How To Be a Story

Rules for being an imaginary person

Welcome to You Are a Story, where I explore the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’ the storytelling animal. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to quarterly ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, and receive a signed, personally dedicated copy of my latest book.

A human being is a biological machine made of flesh, blood and bone. But we only really experience ourselves in this material form when we’re sick or in pain, say, or in moments of physical exertion or sensual pleasure. Most of the time, we understand ourselves as a story.

Because of the way our brains have evolved, we spend the majority of our lives experiencing ourselves, not as a biological machine, but as a set of ideas. This set of ideas, that we call our ‘identity’, is the character we play as we pursue our goals, that are the plots of our lives.

No other animal has this existence, or anything like it. We live in a realm of story, and that story is generated by millions of individual human brains that are connected, and in a constant mode of creation and negotiation, building concepts of past and future and what is good and bad, and what kinds of goals people should be pursuing. We spend our lives participating in this created world. We care deeply about how well, or how badly, the character we play is doing within it.

The facts of our evolution as homo narrans, the storytelling animal, have deep and often poorly understood ramifications for our well-being. What follows is an attempt at building some basic rules for survival, as a made-up character in a made-up story-world. It contains most of the essential concepts and arguments I’ll be exploring here at You Are a Story, and should be taken as a work-in-progress that will undoubtedly be altered, finessed and corrected as work on this project progresses.

Be an active character, seeking survival, connection and status

Heroes in stories act. They might initially refuse the call of adventure, and even profoundly fear it, but at some point they get up and attack their problems regardless. Getting-up is the essence of heroism. When we have the courage to get up, we act in wild defiance of the endless reasons we can conjure as to why it would be better to remain lying down. Getting up makes us the protagonists of our own lives. When we feel unable to get up, in this way, we call it ‘depression’. When someone is depressed, they feel their obstacles are insurmountable, and that they’re capable only of remaining in the dark safety of the back of the cave.

The goals of protagonists in archetypal stories are always the same. Heroes seek the survival of themselves and their people; they seek connection with others and they seek status, which is the condition of being valued by the wider human family. Survival, connection and status are the ultimate subjects of virtually all human stories. The stories we live by are no different. When we actively seek and regularly experience the hero’s three rewards, we experience a life of meaning, purpose and joy.

Practice watching, and not being, your story

We spend the majority of our lives in ‘act two’ of a three act story. Act two is the struggle phase, in which we wrestle with our internal flaws and external obstacles in order that we become more successful in our quests for the hero’s rewards. At times, we can benefit by strongly identifying with our own brain-generated story. When things are going well, and we’re in successful our pursuit of survival, connection and status, we can feel an intense sense of being alive. But when we struggle, it can be agony. At these times of identity stress, we should step back from the fierce urgency of our unfolding story. By loosening ourselves from the powerful illusions of the storytelling brain, we can soothe the mental pain it’s so expert at creating.

This is skill that can be practised and learned. It’s a matter of de-identifying with our story. De-identification can be achieved by various means, including: altering the way we talk to ourselves; distracting ourselves with other absorbing goals or shameless pleasure; mindfully separating our lived-experience from the intense sensations it generates, or by changing our temporal perspective, in order that we see our plight over a longer span of time – the year, the decade, the lifetime. Lifting our perspective helps get our day-to-day stresses and depressions into context. The ultimate high-perspective story is one that connects us, somehow, with the eternal. Paradoxically, de-identification can also be achieved when we remind ourselves of our smallness, helplessness and ultimate irrelevance.

Get comfortable with being a three dimensional character

The human brain is a hero maker. It’s designed to create a sense of self whose positive aspects are exaggerated. This means that a healthy human mind is somewhat delusional. Most ordinary people think they’re more attractive than they really are, over-value their own work and contributions, and believe they have a better future in store than others. Our most powerful self-enhancement is our moral bias. It’s extremely important to humans that we appear, to ourselves and others, as virtuous.

Authors of quality fiction seek to avoid creating a ‘two dimensional character’ – a character who is over-simplified, often by being straightforwardly good or bad. Two dimensionality is what humans seek in themselves. The story of self that our brain effortlessly generates is not a reflection of truth, but a tribal pitch. In the forager groups of our evolutionary past, villains could be humiliated, ostracised or killed. Our brains evolved in an environment in which explaining and defending our behaviour was essential – indeed, potentially a matter of life and death. Because humans are enthusiastic (if not always accurate) detectors of dishonesty in others, a strategy of bold-faced lying was risky. Our self-enhancing stories were more likely to be believed if we wholeheartedly believed them ourselves. And so we became programmed to eat our own bullshit, and eat it greedily.

Our mind always wants to tell a tale that says we’re worthy of the hero’s rewards, no matter how we’ve actually behaved. But our cunning self-stories, and our willingness to believe them, can create significant problems in our social and professional lives. When we fail to acknowledge the part we’ve played in our dramas, we turn ourselves into the enemies of others, and blind ourselves to an opportunity to see our flaws.

One of the many tragedies of the human condition is that we have no choice but to deceive others as to our true nature. The story-world is the creation of the primeval tribe, with its merciless logic and cruel punishments. To a greater extent than we’d care to admit, the self is a performance. If we’re extremely lucky, we’ll find a life partner or a trusted friend with whom we feel safe to expose most of who we are. But, even then, it’s inevitable that we’ll sometimes experience a sense of dissonance and alienation as we worry about private thoughts, beliefs and experiences from the past that we’re scared to share, and perhaps even struggle to admit to ourselves. This dissonance and alienation can be soothed by developing an empathetic and clear-eyed view of ourselves and our flaws, and working to compassionately accept who we are, in all our troubling dimensions.

Accept the impossible truth of your wrongness

Just as we uncritically accept our own self-stories, we’re naively convinced that all our stories about the outside world are correct. Everyone believes they have a uniquely perfect grasp of the truth. This sounds like a madly sweeping generalisation, but the fact is, there’s no person on earth with whom we agree on everything – everyone we know is wrong about something. Even if we logically accept that this can’t be right – that, of all the eight billion people on the planet, we are the most correct – we can struggle to find the places where we’re wrong.

This is especially true for the beliefs that help form our identity. Our identity-forming beliefs are those that afford us connection to our groups, and earn us status within them. These beliefs become sacred to us. They are precious possessions that we defend like fire-breathing dragons. They make us irrationally emotional, and we tend to think reflexively about them. It can feel impossible that we might be even slightly wrong about our identity-forming beliefs, but we almost certainly are, because we’re unable to think rationally about them (if this is hard to accept in yourself, think about what happens to others when they become emotional about their most passionate convictions).

It is useful to meditate on the seeming impossibility of our wrongness: it’s one of the few places in which we can detect the awesome illusory power of the storytelling brain. Its ability to utterly convince us that we are able to see the absolute truth, and that our truth should be obvious to everyone else, has fuelled thousands of years of hatred and horror. We belong to a species that hunts, tortures and kills those who commit the unpardonable sin of telling a different story about the world.

We must develop a humility that acknowledges that our perception of reality is partial and biased at least, and possibly even completely wrong. No matter how right we feel we are, no matter how much evidence we can martial to sure-up our identity-forming beliefs, we must try to create a gap between our beliefs and our behaviour.

Develop the skill of truly listening to the stories of others (especially your enemies)

Humans are born suffering from main character syndrome. We peer out from our skulls to see the entire world revolving around us, the central protagonist of reality itself. We’re surrounded by a cast of supporting characters who are either helpful or not in our ceaseless quest for the hero’s rewards. We spend much of our internal time generating stories about ourselves – imagining our future, fussing over our past, creating defensive justifications for our behaviour. Evolution has cursed us with a relentless self-focus that can become bitter and exhausting. We can become bored of ourselves, wearied by the sound of our own internal voice and irritated by the same-old subjects of our same-old dramas.

In their determination to escape from themselves, humans will go to many destructive extremes including self-harm, binge eating and ‘losing themselves’ in alcohol and drugs. But we can also get out of ourselves by getting into the minds of other people, by listening to their stories as actively and as generously as we can. Too often we want to interrupt their stories with accounts of our own. This instinct is natural, but unfortunate. Everyone wants their story to be heard and by listening to others with real attention, we give them a gift. Their experience can also be a source of learning to us, and give our own lives and dramas a bit of perspective, reducing the irritating potency of our main character syndrome.

Listening to our enemies with curiosity and openness can also help with accepting our wrongness. Their stories can teach us much that is valuable about the parts of reality we struggle to see. This can help reduce the hatred that virtually all humans harbour, but that our storytelling brains make invisible to us with seductive narratives of justification.

Treat other people as heroes as often as you can

We should remind ourselves often that, no matter how it might feel, we are merely supporting cast in the stories of other people. This means they’re looking to us to provide the social rewards of connection and status. Every human is on a lifelong quest to feel connected and respected, and it’s in our power to help them achieve this. We have effectively unlimited reserves of these infinitely valuable prizes to give out, and the more we do, the more we’re likely to receive in return. In the story-world, karma is real.

Show not tell who you are

Because the stories the brain tends to weave about ourselves are self-justifying, we should try to show who we are through our behaviour, instead of arguing for our worthiness like a lawyer. If we find ourselves too frequently in lawyer-mode, it’s a signal that we might be struggling in the story-world, and our character may require adjustment. Showing not telling our character is a reliable route to self-improvement. If we truly wish to become a better person, we should do so with action. This is because the brain observes our actions, then creates a post-hoc story about them. If we give it positive material, it can more easily and authentically generate a positive narrative about who we are.

The principle of showing rather than telling our character is critical in times of trouble. When we’re feeling weak, anxious, lonely or depressed, the mind can generate painfully debilitating tales of defeat. It weaves a self-story that has only incidents of uselessness and moral failure as its plot-points, and so we begin to believe that uselessness and moral failure define us. We can stand up to these self-bullying narratives with positive action. Even the smallest acts of kindness and competence can help us begin feeling better about ourselves.

Choose your cast of characters carefully

The storytelling brain likes to hide from us how easily it can be influenced. Story’s original function is aid cooperation between humans. When we meet a person we identify with, and start to get to know them, our minds merge at the edges. As we share stories and perspectives, without our really noticing it, our stories and perspectives begin to change, so that we become more similar. This process aids cooperation, helping us and our new partner see the world in the same way. Sometimes we become a little more similar to a person, sometimes a lot. This process can even happen with people we never meet in ‘real’ life. Men and women we know only from stage, screen or page can powerfully alter how we think, dress, speak and behave, if we strongly identify with them.

This process – of identification then absorption of story, creating influence – also happens with the groups we join. Whether they’re cults, religions, corporations, fandoms or football teams, all successful human groups use stories to infect the minds of their members, and change them, making them more similar, and therefore more able to cooperate. The more identified with a group we become, the more their story defines us. In order to maintain connection with the group, and earn status within it, we must allow its story of the world, and its model of the ideal heroic self, to influence our perception and behaviour. The more connection and status we desire from a group, the more we must allow it to control us. When humans become fully identified with their group, we call them ‘brainwashed’.

This is why we should be careful about who we choose to spend time with, and which groups we expose ourselves to. We’re rarely conscious of the profound ways we can be influenced by the stories that individuals and tribes emit. Our lives can be ruined, or our dreams made real, depending on which minds we choose to merge with.

Live your life as multiple characters in multiple stories

We don’t live one story, but many. The more identities we have, the more stable our psychological life becomes, and the more opportunities we have to earn the golden rewards of connection and status. We should try to pursue many and varied goals, but with a focus on one central ‘status game’ that serves as our core source of social rewards, and to which we can devote sufficient time to experience success. In each status game we play, we become a different person embodying a different story, and our lives becomes bigger, richer and more meaningful.

Don’t trust your feelings, interrogate them

We’ve been animals with feelings for millions of years longer than we’ve been storytellers. We still respond to what’s happening to us, and around us, most immediately with feelings. We then generate stories about those feelings. But the feelings come first, and have dominion. We believe – and often even perceive – what we feel to be true.

Most people hear a voice in their head that tells them a story about why they’re feeling what they’re feeling. But this narrating voice has no access to the systems in the brain that actually generate our emotional landscape. It trades in a kind of best-guess fiction. It’s not always obvious why we’re depressed or angry or jealous or insulted or feel hatred for one person and adoration for the next. Often, the explanation generated by the brain is incorrect. We’re routinely deceived by our own minds.

The self is a mystery we’ll never fully unravel. There are depths within ourselves that we’ll never approach the bottom of; powerful neural mechanisms our conscious awareness will never know. We’re far more automatic than we imagine, and far less in control. We’re pulled around by genes, desires, dreads and damage and, all the while, sold a story that says we’re the freely choosing puller of our own puppet strings. We can get closer to the unstoried truth of ourselves by doubting and exploring our feelings, and declining to uncritically accept every story our narrator throws up about them.

Become a compassionate, rational autobiographer

In Hollywood movies and airport fiction, heroes often undergo a complete transformation. The cowardly become courageous, the introvert becomes extrovert, the selfish selfless, the ugly beautiful. In reality, a 180 degree transformation of character is all but impossible. Much of who we are is the product of genes and childhood experiences, and is wired-in by early adulthood. Although, with strong effort, we can seem to radically change our nature for short periods, it’s exceedingly rare for such a radical transformation to be permanent.

This is why we should treat ourselves with compassion. We are profoundly limited, and have been broken by the life we’ve already lived. We cannot be anything we want to be or do anything we want to do. That we can is a myth, common especially western individualist culture. It’s a story that we absorb and internalise, so that it comes to deceive and bully us even in our own minds. We should never beat ourselves up for failing to become the perfect hero. We must recognise that the story-world can be a cruel place, and that it will never be satisfied with what we achieve, no matter how kind, competent or otherwise impressive we might eventually become. It’s programmed to hector us into becoming a more valuable contributor to the human tribe – and more and more and more. Although we might envy them, even extremely high status people are rarely truly happy: they’re whipped by the urge to become ever-more accomplished, popular or wealthy, and dread their inevitable decline.

We should consciously create a story of self that takes this into account. This story must acknowledge our very real and very natural limitations. When we fail, we must resist the urge to punish ourselves too much, and accept the paradoxical truth that our times of gruelling struggle are often the times when we’re at our most heroic, despite how weak or failed we might feel. We ought to practice being kind to ourselves, but always with an awareness that we mustn’t slide into the self-defeating paranoia of the perennial victim, or adopt the obnoxious attitude of those who insist that as long as they’re behaving ‘authentically,’ they’re above reproach.

Treat endings as beginnings

The storytelling brain responds to our inevitable disappointments and defeats as if we’re in act three of a three act tale, and the credits are about to roll. The final judgement of the audience has fallen upon us, and it is savage. Our story has turned out to be a tragedy. We feel crushed. But this, typically, is an illusion. While we’re undoubtedly in a place we’d rather not be, this is just another obstacle in a lifetime of obstacles, and we’re actually at the beginning of a new tale.

The brain understands our life in the form of simplistic plot – a pattern of causes and effects. This means that when we fail to achieve what we want, it naturally feels like defeat: we wanted X, we got Y, therefore we failed. It’s bad at understanding that such moments tend to have a chaotic effect. They end up generating new stories and fresh opportunities that, as we’re stuck in the hard misery of the immediate, we’re simply unable to imagine. As long we we keep active, and keep creating new plots for ourselves, our story will continue, and we’ll have another day, sometime, in which we’ll revel in the treasures that are available to ourselves, and to every living human who has the stupid courage to just get up.