Stories have always been very important to me. They are the way we store and transmit knowledge, and more importantly wisdom, understanding and values from one group to another and from one generation to the next. They feed our souls, bring meaning to the arbitrary universe and invoke emotions that connect us one to the other.
My relationship with the written word hasn’t always been an easy one. My mum read to me when I was little – I can remember sitting next to her looking at the pictures in “Robin” or some other pre-school comic. I can still remember some of the stories (like the story of a little lamb being taken in having lost its mother and fed on milk from a bottle shaped, somewhat oddly, like a banana!). Despite having all the right sort of pre-school experiences, when I actually got to school I found it very difficult to learn to read. My difficulties were such that there was some talk of sending me to a “special” school, which meant then as now, to a school for people with learning difficulties.
As it happened, I didn’t go to a special school (or an approved one, before you ask), and I did eventually learn to read, mainly by reading comics. I still didn’t read books, though. When I was about nine or 10 I borrowed a book from the school library which dutifully sat in the sideboard cupboard for a few weeks. Then for a reason which I can no longer remember, I took it out of the cupboard and read it. I was suddenly captivated! There were others in the same series; I read them. I was off into a world that was exciting and new (for the time: one of the characters in the first book I read, which was science fiction for kids, had a ham radio, which he smuggled onto an orbiting space station; it was as big as a suitcase and he had to have a licence from the General Post Office to operate it! – obviously, mobile phones were never invented in this alternative version of the future). There were characters I liked and identified with, who became my earliest role models, teaching all sorts of values: keep a stiff upper-lip, be courageous, play your part in the team, there is a time when disobedience to authority is right, boys should be adventurous, be on the side of justice and honour, protect the weak, be manly in your dealings with the world, dishonour is worst thing that can happen to a chap, good will always triumph over evil. I learnt those values and learnt them again and again as I progressed through Biggles, William Brown and Jennings & Derbyshire.
Then came teenage years: all of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, C. P. Snow (not in the same class, I know, but I loved the “Strangers and Brothers” saga – the story of the life and times of a clever, working class, provincial boy making his way in the world – you can see why it appealed); then later D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce (I’ve never managed “Ulysses”) and Thomas Hardy. And of course the inevitable science fiction, and now fantasy – Michael Moorcock and Tolkien (I am actually a child of the sixties remember). And always what drew me back were the stories and the things I learnt about a world that I hoped, wished I could live in, so different from the day to day realities of school and home.
What is one of these “story” things? The nearest I’ve been able to come to a definition is that it is a set of characters in a set of circumstances where something happens that puts their qualities to the test and from which we, the audience, can gain an insight and have our emotions pleasurably tickled along the way; characters, scenario, trigger, test of virtue, insight, emotion.
Hemingway, famously laconic, wrote the six word story that is the title of this blog for a bet. It is a masterpiece of story telling. Does his story fit the model? Try this: characters (parents and an actual or putative baby); scenario (the parents are poor and have gathered things carefully together for the baby, which has been lost); trigger (loss of baby, deteriorating health and need for money); test of virtue (steadfastness to memory of baby versus need for even small amounts of money); insight (unimaginable acts, such as the sale of the shoes are possible if the need is great enough); emotion (sympathy for the plight of the parents; sadness at the loss of the baby; gratitude that our own position is not so bad).
Of course you can fit other details to the same six words, which is one of the reasons why this particular six-word story is a masterpiece. I told Hemingway’s story in a workshop I was facilitating a few days ago, and got a big “Aahh!” from very parent in the room. And that’s the other reason it’s a masterpiece – it grabs you by the emotions and gives them a tug!
Of course, stories don’t just come in books – they are everywhere: plays, poems, films, songs. television programmes, opera, folk-tales, nursery stories and rhymes. And the good ones inform and educate as well as entertain. When a politician or a businessman or a salesman wants to persuade, explain or motivate, he doesn’t expound all the facts and statistics that go to make the actual case, he tells you an anecdote, draws an analogy, produces a metaphor or a hyperbole – he tells you a story and engages your emotions. And there’s no point in trying to argue against the power of the story with reason and booksful of evidence. In the end you can only fight a good story with a better one; facts alone are just not enough.
I have always argued against using stories in place of actual thought about complex issues – they are too powerful to be trusted. So, I’ve spent most of my life hooked on a story, and at the same time I have always tried to rely on facts and reasoning. And I know that it’s the story-tellers who always win the day! Knowing all this it sounds to me that I have been very wilful and misguided all along! Time to throw in the towel and join the winning team. Next time I want to educate, inform or persuade, I won’t tell them why, how and when – I’ll tell them a story!
