Why Stories Matter

[browngirl]

Oh NUMB3RS fandom, I love you and miss you and will return to proper participation as soon as I may! But till then, a post I read, a quotation used in it, and a thought.

color_blue wrote a great post about some of the problems with Slumdog Millionaire, and in it quoted Terry Pratchett. I decided to keep this in my files for the next time someone says "It's just fiction."

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling... stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

And the very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

From what I've seen of humans, many of us, maybe most of us, organize our comprehension of reality along narrative lines; we see things in terms of stories. Give people a story that says, for instance, that society's problems are caused by X group dragging everyone else down, and we find that much more comprehensible than a bunch of economic equations. I was going to say more, but a small person crawled onto my foot, so I'll just wind this up to post it tomorrow.

Comments

[ilthit.livejournal.com]

This is why I love Pratchett. :D It's not the jokes.

[sophinisba]

Thanks for that link!

[solvent90.livejournal.com]

I have *just* watched Slumdog Millionaire, so thank you for linking me to that post. I disagree comprehensively with most of it, except for some big points I need to Think Some More about, but found it useful and thought-provoking. Plus joy, as always, in being reminded of Terry Pratchett.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Er... Seconded.

Fiction can be far more powerful than the truth, because storytelling is so universal, and its roots are so primal in all of us.

A thousand persuasive, logical, angry arguments against slavery by real abolitionists didn't change the minds of 1% of the people who wept over the fate of a fictional slave in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel (and who voted accordingly).

To this day the two most efficacious ways of teaching something are stories and games.