The Power of Story
The Story Writer’s Path
And why you need to write yours
A story can change your life, whether you are reading it or writing it, but especially when you are writing it.
A story can save your life. And stories may even be capable of saving the world.
Why Stories Are Powerful
Stories shape our lives. When you write a story about something that happened to you, you give it a beginning, middle and end. You make sense of that event — and that gives your life meaning. It also gives you knowledge, and maybe even the ability to take the next step instead of floundering in the dark.
Maybe — just maybe — this is why so many people want to be writers. Probably, though, most people start out with a burning idea for a story, an idea that won’t let go of them whatever they do.
That’s part of the power of story — it grabs you and won’t let go.
And most of those writers just beginning have no idea that they are embarking on a path that will change them profoundly. But they are. Committing to the story writer’s path will educate you, confound you, amaze you, discourage you, impress you, and more. It will give you joy, and make you cry. It will elate you and discourage you. And then, when you are finished with the story, it will do all of those things to the people who are lucky enough to read it.
What follows is my favorite quote on writing, ever. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps, because it sums up how powerful story truly is:
“But take hope, for writing is magic. Even the simplest act of writing is almost supernatural, on the borderline with telepathy. Just think: We can make a few abstract marks on a piece of paper in a certain order and someone a world away and a thousand years from now can know our deepest thoughts. The boundaries of space and time and even the limitations of death can be transcended….As writers we travel to other worlds not as mere daydreamers, but as shamans with the magic power to bottle up those worlds and bring them back in the form of stories for other to share. Our stories have the power to heal, to make the world new again, to give people metaphors by which they can better understand their own lives.”
The quote is from Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, which also is one of my favorites on writing (I actually prefer the older, first edition, which is simpler than more recent versions).
Our charge as writers
Bear this quote in mind the next time you stop to ponder if story — if what you create every time you sit down at the computer — matters. It’s so important for us to tell our stories, to be the chroniclers of what we see.
Someone must shape events to give them meaning, and that task falls to us as writers.
After September 11th, I, like so many others despaired. And that despair encompassed my writing. What value could writing possibly have in the face of such evil? What use was it to create something so intangible as a story, when firemen and police officers risked their lives to save others? I thought and thought about this and finally remembered my charge as a writer: to chronicle what I see and feel and hope that I can touch, and possible help, someone who is thinking the same thing. Validation for this came from the fact that the essay I wrote out of this despair was consequently published in a national magazine.
The author and screenwriting guru Robert McKee has weighed in on the power of story as well:
“Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life? …Traditionally humankind has sought the answer to Aristotle’s question from the four wisdoms — philosophy, science, religion, art — taking insight from each to blot together a livable meaning. But today who reads Hegel or Kant without an exam to pass? Science, once the great explicator, garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our faith in the traditional ideology diminishes, we turn to the source we still believe in: the art of story.”
This is evident in all areas of our culture, from novels and memoirs to movies and games and content on the internet. We absorb story, we learn through story, we seek out story, we immerse ourselves in story, we crave it.
Saving the World
Who hasn’t had the experience of being deeply touched by a piece of writing? I’m certain you have, or you wouldn’t desire to be a writer yourself. Think of how that emotional moment changed you, if even for a minute. What a powerful, wonderful thing the written word is and how damned lucky we are to worship at its gates. Next time you are sitting at your computer and the words refuse to come, remember this and be grateful that you are a writer. And furthermore, remember that the very act of writing is not only saving a life (perhaps your very own!) but it is also actively saving the world.
But you can’t save yourself or the world through story if you don’t know how to write one. Wrestling story from the ethers onto a computer can be a confusing process fraught with peril (powerful stuff, remember). Some of us have the best of intentions to sit down and write, but somehow doing the laundry or mopping the kitchen floor takes precedence. And then even when we do make it to the computer, we aren’t exactly sure how to write the story we so desperately want to set down on the page.
In this new ongoing column for The Writing Cooperative, I will explore all aspects of story and how to write it — while always keeping in mind its ultimate power. I’ll explore fundamentals of story such as character, setting, point of view, plot, conflict and theme, and also talk about the writing process (that’s up next week) and how to get your butt in the chair regularly to write. (Because if you can’t learn to do that regularly, that story inside you will never get out.)
But for now, I ask you to remember as you write that you are engaging in one of the most important things a person can do on this planet at this time. You are writing a story.