Writing & Stories
Writing is a crucial part of every day life, indeed it is one of the things that makes us human. Whether you are involved in the actual process of writing or not, if you are reading this now, then you are a part of the dialogue that goes on between writers and readers everywhere. Writing is a representation of language, a conceptualisation of sound that becomes existent in a textual form. There is debate as to the exact origins of writing, but one established view is that it came into being out of a necessity to record complex trading routines and procedures in a concrete form.
A Story is also known as a narrative and is intricately linked with the processes of writing and reading. A story is the creation or description of events in a sequential form and can either be fictional or non-fictional in nature. Stories can either be told in song or verbal language as they have through a lot of our history, they can be shown through theatre and dance, or they can be written down and recorded like they mainly are today.
When we began to write our stories down in a concrete form the culture of human beings was forever changed. We were no longer restricted to having our memory functions or ancestral lines define the scope of our culture, and could instead record and preserve our collective mythology independently. We could also access and incorporate the stories of other cultures and lands and extend our belief systems accordingly. Technology seems to bring us closer together in many ways, and writing is perhaps the most important technology that has ever been created.
A writer is someone who composes a message or a story, and therefore not all writers are by definition story tellers. A writer may write technical descriptions or restaurant menus which may involve creativity but are not story like in fashion. Indeed this article you are reading now is not in narrative form, does not have a sequential structure and could not be called a story. Storytelling is a special kind of writing that has special links with culture. Most works of literature and entertainment are considered stories and have a unique connection to our lives in many ways.
Stories have inspired and nurtured us as a species for what seems like forever. They make us think and feel in different ways, they make us extend our selves past the boundaries of our skin. When story telling was primarily a verbal activity we had a certain authentic relationship to our stories, they meant something unique to our tribe, to our nation. Today we have a more free relationship to our stories, we pick them up from all over the world and put them down again just as easily. This can be both a good and a bad thing depending on what we do with them, but it seems like our stories and our writing will continue to sculpt our culture for as long as we remain human.