborate plots or devising clever endings. It lies in discovering that a vague intuition, impossible to explain only weeks earlier, has gradually acquired language. Every completed story began as something that resisted articulation. There was merely a feeling, a question, or an image that refused to disappear. The act of writing is an attempt to understand why it refused. Readers sometimes imagine that authors possess answers. More often we begin with exactly the same uncertainty they do. The difference is simply that we have agreed to spend several years exploring it.
There is also a comforting democracy to stories that I have always admired. They pay little attention to conventional measures of importance. Kings and labourers, celebrated artists and anonymous clerks, professors and gardeners all have lives capable of sustaining unforgettable narratives. Literature has repeatedly shown that greatness belongs neither to wealth nor influence but to the depth with which a human life is observed. The ordinary has always proved generous to those willing to look closely enough. Some of the most memorable characters in literature accomplish very little by conventional standards, yet continue to inhabit our imaginations because they reveal something enduring about what it means to be human.
This may be the greatest kindness stories offer us. They remind us that every passer-by has an interior life whose complexity rivals our own. The stranger seated opposite on a train has anxieties, loyalties, private disappointments, and ridiculous hopes of which we know nothing. The waiter who serves dinner, the neighbour watering her garden, the elderly couple walking slowly through a park each carries a narrative invisible to everyone except themselves. Fiction trains us to imagine those unseen lives. It encourages curiosity before judgement, and understanding before certainty. Those seem increasingly valuable habits.
We live, unfortunately, in an age that has developed considerable confidence in speed. News arrives instantly. Opinions form almost simultaneously. Conclusions seem to require remarkably little acquaintance with either evidence or reflection. Stories move the other way. They insist on duration. They ask us to accompany people through uncertainty, contradiction, and change. Characters disappoint us, recover our sympathy, lose it again, and occasionally redeem themselves when we had almost abandoned hope. Such experiences resist simplification because human beings resist simplification. Stories remind us, without needing to say so, that most lives cannot be reduced to headlines or slogans without losing precisely what makes them worth understanding.
That is why I continue to believe stories matter. They preserve voices that would otherwise disappear into nothing. They rescue places from forgetting. They let us encounter people separated from us by centuries, languages, and continents, and recognise in them the same longing to be understood. They encourage patience in an impatient age, humility in a confident one, and empathy in a world that often seems suspicious of it. Above all, they remind us that no life is ever entirely ordinary once somebody has cared enough to tell it well.
Every book I have written, every film I have directed, and every essay I have begun has started with the same conviction that somewhere inside a story lies a fragment of truth unwilling to reveal itself in any other form. Whether that truth concerns love, regret, ambition, forgiveness, or simply the odd ways people attempt to make sense of one another matters rather less than the journey it invites us to undertake. We enter stories believing we are about to observe someone else's life. More often than we realise, we leave carrying a slightly altered understanding of our own.
That, I think, is the real purpose of stories. They do not exist merely to entertain us, though the best of them invariably do. They exist because a single human life is too brief to experience everything for ourselves. Through stories we inherit centuries of accumulated joy, grief, triumph, failure, wisdom, and foolishness without leaving the comfort of an armchair. We borrow other lives, return them with gratitude, and discover that in doing so we have enlarged our own. It strikes me as one of civilisation's happier arrangements that such transformations continue to begin with something as deceptively simple as the words, "Once upon a time."
AK Srikanth is an Indian novelist, filmmaker and essayist whose work explores storytelling across literature, cinema and performance. He is the author of A Song for Eresha and writes from the Nilgiris in southern India.
If this resonated
An essay exploring why storytelling remains central to literature, cinema and the human experience, and how stories shape memory, empathy and identity.