What is a story?

First, a story is a mental space in which things happen.

Is this true? “Things happen” means change. Change of state, change of attitude, change of emotions or
of assumptions (we learn something) or intentions, a change in the probability of an outcome, even
physical changes in our selves or our surroundings. All changes affect the quality and the tempo of our
daily lives.

It's a truism that we resist changes in our real lives. Yet we more than tolerate, we seem to hunger for,
changes in our stories. What is it we need? What do we hunger for in stories?

I have to test the assumption that we do hunger for stories. In what ways do we need them, and how
often? I think we take our stories wherever we can find them – from anyone around us able and willing
to communicate, to tell something about their lives or their days. In the mind of the listener, perhaps
whether actively listening or not, the words of another person slot yet another bit of data about life into
our reality templates and mental molds. We are, I think, continually building models of reality, of our
sense of self and its relationship with all the things and events and people around us, continually and
gradually building toward a kind of role and self image, sharply known in the minds of a few, vaguely
suspected by the rest, many of whom experience themselves as no more than flickering shadows on a
dimly lit backdrop.

Some of us construct our internal stories more actively than others, with values and goals clearly in
place to act as guideposts, grounding our perceptions as well as our actions. For others, the markers for
ourselves and our relationships, our story, are little more than smoky ephemera with little power to
demark our internal landscape.

Here are two principles that apply less to the question “what is a story?” than to questions of
characterization within a story, but as they seem useful, I'll list them here.

First, two rules for monologues. The context for these is theatrical, but may apply to written work as
well. One, the character must not indulge in navel-gazing that excludes the audience. The monologue
must provide a political point of view the audience can hold on to or disagree with. Second, the
character must round out the monologue with self-critical humor in order not to alienate the audience
immediately.

Next, a broad model for dramatic narrative drawn from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and
Salt: The broad pattern of a character's point of view and personality can be considered either dharma
(read glass half full) or nihilistic (glass half empty). Specific dramatic events in that character's life can
be characterized as either comedy (if in a dharma context) or tragedy (if in a nihilistic context). Think
of the Chinese yin-yang symbol: the white field is dharma, with the black spot in the middle being
comedy, while the black field is nihilism with the white spot being tragedy.

It seems altogether possible, and an interesting dramatic challenge, to think of a character's narrative as
being dharma with tragic events or nihilistic with comedic events (black comedy?)

In the last few years, I've written some fiction with narratives; these are certainly stories in my mind.
What are the elements in them that seem to add up to “stories”? There seem many: vignettes, individual
moments or events disconnected from other events; short collections of events that, together, seem to
define something, a character or a setting (an aggregate of characters). Longer chains of events, related
or not, which tell of one or more character's internal changes and demonstrate an arc of changes leading
to insights and epiphanies.

But the thought that keeps returning to me, and which I've been reluctant to express because I can't yet
demonstrate the truth of it, is that we need stories because we, individually and collectively, require
constant reminders and reassurance that we exist at all.

I can't verify it yet, objectively. But my gut tells me that all of us live with a low-level, almost entirely
unconscious, hunger for validation as humans. That because we are creatures who think and reflect, we
are plagued by the need to understand who we are, and more fundamentally, that we are, that we exist
at all. In my model of how this works, this need accounts for our collective creation myths (where did
we come from, how did we get here) and deification of forces we imagine or experience but cannot
explain (sun god, earth spirits, and later, monotheism). These stories, as well as giving us some context
for our existence, real or not, also satisfy the need for meaning in our lives. If, as for most of us, we
can't create or find a satisfying sense of meaning for it all, we can at least assume there is some higher
organizing force that gives our lives meaning. Religions are stories, in other words. Gods are characters
dominating those stories.

Stories are manna to us, if this is the case. Stories validate us, over and over. All stories, but most of all,
our own stories, good, bad, ugly, beautiful, indifferent. Stories about ourselves and stories shaped in
ways that we can identify with in some way. Stories that say, “Yes, I'm alive. I'm human. I hurt, I have
joys, I have boredom and love and hate and I wonder all the time why I feel, why I act or don't act, who
I am.” Thus we instinctively create those stories for ourselves. Our parents and others around us help us
do that, especially when we're just starting to think. Someone we love, or whose love we disparately
need, sees us in a certain way and tells us who they think we are: you're a girl or a boy; you're part of a
nation of peoples different (or the same as) peoples of other nations; you're smart or you're dumb;
you're beautiful; you're unwanted and in the way; you can do anything; you can do nothing right.
You're meant to become something: a doctor, a lawyer, a thinker, a ditch digger or truck driver.

And at some point you take over the internal story creation process. As we now know, how you tell that
story to yourself dramatically affects who you become and what choices you make in your life.