Stories and Storytellers

Although, as you can probably guess from the many interviews and book posts I include on this blog, I read a great deal of fiction, not all of it historical, I also sometimes read nonfiction books. Right now, in fact, I am making my way through Kevin Ashton’s fascinating exploration of the role of storytelling in everyday life, which he argues is a uniquely human art form.

His book, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art, will come out with Harper at the beginning of March. The plan is for me to host Kevin Ashton here on the blog in a few weeks, and when I do, we will go through the details of his argument, but here I mostly want to share how reading this book has changed my appreciation of the fundamental role that stories play in shaping who we are and how we see the world.

Naturally, the post itself takes the form of a story, because while I’m not as certain as Ashton that humans are the only storytellers on the planet—do we really know what whales sing to each other as they navigate the oceans or even what one robin’s twitter communicates to another?—the argument that humans as a species rarely let an hour, never mind a day, pass without sharing a story (assuming they are awake) seems incontrovertible. We call those exchanges conversation, and conversation takes many forms—phone calls, letters, emails, texts, video clips, social media, and more. Think about it for a moment, and you’ll see that every conversation you have, in fact, is first and foremost an exchange of stories. Even classes, lectures, and interviews involve stories.

I have been, for most of my life, a reader and a writer. I started reading voraciously at the age of five (and loved hearing stories read to me long before then). I wrote academic essays and articles, reviewed other people’s works, provided an introduction for a book I translated, then gradually transitioned to writing fiction—mostly historical, since they say “write what you know,” and for me that’s history. I research my novels, in print and online. All of that has existed within my concepts of stories and storytelling for as long as I can remember.

Even so, reading Ashton’s first chapter, “A Million Years of Stories,” opened my eyes to the reality that every time I tell my family about my day or describe some absurd thing the cats did, I am telling a story.

In fact, I am telling you a story right now. It goes like this. Last Friday, I read chapter 1 of Ashton’s book. On the Saturday, I hosted the monthly meeting of my writers’ group—all storytellers, by definition—and as I started to share the progress I’d made on my various writing projects, including a couple of cover ideas bouncing around in my brain for future books, I suddenly realized, I’m doing exactly what Ashton was talking about. I’m telling a story. A story about the stories I tell, which is very meta, but a story nonetheless. And ever since I read that first chapter, I find myself periodically noticing the many stories I hear—and share—throughout the day.

In fact, as I’m writing this post, my husband is standing downstairs telling me about a phone call he just received from a family member who, at my father-in-law’s funeral ten days ago, captured people on audio exchanging, in very salty language, insults that one would not expect to hear at a memorial service (at least they aimed the insults at other family members, not the deceased).

And that, you have to admit, makes for a great story …