“Why do we tell stories? To try to make sense of a world that can be terrifying and enormous.” – Brennan Lee Mulligan

It’s a quote that comes back to my mind every so often, as someone who works in a house full of stories (aka the library) and as a writer. You could say it’s a favorite quote of mine (and I promise it has nothing to do with the fact it comes from one of the best Dungeons & Dragons live play sessions I’ve ever watched). Every time I get struck by the dreaded writer’s block and every time I start fretting over the words in my blog posts for more hours than can actually be healthy, I hear those same words in the back of my head.

Why do we tell stories? Because the world can be terrifying, and enormous, and so hard to make sense of.  

Mulligan’s answer is one of many, but don’t worry, I’m not going to delve into more horror picks this month as much as I want to focus on the “terrifying” part. His words usually get me thinking about the question itself. Why do we tell stories? The habit of storytelling is as old as recorded history, if not older, and yet we still do it, from amateur weavers to lauded professionals. We have places where you can buy stories and places where you can get them for free. Even the internet has curated spaces and websites specifically meant for telling stories (here’s looking at you, fanfiction auteurs).

With November coming up, which for the past eight years has been Buckle In and Get Writing Month to me, I was going to make this post about the usual writing guides, tips, and tricks that the library and the internet have to offer. Instead, I would like to shift gears and make a miniature investigation into storytelling, with you readers as my honorary Watsons. I hope you all have your deerstalkers on.

Storytelling is as old as the cavemen (and here’s hoping for an eventual Storytellers exhibit at the ROM). Despite not having language as detailed and metaphorical as we have now, cave paintings certainly counted as a vehicle for tale-spinning. Art made of mud, clay, and even sticks in the shapes of animals and other natural phenomena served as one of the only common languages that early people shared. Most stories that people told each other mirrored the times they were living in which meant, from what historians can gather, a lot of early narratives dealt with survival at their core and were filled with warnings and lived experiences. If you’re interested in delving further into cave paintings, we have a great film narrated by the iconically German-accented and deadpan Werner Herzog here at the library, which goes into one of the most important cave painting discoveries in the Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc caves in the south of France.

All of that to get to my point: storytelling might be as inherent to being human as is the capacity for philosophical thought. Telling stories is not something we were ever told to do. People, no matter what time they were living in, just sort of did it. Hieroglyphics continued the history of cave paintings, and in terms of tales as old as time itself shared via the tradition of oral storytelling, you only need to look at the myths and legends that make any culture what it is (but I won’t get myself started on the wonders of mythology. That could probably be a whole post by itself). Still, “because” isn’t a completely satisfying answer to me so I did a little shelf-delving to dig a little farther.

Okay, so I might have lied just a tad when I mentioned not getting into mythology or more literary history. I present to you, dear Watson, Exhibit A: The Written World by Martin Puchner. In this read he takes you through the evolution of the written word beyond the bible and historical texts (writing for literature’s sake is a lot different and started much later than you would think) in four distinct phases, choosing to focus on cornerstone stories and inventions like the alphabet that shape how we tell stories today. To Puchner, written stories are powerful tools that shape perception, philosophical thought, and history. If there were no widespread books and texts, no widespread stories, with the only tool at our disposal the tradition of oral storytelling, how different might anything that we accept as truth today be? I guess you could say that the reason we tell, and more specifically write, stories is to preserve the things we’ve discovered about the world and ourselves and to create equal access to truth and intellectual thought that isn’t colored by any one person. It’s a far step away from simply “because we are wired to do so”, but if this answer feels a little too philosophical, let me point you in the direction of Exhibit B.

Let’s talk about the heat death of the universe. If you didn’t think that’s where this was going, you’re in for a surprise with the first few pages of Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling. His answer to the why behind storytelling is that it is an act of rebellion (with a dash of denial) in the face of an unwinnable fight with existence. Stories help us to be future thinkers with dreams, ambitions, and hopes even when it might be futile. Yeah, heavy stuff. But if you’ve managed to get past the first paragraph coming at you at a hundred miles per hour, Storr will deftly guide you through the marriage between storytelling and human psychology. Understanding how the mind works has always made me a better, more grounded writer (no matter how fantastical my plots get) and though I said that I wouldn’t be getting into writing guides for this blog post, Storr manages to share enough tips that inevitably this read becomes both a study and a handy-dandy writer’s improvement manual. I’ll probably be holding onto this book for the entirety of November. Sorry in advance, readers.

If you’d like something in a similar vein that’s a little more lighthearted with great straight-laced humor, let me introduce you to Exhibit C: The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall. I don’t think Gottschall has one definitive answer for why we tell stories, but that’s the great thing about this read. He explores so many different facets of science to find his answers, from psychology to biology to sociology and more while encouraging readers to pose their own questions. I won’t lie and say the book didn’t have me chuckling out loud within the first few paragraphs (a rare for a non-fiction read!), so this pick is probably my favorite of the bunch from this mini-investigation.

If you haven’t yet been accosted by the series of well-made author-focused Masterclass ads on Youtube (I am cursed to be very easily algorithm-read), let me preface Exhibit D with a quote by Salman Rushdie I have been somewhat forced to learn by heart: “We are the only creature that does this unusual thing of telling each other stories in order to try and understand the kind of creature that we are.” Stories continue to be made because we keep asking ourselves why we behave the way we do and though psychology has come far, we’re still a ways off from truly understanding what makes a person’s mind tick. You could say stories best illustrate, describe, and make up a large part of our personalities and bleeds into the other pillars of identity like culture and history. Montreal Lake Cree writer and lawyer Harold Johnson seems to agree, writing that “we are the stories we are told and we are the stories we tell ourselves.” In his final book The Power of Story, he details his observations and findings following a gathering he had hosted between representatives of Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths. To Johnson, stories not only make up an identity but they can also lay the groundwork for creating spaces for empathy, especially when these stories come from religions and backgrounds unfamiliar to you. Besides that, The Power of Story is full of exploration into story’s place in Indigenous culture, plus Salman Rushdie-level quotes from both the author and his long-time friend Tracey Lindberg.

Now I’m going to bring things back to where we began (as many good stories do). Did you know that cavemen were huge gossips? No, this isn’t the setup for a very cheesy punchline. It’s true! Besides the typical “how to stay alive” warnings with such hits as “saw big cat with sharp teeth, scary” and other variations, the only way that people held each other accountable was through stories. Good actions approved by the tribe were rewarded by tales of your heroic deeds shared among the people, with bad actions losing you an immeasurable amount of brownie points (you can read more about it in The Science of Storytelling). The idea of heroes and villains as characters is about as old as the practice of storytelling itself. In The Hero, Jack Reacher creator Lee Child attempts to follow the origin of just that. Where did we get the word hero? How did the character develop from what the cavemen created into the epic spandex-clad and cape-wearing superhumans of the modern-day comic book? Why, even after hundreds of thousands of stories told about heroes, are we still so fascinated by them? Maybe we’re not as far removed from the cavemen as you might think.

As for me, I’ve been thinking hard about what compels me to tell stories while researching and writing this post. Like Gottschall, I’m not sure I can think up one singular answer that feels fitting enough. Right now, I think my why is “connection”. As much as a reader is out there looking for someone who might understand them, whether it’s someone in their life or a book they can pick up off a shelf in a bookstore or a library, the author is looking for the same thing: for someone to see the way they see and feel the way they feel. It doesn’t matter if the things we see aren’t real or that we whittle away our time wrapping up what is essentially a grandiose lie in beautiful paper. People, no matter when or where they are, have always been social animals. The stories told by cavemen were told to protect those around them. Despite writing late into the night when no one else is awake at my place, in a room with only my steadfast desk buddy (the roundest stuffed animal monkey you can imagine) to keep me company, I still hope that whatever idea I’m throwing out into the void comes back out the other side and finds someone else.

If you, like me, are compelled by some unknown force to create stories, maybe this is the time to give you a little homework assignment, should you choose to accept it. November may be the month of the written word, but in between reaching a word goal or trying to climb the ever-lofty mountain of attempting to write a whole book in a month, I encourage you to think about your “why”. Why do you tell stories? Who knows? Maybe you’ll find just the thing to help you break through the cursed writer’s block if you end up so unlucky.

If you’d like not just November-exclusive, year-round writing support, check out our Vaughan Writes page on our website. With that, I’ll leave you here. Go out and tell some stories, for whatever reason that may be.