Men and women who rise strong are willing and able to reckon with their emotions. First, they recognize that they’re feeling something — a button has been pushed, they’re hooked, something is triggered, their emotions are off-kilter. Second, they get curious about what’s happening and how what they’re feeling is connected to their thoughts and behaviors. Engaging in this process is how we walk into our story.
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong, p. 40
We’re wired for story.
In a culture of scarcity and perfectionism, there’s a surprisingly simple reason we want to own, integrate, and share our stories of struggle. We do this because we feel the most alive when we’re connecting with others and being brave with our stories — it’s in our biology. The idea of storytelling has become ubiquitous. It’s a platform for everything from creative movements to marketing strategies. But the idea that we’re “wired for story” is more than a catchy phrase. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story — a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end — causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA.
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong, p.6
When we tell our stories to others, we want them to sound effortless. We want to appear as if it all came easily to us — as if we simply picked the destination we wanted to reach or the goal we wanted to achieve, pursued it doggedly and unwaveringly, and eventually succeeded. But in real life it never happens like this. There are always false starts, detours, and course corrections, and more often than not the room we end up in is not the one we first envisioned. Maybe if we begin to tell our stories differently, if we start to talk about all the times our journey didn’t go as smoothly as expected, we can help others look past their preconceived notion that the road to the “perfect” room is without speed bumps and glitches.
— Sherre Hirsch, Thresholds, p. 154-155
Stories are about the dropped stitch. About what happens when the pattern breaks. Though there is a certain poetry in the rhythm of the everyday, it is most often a shift, a moment of not-always-so, that ends up being the story. Why is this moment different? What has changed? And why now? We would do well to ask ourselves these questions when we’re at work. This shift can be a massive one (here I am thinking of the dystopian novel in which the very rhythms of the universe are called into question: the sun no longer predictably rises in the east or sets in the west; a meteor is hurling toward earth; the oceans are rising), or it can be as subtle and internal as the Steven Millhauser story, “Getting Closer,” in which a nine-year-old boy on vacation with his family feels, for the first time, a searing, wordless awareness of time’s passage.
Why are we writing about this moment, and no other? And what can we do — stylistically, structurally, linguistically — to get inside it? How can we reveal the innards, the pulsing truth of this character who is — let’s face it — at some sort of juncture, because if he isn’t, why would the story be worth telling?
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, p. 136-137
Only now am I grasping the importance of looking backward. Of remembrance. My father finally wrote out his memories for a reason. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth. Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.
— Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, p. 73
Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, p. 36
People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them.
— William Deresiewicz, A Jane Austen Education, p. 163
A tale is not meant to tell anything. It tells what the listener chooses to hear.
— Conor, in Son of the Shadows, by Juliet Marillier, p. 280
Why do we read novels? What draws us to browse bookstores, to bring home a book, to open its cover and start in on a several-hundred-page trip? Humans read literature in order to live more, to live differently, to have a precious vicarious experience that is available in no other way. In the stories to come you may encounter a form of drastic dislocation, an opening of self like none other. Reading literature puts you there. No other travel plan comes even close.
— Arnold Weinstein, Morning, Noon, and Night, p. 9
But this is no fairy tale. Naturally, given that the story involves real people, it’s messy. Also, since it involves God, you get the sense that the story is not so much about how to simply clean up the mess, but how creative you can get with the mess you have. This is what God seems to be up to — creating good, mysterious things out of messes.
— Curt Thompson, M.D., Anatomy of the Soul, p. 141