Why Stories Matter

THE STORIES SERIES

An exploration of why stories have always been central to the human experience, and how they shape our memories, deepen our empathy and help us understand ourselves through the lives of others.

There is something faintly unreasonable about the human habit of telling stories. We have been doing it for so long that it has acquired such a reassuring appearance of inevitability that few of us stop to examine it. Viewed from a slight distance, however, the practice is rather peculiar. 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. Instead, 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 then we have been quietly 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 are inclined to 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 that become almost impossible to separate from memory itself. Somewhere beneath those carefully revised narratives, the original events continue to exist, although one suspects they occasionally struggle to recognise themselves.

Memory, after all, has always been less of an archivist than an editor. It removes, condenses, exaggerates and occasionally invents with an enthusiasm that would make certain screenwriters rather envious. Ask three siblings to describe the same childhood holiday and one is likely to 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 remarkable thing is not that these versions differ. The remarkable thing is that each narrator remains quietly convinced that theirs alone reflects reality. Stories do not merely preserve experience. They interpret it, polishing some moments, softening others and giving shape to events that, when they first occurred, possessed no obvious structure whatsoever.

Perhaps that explains why our earliest memories often resemble scenes from novels rather than records from a surveillance camera. We remember standing beneath an enormous banyan tree whose size increases with every passing decade, a grandmother whose kitchen appeared capable of producing an endless procession of improbable delicacies, a school corridor that seemed to stretch towards infinity whenever an examination awaited at the far end. None of these recollections is entirely accurate, yet each contains an emotional truth that remains stubbornly resistant to correction. The dimensions may be unreliable. The feeling rarely is.

Facts, useful as they undoubtedly are, possess a curious inability to remain with us. I cannot remember the population of Rome in the second century, the average annual rainfall in Coonoor, or the number of bones in a giraffe's neck, despite having encountered each of these at one point or another with every intention of remembering them. Yet I remember Atticus Finch standing outside a prison at night, Santiago refusing to surrender to the sea, and a lonely boy discovering a secret garden behind a locked gate. They remain vividly present because stories possess an extraordinary capacity to attach themselves to our emotional lives. We rarely carry away the details of a lecture. We carry away the people.

That attachment begins astonishingly early. Long before we understand metaphor or symbolism, we instinctively recognise courage, jealousy, kindness and fear. A child listening to a bedtime story has no difficulty identifying the lonely giant, the boastful prince or the frightened traveller. Nobody pauses the tale to explain human psychology. The story performs that task almost invisibly. Years later, when we encounter those same qualities in colleagues, neighbours or even ourselves, there is often the faintest sensation that we have met them before. Literature does not invent human nature. It introduces us to it.

Perhaps this explains 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 considerably fewer pages. Thankfully, 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 quietly begun to inhabit another person's world.

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 appears to deteriorate 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 surprisingly difficult to maintain the comforting belief that our own experiences are uniquely complicated after spending an evening inside somebody else's.

The curious consequence of this is that stories enlarge us in ways that knowledge alone rarely can. They encourage a form of patience that modern life seems increasingly 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 somehow 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 patiently all along. It is one of literature's quieter miracles that a story can remain motionless upon a shelf while continuing to grow inside the reader.

There is, I think, a gentle lesson hidden within this. We often speak of finding the right book, as though books wandered about the world looking for suitable companions before finally settling upon one of us. Experience suggests something rather different. Books possess impeccable manners. They wait. They allow us to arrive in our own time, often years later than we had 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 upon 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, however, has never been measured by duration. There are scenes that continue to accompany us decades after the projector has fallen silent. A line of dialogue emerges 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 recognised the tune itself. Stories possess an inconvenient habit of refusing to conclude when the final page has been turned. They continue their work in private, rearranging opinions with remarkable discretion until, one day, we discover that we have become someone slightly different from the person who first encountered them.

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 that are 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 upon stories that explain why one street carries a peculiar name or why an abandoned bungalow is still referred to in lowered voices. Nations preserve stories that become history, mythology and occasionally political argument, depending largely upon who happens to be speaking. Even businesses, despite considerable effort to disguise the fact beneath presentations and spreadsheets, survive because someone continues to tell a convincing story about where they came from and where they hope to go.

Perhaps 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 quietly influenced three generations without ever imagining that she had done anything particularly remarkable. Places survive in memory because of people. Once those people disappear, the geography remains but something essential has quietly departed.

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 appears entirely ordinary until someone tells the story behind it. Suddenly the building acquires depth. Time begins to accumulate around it. The place ceases to be merely architecture and becomes memory made visible. Stories possess 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, 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 quietly, disguised as passing observations that appear 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 that she has remembered something far too late. Most disappear as quietly as they arrived. A few remain. They return the following morning, accompany a walk, intrude upon unrelated thoughts and eventually insist upon becoming something larger. A writer's task, I suspect, is less a matter of invention than of recognising which quiet visitor intends to stay.

The process itself is rather less glamorous than readers are sometimes led to believe. People occasionally 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 possesses all the elegance of damp cardboard when encountered the following morning. There are days when every paragraph appears inevitable, and rather more days when every adjective begins negotiating aggressively for early retirement. One develops an affectionate respect for persistence. Inspiration, when it does appear, generally prefers to find somebody already at work.

The peculiar 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 existed 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 occasionally 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 remarkably little attention to conventional measures of importance. Kings and labourers, celebrated artists and anonymous clerks, professors and gardeners all possess lives capable of sustaining unforgettable narratives. Literature has repeatedly demonstrated that greatness belongs neither to wealth nor influence but to the depth with which a human life is observed. The ordinary has always proved astonishingly 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 possesses 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 absolutely 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 gently 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 appear to require remarkably little acquaintance with either evidence or reflection. Stories move in the opposite direction. They insist upon 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 quietly remind us that most lives cannot be reduced to headlines or slogans without losing precisely the qualities that make them worth understanding.

Perhaps that is why I continue to believe that stories matter. They preserve voices that would otherwise disappear into silence. They rescue places from forgetfulness. They allow us to encounter people separated from us by centuries, languages and continents, yet 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 quiet 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 peculiar ways in which 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.

Perhaps that is the real purpose of stories. They do not exist merely to entertain us, although 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 quietly enlarged our own. It strikes me as one of civilisation's happier arrangements that such profound transformations continue to begin with something as deceptively simple as the words, "Once upon a time."