Why stories? 

The short answer: Because it’s the only way.

“Humans are essentially storytellers,” wrote Walter R. Fisher, a respected communications scholar who taught for years at USC’s famous Annenberg School. These kinds of airy descriptions of humanity are frequently found in the marketing copy of so-called “storytelling” agencies. The marketers rarely cite any real basis for their claims about the nature of stories and some academics deride them as nonsense. But many scientific disciplines now support the notion that modern humankind’s distinguishing capability is narrative. Fisher helped lead the way to that conclusion, creating the “narrative paradigm” of communication, elaborated in his influential 1987 book, Human Communication as Narration. Quite simply, Fisher lays out the compelling, virtually undeniable argument that all human communication takes the form of narrative.

In the decades since Fisher wrote his book, the role of narrative in memory and decision-making has been validated and explained by psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and narrative theory. The sciences of the mind tell us that people are conscious of only a small portion of this constant evaluation of internal stories; the vast majority of decision-making is unconscious. (Take a look at The Science of Winning with Stories.) But, conscious or not, it is now widely believed that the vast majority of our knowledge and memory exist as narrative.

Fisher’s book documents how people in all times and cultures have made their decisions, taken action, and lived their lives based on an inherent human ability to judge the “coherence” of the stories they are told — the internal consistency of a story and how well one story hangs together with others that we believe. Fisher shows that people’s beliefs and behavior are determined by “the constant habit of testing...whether or not the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives.” In other words, people’s beliefs and behaviors are based in narrative and can only be influenced or changed by encounters with other narratives — “narrative persuasion.”

I came across Fisher’s work around 2016 or so. It resonated because it confirmed all the recent audience research I’d been involved with and everything I’d experienced while telling stories in journalism, then advertising, and, for the past decade, in politics and social activism. If you want to influence or persuade people, you have to tell them a coherent, emotionally appealing story that engages them and intersects in some way with the internal stories — conscious and unconscious — that construct their reality.

The literature of narrative stretches across many disciplines — academic, scientific, artistic. Some of these threads are brought together in Harnessing Narrative Persuasion for Good, a long essay I wrote in 2023. Most recently, focusing on journalism’s self-imposed ignorance of storytelling, I ran across The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative, a 1994 book by scholar Phyllis Frus, where she argued that there is no formal, structural difference between fictional and factual narratives. Frus wrote:

…"true-life" narratives ought to be judged as fictional ones are: according to their coherence and correspondence to a world we recognize, that is, as they correspond not to the events themselves but to other narratives. We naturally do compare the events that we derive from different narratives, but once events have happened, we can recover them only through narratives about them (considering memory, too, as a kind of narrative), and so they are secondary to the plots in which they are embedded. In other words, narratives, whether recited to ourselves in our mind's ear, told aloud, or read, are not representations of reality but in some sense prior to the happenings that gave rise to them.

The added emphasis above is mine. It is critically important to understand that our view of the “truth” or “reality” of anything — an event, a person, a theory, a thing — is constructed by comparing it, as Frus says, “not to the events themselves but to other narratives” in our memory. This is because we have no way of directly perceiving, storing or thinking about what we all call “real events.” All we have access to is symbolic representations of the world that we call narratives — stories that we have retained about things and events we believe to be real. This perception is not Frus’s alone; it is broadly acknowledged and affirmed by all the disciplines of the mind.