The impositions of narrative
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different f
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
We organise much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls.
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
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 Didio... See more
Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems
Narrative is a tool by which we extract (or impose, depending on your perspective) meaning from the chaotic flux of being in the world
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse
... See moreStories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it. And it works. A recent study of eighteen hunter-gatherer tribes found almost eighty per cent of their stories contained lessons in how they should behave in their dealings with other people. The groups with the greater proportion
... See more…shaped narratives typically focus on the struggles of protagonist, are almost always grounded in some implicit or explicit moral conflict, and ultimately lead not just to an account of what happened but also to an expression of what it all meant. Shaped stories are meaning-making tools and they can exert awesome sway, not just over individual peop
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