A quote from The White Album

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We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as... See more

Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems

Storytelling, then, is born from our need to order everything outside ourselves.

John Yorke • Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them

all cultures have created stories to help us grapple with, and ultimately map, the chaos into which we are thrown at birth;

Jordan B. Peterson • 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

All this made me think of Joan Didion’s most famous sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s a sentence that has found its way onto Pinterest boards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs, as though it were a consoling affirmation of The Power of Storytelling. It is not.

The sentence is the first one of Didion’s essay “The White Album,”... See more

Alan Jacobs • Stories to Live By

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting