Is Storification Always Necessary?
“We are all storytellers.” It was some time in the 1980s I began hearing this at workshops and conferences and in books for writers. I bought it entirely. It gave me hope that I too could do what I badly wanted to do—write books for children.
In a way, I’d been working at storytelling my whole life. I fabricated whoppers when I was a child, often just for fun. I wrote on walls. I scribbled made-up narratives almost as soon as I had the basic skills of manipulating pencil and paper.
When I finally dared to think of myself as a writer, it was vastly reassuring to be told that I came by the yearning naturally. Hadn’t stories been told from the beginning of time? In rock art and body art? About constellations and shorelines and mountains? Around fire circles in dimly imagined pasts? It didn't seem so audacious to be reaching for a skillset that I’d apparently acquired by birthright.
Over the years I grew skeptical of this generalization—what did it mean that we are all storytellers? What did story mean, anyway? And if we were all going to be telling it, what was the point? Tellers require listeners and questioners, and there wasn't much conversation about developing those skills. As everything from commercials to politics became framed as a story, I began to question the assumption that story was inherently sacred and redemptive and was going to save us all. There had to be more to truth than a well-told tale.
Turns out that critic and comparative lit professor Peter Brooks had his own journey of disenchantment with the universal adoption of story as a guiding metaphor. His 1984 book, Reading for the Plot: Design and Invention in Narrative, elevated plot, argues that the design of story speaks to something vital and human in each of us—that desire is a “thematic instrumentality” and that the desire to narrate leads to a natural transaction with the reader.
Fast forward to 2022 and Brooks is writing Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, in which Brooks suggests we are swamped by story, drowning in it, and worse, we’re guilty of “storifying” reality.
Story is indeed powerful. In her New Yorker piece, The Tyranny of the Tale, Parul Sehgal writes:
How inconspicuously narrative winds around us, soft as fog; how efficiently it enables us to forget to look up and ask: What is it that story does not allow us to see?
Amit Chaudhuri lays out some pretty good arguments against the universal elevation of storytelling over other elements of literature. What writer doesn’t carry opening lines in the mind that seem to hold some truth about heart and soul and existence? That have nothing to with the trajectory of a story but everything to do with the life of the person who treasures some particular words and breath and pauses? Who is to say these things are just components of story? Something big changes when elements other than story are given a central place.
Even in the miniature, 12-24-32-page world of books for the very youngest children, story reigns supreme. But little kids also love nonsense rhymes and repetitions, word patterns and silliness purely for its own sake.
Sometimes awful things happen when the truth, in all its complexity, takes a back seat to story. There are plenty of publicly traded narratives out there that don’t lack for story. What they suffer from is a paucity of truth. This, in the long run, isn’t going to serve anybody’s children too well.
