Why Do We Tell Stories?

The article features Amy Chua, Liu Cixin, and Fang Fang, among other writers.–Kirk

Source: NYT (12/8/22)
The Big Question: Why Do We Tell Stories?
Some key figures in literature, the performing arts, science and more ponder the purpose and vitality of storytelling in our lives.
By the NYTimes

This article is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.

We have been telling stories since our beginnings. Some researchers posit that the origins of language date back more than 20 million years, while writing surfaced around 3200 B.C. Today, elaborate cave paintings, ancient parchment scrolls and centuries-old poems have evolved into literature and operas and Twitter threads, but our innate drive to recount narratives about who we are, where we come from and what we mean to each other remains an essential trait of being human.

We asked a group of luminaries from various fields to answer a fundamental question: Why do we tell stories?

Their responses below have been edited and condensed.

Amanda Gorman: ‘We Tell Stories Because We Are Human’

In elementary school, I was told there are only a few reasons to write: to explain, persuade or entertain an audience, or to express oneself. As a young girl passing through the educational system, those purposes suited me for a time; I could write the assigned essay and receive an A grade. But as I continued to grow and challenge myself as a poet and activist, I soon found that those purposes I had unquestioningly absorbed weren’t enough for me.

While I’ve been writing ever since I can remember, I was around 8 when my love for language started to kick in full throttle. In third grade, my teacher read chapters of Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine” to my class, and every day I’d sit, enchanted and enraptured by the sweeping words of this literary great. While it was prose, not poetry, the makings of poetry in this novel were clear and intoxicating to my elementary school mind: metaphor, simile and rhythm. I didn’t choose poetry, but rather it chose me. In it, I found a safe place where I could write — literally — outside the lines, break the rules and be heard.

As I grew older and continued to write in my own voice, I discovered that I wasn’t doing so just for entertainment, explanation or expression. I wrote to empathize — both with myself and with the world. I’ve learned I’m not the only one. For millenniums, humans have told stories to connect, relate and weave imaginative truths that enable us to see one another more clearly with compassion and courage. Finding empathy is a difficult challenge but also the most human of the reasons we tell stories. Often, we explain and express so that we can be seen or so that others can empathize with us. Often, effective persuading means truly stepping into another’s point of view. Often, we entertain to bring joy and light not only to our audience but to ourselves as creators.

We tell stories because we are human. But we are also made more human because we tell stories. When we do this, we tap into an ancient power that makes us, and the world, more of who we are: a single race looking for reasons, searching for purpose, seeking to find ourselves.

Amanda Gorman is a poet and the author of “The Hill We Climb” and “Call Us What We Carry.”

Amy Chua: ‘To Build Dynasties of Meaning’

When my mother was 1, her family boarded a junk and left China forever. They were bound for the Philippines, where, in their new home, my grandmother enthralled her with spellbinding tales of drunken deities and wandering poets, of wise fools and talking animals, of the Yellow Emperor, the Great Wall and other glories of the magnificent 5,000-year-old civilization that was the Middle Kingdom.

When I was growing up in West Lafayette, Ind., my mother told me the same stories. But she also told me about her harrowing childhood living through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. She described Japanese troops bayoneting babies and forcing one of her uncles to drink so much water he exploded. She recounted how her parents disguised her as a boy — I only realized much later that this was because they had heard so many horrific stories of what Japanese soldiers had done to young girls. And she recalled the exhilarating day when Gen. Douglas MacArthur liberated the Philippines and she and her friends ran after the American jeeps, cheering wildly as soldiers tossed out cans of Spam.

When I had my own two daughters, I told them all the stories my mother had told me. When they were 13 and 16, I wrote a book called “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” about how I was trying to raise them the same way my parents had raised me and why I asked so much of them, retelling stories of my daughters’ childhood from my perspective. The book was part love letter, part apology, part apologia. I never expected so many people to find my stories so hair-raising. But stories mean different things to different people. And they have a way of taking on a life of their own, generating more stories and counter-stories and meta-stories.

We tell stories for countless reasons: to delight and destroy, to arm and disarm, to comfort and crack up. These days, I love regaling my students with tales of rejection and humiliation from my younger days — mortifying total fails that still make my face burn. Stories can bridge chasms, connecting us in our common ridiculousness. Among outsiders, we tell stories to preserve, to transmit pride across generations, to build dynasties of meaning.

Amy Chua is a professor of law at Yale University and an author. Her most recent book is “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.”

Wendell Pierce: ‘The Gateway to Truth-Telling’

“A man can’t go out the way he came in,” the character Willy Loman declares in Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman.” “A man has got to add up to something.”

With each performance I give in that role in the play’s current Broadway revival, I’m reminded it epitomizes the innate human desire to make a lasting impact in our world before we depart. As an artist, telling stories has always been a privilege for me, whether by recording music, narrating a documentary or becoming a character onscreen. To tell the story of our journeys gives our lives purpose, meaning and longevity, providing insight into the human condition that can be shared for generations and that carries the power to change perspectives.

Storytelling is also the gateway to truth-telling, which helps inform our opinions, decision-making and self-views. Sharing our stories allows us to come together, declare what our values are and act on them. Without storytelling, we would not have the layers of history that impact our present and influence the future. It’s impossible to imagine a world in which our ancestors did not share their journeys of enslavement, persecution, horror, honor, hope and triumph.

Think about what the landscape of storytelling in jazz — the idea of freedom and form coexisting in art — would be without the likes of Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. There would be no Terence Blanchard, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Wynton Marsalis and all the musicians who’ve carried jazz into the present day. And when the coronavirus pandemic hit, storytelling became a revered place of comfort and creativity. We discovered new authors and auteurs, rediscovered film and TV favorites and attended virtual theatrical performances by companies worldwide.

I discovered my gateway to storytelling as a boy growing up in New Orleans inspired by the historic Free Southern Theater, and throughout my 40-year career I’ve developed a full appreciation of its power. Each time I step onstage or in front of a camera, I am building a relationship with the audience, hoping to leave them with their own story to tell once the experience has concluded.

Being onstage each day in “Death of a Salesman,” embodying the iconic role of Willy Loman, is not only a watershed moment in my life and career, but it also adds a necessary historic chapter that now leaves the door open for this story to be told by a multitude of diverse voices and artists. I hope that with each performance, we are burning down a house that has confined us, so that we, as artists, can build a bigger, more inclusive home — one that provides a nurturing space to celebrate the full richness of all our stories.

Wendell Pierce is an actor and recording artist. He currently stars in the Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman.”

Liu Cixin: ‘A Thought Laboratory’

Telling stories — using the imagination to create virtual worlds outside of reality — is an important and unique human ability. So far there is no evidence that any other species on Earth has this power.

The virtual worlds that make up the essence of human storytelling may sometimes be similar to the real world, but they can also share little with it. The story must have enough similarity with the actual world for people to find touchpoints within it but be different enough to allow for exploration.

This virtual world — the story — serves many important functions. First, it is an extension of real life. People create or appreciate experiences in stories that can’t exist in reality. Therefore, humans can have spiritual and emotional encounters in this space that are not possible in other contexts.

Stories also allow people to understand the world from a different perspective. The virtual world formed by stories is a thought laboratory in which nature can operate in a variety of extreme states, allowing the storyteller to explore various theories and hypotheses about nature and its connection to humans. Exploring the limits of the natural world in this virtual setting can reveal aspects of its fundamental essence yet untested in reality.

Stories do not only exist in a virtual space. They can create real-world connections. When people read or hear the same story, they enter a shared virtual universe. This collective experience can lead to the construction of a connected community in real life, built on encounters within this virtual space.

Liu Cixin is a science fiction writer and the author of the Hugo Award-winning novel “The Three-Body Problem,” which is being adapted into a Netflix series.

Michelle Thaller: ‘The Universe Is a Story That Exists From Start to Finish’

The human mind is all about connections. A single neuron, thought or fact makes no sense; it’s the links and underlying maps we create that allow us to parse reality. Thousands of years ago, perhaps around a campfire, early storytellers must have discovered the previously hidden power of the human mind. Today, we latch onto stories as if our brains are hungry for them. They allow us to organize knowledge and pass it on to others. Storytelling may very well be what made us fully conscious.

A story is the progression from one point to another that makes sense of the facts and the events it contains. Allow your favorite book to fall open to any page and glance at the first sentence you see. Immediately, you will have access to the entirety of the story. You will know which events have come before, what character is speaking and how it will all end. An entirety of existence can be contained in a single point.

Reality may be nothing but connections. There may be no events or places, no space or time as we understand them. The universe may be similar to a hologram (no, this does not mean we are in some kind of computer simulation), and our perception of space and time may be part of a larger whole that we are unaware of. I made a hologram in college: a glass plate smeared with light-sensitive gel. I developed an image of a small vase of flowers and admired the three-dimensional effect when I shone a laser through the glass, turning the plate to see the flowers at different angles. Then, the instructor told me to break my plate with a hammer. Looking through a small, brittle shard of the original glass, I could still see the entire image. Every single point of a hologram contains every other part.

This is where the deep nature of stories is revealed. What we think of as a universe extending into space and time is just how our limited brains perceive an underlying structure of pure connection.

I like to think that the universe is a story that exists from start to finish, all at once. The page has fallen open to this moment you are experiencing now, but all the other pages still exist. The whole story is contained in every point, even the tiny point of space and time in which you are reading this. We are all in this story together, for all of space and time. Let’s try to make it a good one.

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer and science communicator. She works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Fang Fang: ‘Our Most Kind and Enduring Companion’

As long as people breathe, they will speak, they will write, and they will tell stories.

Stories have existed even before humankind had the ability to narrate them. The interplay between people’s lives and their primitive emotions certainly led to the creation of all kinds of stories. Once humans began to interact and form social ties, these stories began to display their vividness and complexity, gradually revealing their function to entertain and educate.

No matter what stage humankind finds itself in, stories are always right beside us, becoming our most kind and enduring companions. From the earliest moments as babies when we begin to imitate sounds, we are already intently listening to stories. They come from our family, our neighbors, from the fields and the streets, from books. From these stories, we learn about principles like justice, rites, the nature of wisdom and what it means to have faith; we come to understand good and evil, civilization and culture, intelligence and ignorance.

Although the vehicle through which they are conveyed might change over time, the inner heart of these stories remains constant. During each stage of human existence, we see the recurrence of stories with similar themes. Birth, aging, sickness and death; the sadness of departure and the joy of reunion. These are universal experiences. But the details of how these themes are approached and narrated evolve during different eras and take on different forms depending on circumstances like background, race and gender.

Countless individual stories come together to form the collective story of all human knowledge and emotion. Some stories are short, others are long, and some are unclear and incomplete — but they are all a part of our evolution. As we move through life, we, too, become storytellers. As our lives ascend like a spiral, so, too, our stories are constantly elevated.

Fang Fang is a writer and a Lu Xun Literary Prize winner. She is the author of “Wuhan Diary: Dispatches From a Quarantined City.”

This essay was translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry.

Hikaru Nakamura: ‘The Story of Chess Is a Broader Human Story’

I tell stories because, as a Twitch streamer, I’m expected to be an entertainer. On the surface, people tune in to my stream to watch me play chess, but if there were no story to tell about the moves I make, I might as well be a computer program. I have to enhance — or create — the drama in the game to keep the attention of my fans and generate more interest.

In my streams, I tell stories about chess, chess tournaments, historical events and games. I also make myself a character in the story of chess. After all, in my experience, only a few hundred people can tolerate a dry analysis of strings of chess moves, but hundreds of thousands want to hear that your opponent kept kicking you under the table or that his breath was so hideous it distracted you. In this way, the story of chess is a broader human story. Even people who don’t know much about the game can connect with a player who has faced off against an unlikable rival, experienced a painful loss or pulled off a dramatic, come-from-behind victory.

For those of us who love chess, however, telling stories about the game serves another purpose. Recounting competitions and the experiences of chess players allows those in local clubs to imagine a world beyond their small circle of regular opponents. They can envision themselves as part of a huge global community made up of colorful, talented people who may speak different languages and come from diverse cultures but can still communicate via chess moves.

The stories that I tell about chess may have universal themes, but they come from a deeply personal place. When I talk about the people who taught me, who surprised me, who showed me special things about chess, I stay connected to the part of me that loves this game. These stories encourage me to look for new ideas and more beautiful themes in the chess moves, discovering new things about the game — and about myself.

Hikaru Nakamura is a chess grandmaster, one of the world’s top blitz chess players, a five-time U.S. chess champion and the most popular chess personality on Twitch and YouTube.

Naomi Watanabe: ‘Stories Are Life’s Inheritance’

There are as many stories as there are people. I want to know and learn from as many stories as possible. As a performer onstage and onscreen, I encounter different types of individuals and listen to their accounts. I want to hear about their adventures and understand how they live and what they are feeling.

Stories provide opportunities to see the world in different ways. Each of us brings a unique background to the table. It can be challenging to step out of our bubbles and embrace other perspectives. But life is short, so I want to pick up on everyone’s insight into what is happening in the world around me.

My story isn’t just made up of my singular life experiences; everyone’s tales blend into mine and become part of my story. These tales from others can help us find purpose and bring fullness to our lives — if we choose to learn from them. That’s why I want to treasure everyone’s narratives.

These narratives allow us to step outside ourselves and view our realities with renewed vigor. Think of life as a buffet, and you get to sample bits of what it has to offer. You may sometimes realize, “I wanted to eat this, but now I want to try this instead.” You leave that buffet with a full plate, strewn with dishes you may not otherwise have sampled. The same holds true in our everyday lives. But unfortunately, we often get so caught up focusing on the big picture that we forget the smaller, yet equally valuable, moments that shape our stories. That’s why I try to post on Instagram. I use social media to record and share what I encounter in my daily life.

Stories are life’s inheritance. They unfold every day, every minute and every second. Stories leave us with a wealth of collective experiences, and if we choose to open our hearts and minds to these indispensable heirlooms, they will deeply enrich our lives.

Naomi Watanabe is a comedian.

Christopher Wheeldon: ‘The Tormented Tempest of the Human Condition’

We tell stories because it’s easier to comprehend deep truths through myths, legends and universal ideas. Because music and movement are universal, even primordial, the deep part of us that understands the arc of a story is particularly illuminated by dance.

One expects all the drama in a story ballet to emerge through the union of steps and music. But a moment without motion can also be powerful. Take the third act of Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s classic production of the ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” After Tybalt’s murder at Romeo’s hands, and as Juliet faces a forced marriage to Paris, MacMillan chooses stillness to describe Juliet’s torment.

After so expertly expressing the tempestuous passions of the protagonists through a marriage of classical ballet steps driven by Sergei Prokofiev’s score, MacMillan chooses to show us the swirling machinations of Juliet’s mind by simply sitting Juliet at the end of her bed. She does not move, her toes resting together on pointe. Even her gaze is hauntingly fixed, allowing the tumult of the tumbling strings and discordant brass line to narrate Juliet’s thoughts as her emotional spiral comes into focus.

Every pirouette, every carried lift, has brought us to this moment where stillness reigns. It is a beautiful example of how movement — and the spaces in between — resonate with us on a deeply emotional level. Dance can convey fear, love or joy, or even go deeper into the tormented tempest of the human condition.

Christopher Wheeldon is a choreographer and director, most recently of “MJ: The Musical.”

Diana Gabaldon: ‘How We Make Ourselves Whole’

We tell stories because we need to see patterns. Everyone asks me, “How did you get from being a scientist to being a novelist?”

“Wrote a book,” I reply, shrugging. “They don’t make you get a license.”

Art and science aren’t different things, you know; they’re two faces of the same coin. And what makes a good writer — or any other sort of artist — is the same thing that makes a good scientist: the ability to perceive patterns within what looks like chaos.

A scientist observes the external world and works by circumscribing a small quantity of chaos (say, in an ecosystem, planetology, an organism or molecular structures) and divining its patterns. An artist does something similar, but draws from the internal world of their personal chaos.

Patterns are the logic of both the material and the spiritual worlds, and stories are how we make that logic evident to one another. Each pattern explains and connects, fills in a blank, and provides a steppingstone to something more.

Stories are how we make ourselves whole.

Diana Gabaldon is an author. Her most recent novel is “Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone,” the ninth installment in the Outlander series.