Welcome to You Are a Story with Will Storr

On telling, being and believing stories

You are a story.

Because of the way your brain has evolved, you live in a narrative reality. It is a dramatic realm of heroes and villains, victories and defeats, loves and feuds, autobiographical pasts, meaningful missions and longed-for happy endings.

Humans are designed to experience the world this way. It’s our superpower. It’s what makes us unique. It has gifted us our incredible intelligence and our dominion of the planet. It has granted us varieties of joy and pain unknown to any other creature.

Over the nearly twenty years that I’ve been writing about the science of the storytelling brain, I’ve become convinced that seeing the self as a character in a story is the most useful model for understanding human life. It gives us profound insights into our own personal struggles, and the struggles of humanity itself. In my books, I’ve used the science of storytelling to illuminate subjects as wide-ranging as religion, cults, moral panics, conspiracy theories, mental health, suicidality, the rise of the Nazis, the fall of the Communists, the nature of identity, the power of social media and the success of global brands ranging from Apple to Ariel to Adidas.

You Are a Story continues this journey. It’s the place where I’m writing about the science of storytelling in all its manifestations, but with a general focus on two themes. Firstly, I’m analysing stories from a psychological perspective to help writers become better at their craft. Secondly, I’m diving further into using storytelling as a way of exploring psychological wellbeing. The essays at You Are a Story will grow into a user’s manual for the storytelling brain, that will enable readers to understand themselves a powerful new way, and help reduce mental pain.

You Are a Story is based on a bold claim: that you’re a made-up character living in a made-up story-world. Before we begin, then, I should explain the basics of what I mean.

In order to show how human life is a story, we will experience the lived-experience of an animal that is not.

Welcome to the world of the blood sucking tick.

The blood-sucking tick climbs carefully, with its six legs, to the top of a leaf or a branch, and there it waits for a yummy mammal to pass it by. The tick cannot hear, for it has no ears. Neither does it have eyes. It ‘sees’ with its skin, which is sensitive to light. It knows when it’s in the presence of its prey because it can smell the butyric acid that all mammals emit. This vomity scent is its cue to leap off its perch and onto its meal. The tick can tell whether it’s been successful in its greedy pounce by its sense of hot and cold. If it detects that it hasn’t landed on a warm-blooded animal, it finds a new plant to climb up, and there it begins its epic wait all over again. But if it has, it crawls to a suitable patch of skin, digs in and drinks. Its meal is not delicious – the tick has no sense of taste – but it is filling. It sucks up blood until it has swelled from about 1.5 millimetres in width to the size of a pea.

It might have occurred to you that this is a tough strategy for living. Climbing up a plant and just waiting there until a mammal just happens to pass by? How long might you be up there, hanging around for your dinner to obediently trundle along? How bored you must get! How hungry! But not if you’re a tick. In one lab, these tiny beasts were kept perfectly alive, without feeding, for eighteen years.

The reality of a blood-sucking tick is that of smelling, leaping, crawling, burrowing and drinking. It has no sense of the wider world, as we experience it. It has no sense of time. It exists in perfect silence, and can detect only light from dark, warmth from cold, touch, and a single smell – butyric acid. That is its entire universe of perception. It has no idea anything else exists. Why would it?

All living things exist in their own unique perceptual reality, known as their ‘umwelt’. An animal’s umwelt is limited by the narrow and particular quotient of information their senses can detect. Dogs live principally in a world of smell, bats in a world of sound and moles in a world of touch. The umwelt of the knife-fish is dominated by electricity; the umwelt of the catfish is that of flavour, which it tastes with its skin; the umwelt of the treehopper is musical, its songs picked up as vibrations that travel through the plants on which they live, and up their legs; the umwelt of the loggerhead sea-turtle contains an experience of underwater magnetic fields.

And the human umwelt?

It is story.

Our brains remix reality and turn it into gripping tale, with its owner cast in the role of heroic protagonist. This story-making is made possible by a large number of neural technologies that are unique to our species. We have brains that, during our extra-long childhood, expect to absorb the local web of stories we call our ‘culture’, that tells us how the world works and what kind of character we ought to be in it. We build an ‘identity’ from ideas we encounter in this culture, taking parts of other people with whom we identify – including their beliefs, tastes, behaviours, hopes, fears, decisions, language and personal projects – and using them to construct our very own character that we’ll spend our life playing in our story-world. We experience our lives (and the lives of others) as simplistic plots built from causes and effects, often structured as discreet dramatic episodes of crisis-struggle-resolution. We overlay memories of our past with autobiographical meaning, so our backstories tell a tale about who we are today and who we’ll be tomorrow. We vividly imagine the future – yearning for happy-endings and dreading tragedy. We have a voice in our head that narrates our existence, imposing narrative order on events that are often actually chaotic and unknowable. We tell stories about ourselves when me meet people in order to connect with them, and impress them. We tell stories about other people too, in the form of gossip, which is a universal human habit. Gossip is enabled by the special effect of morality, which overlays strategic human behaviour with the qualities of villainy and heroism. We have obsessive interest in the internal moral character of other people – and of ourselves. We’re highly sensitive to the fortunes of the character that we play in the story of our life. How loved and connected do we feel to others? How much status have we earned? Are we a hero, really? Or are we somehow failed or villainous? Agonised questions such as these can dominate our thoughts, especially in times of trouble.

No other animal has any of these abilities.

You are a story, and the problem is that stories are never wholly true. They’re always simplistic, solipsistic and biased and often delusional, vengeful and hateful. In evolutionary terms, story’s purpose is not to discover truth or make us happy, but to motivate us to cooperate and strive and fight. As well as being a source of inspiration and meaning, then, our species’ narrative capabilities can be the cause of profound and lasting problems. Unrealistic stories about our goals can lead us to humiliation and defeat; memories of shame and crisis can torment and diminish us; grandiose stories about ourselves can make us alienated and frustrated; insufficiently positive stories about ourselves can leave us riddled with anxiety and self-hatred; vindictive and partial stories about others can poison our relationships and lead to prejudice and violence; exaggerated stories about life’s obstacles can leave us paranoid, hopeless and depressed; stories from our culture about who we ought to be can make us feel like failures. In a multitude of ways, the astonishing apparatus of imagination that evolution has designed for us can become an instrument of torture.

In this newsletter, I will be exploring the blessings and the many, many curses of being homo narrans, the storytelling animal.

Free subscribers will receive one essay per month, paid subscribers have access to all the content, and the chat. Full subscribers get exclusive access to my quarterly online ’Science of Storytelling Live!’ masterclasses (two on fiction, two on non-fiction).

I hope you will join me.

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