I have loved stories for as long as I have known what story is. That’s probably a false statement. Humans know story, it’s in our bones, hardwired into our brains. Stories have kept us alive. Stories sustain us when we have nothing else. They teach us everything we need to know. Stories, both real and imagined, are the way we view, understand, and operate within the world.
I have been an avid reader all my life. My mom had some of my baby books memorized because I requested them so often. My dad would sit with us at the kitchen table each night for bedtime snack time and read through Harry Potter for an hour. Story has always been part of my life in the form of books, but also in the form of play. Every childhood imaginary play pretend game we engage with is a form of story - whether enacting stories we’ve seen or coming up with outrageous rules this pretend world revolves around, like the floor being lava. How many times have we heard people say, “Oh so, I’m the bad guy here”, or “He’s my hero”, or “plot twist.” All of these expressions come from story, and yet we use them in our real lives to indicate real universal truth and meaning every single day.
Through every experience we have in play in childhood, or between the covers of a book for education or entertainment, the outcome is always the same; learning and development. Story exists as a way for us to understand, communicate, experience, and learn about the world around us and how we are to operate, survive, and thrive within it. Myths exist to teach us lessons about how to behave and the gravity of consequences, origin stories exist to help us explain that which we can never fully know firsthand and make sense out of the unknown. Fables guide our morals as a community, fiction explores emotions and situations we may have faced or may face in the future and have something to share about how to navigate those situations should we ever encounter them.
In order to evolve we need to learn. Story is the best teacher we have - from generational stories, to written histories, speculative fiction, and everything in between, story is the best way our brains understand lessons - both practical ones and social or emotional ones. Story allow us to explore consequences before we live them. If that’s not magic, then I don’t know what is.
And who wouldn’t want to wield such powerful and beautiful magic? I certainly did, and still do. When I was in my early teens my love of reading was at its peak. All I wanted was to write a story that I wanted to read, one that didn’t have a love triangle, one where the heroine’s story wasn’t tied to a romantic interest. Now, we’re talking epic fantasy and YA fantasy, not romance, which I am now very passionate about writing. At the time that’s all it took; a desire to read something specific I couldn’t seem to find. That launched me into writing seriously for the first time. I was always writing short stories or small little novellas in my spare time, but I called them stories, small pieces of writing a few pages long that were fun. This turning point, wanting to write something that I wanted to read made me think, for the first time, that a story I wanted to tell might be something someone else might want to read too, because story is meant to be shared; to tell a story is to want to connect with someone and open a window between you for greater understanding.
When we read or hear story we are learning about ourselves, others, our world, society, and the person who wrote the material, or the storyteller spinning the tale. It brings us into relationship with one another and into relationship with ourselves. We are never satisfied with being, we want to grow, we want to learn. Story is the vehicle that takes us on a journey without ever leaving our front door. Story gives us the tools to survive out there when we do leave our front door. I think that’s a beautiful thing; that even when we want to give ourselves break, we are always learning in story, writing our own as we live our lives, and leaving lessons for those that follow after.
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