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DNA is a long braided molecule, inside almost all of your cells. It carries your distinct genetic code, which expresses your body’s individuality. It also relates you to your family members, with their similar DNA, and more remotely to the whole human race. Your DNA is a special sauce: both the signature of your unique self, and echoing traits shared with your relatives.
If DNA is your internal code, then Storytelling is a kind of external code. You tell stories to articulate your experiences, thoughts, feelings, and more. Those stories are not just what you say, but how you say it—they are told or written in your personal voice or style. Milton, Murakami, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy spent decades honing their craft, and all the while their styles too were beaten and polished into shape. Open one of their books at random, and the first paragraph already sounds inimitably like them.
DNA distinguishes your single self, yet connects you to your family and all of humanity. Storytelling does this double duty too, cleaving you apart and also cleaving you together with others. The voice of your telling can be utterly your own, but by sharing our stories we bring our private worlds into closer congruence, we gather as a group to see eye to eye.
Storytelling may be a communal project, where we’re all talking and listening in turn, gradually extending the understanding among us. A fruitful romance needs two people, mostly harmonious, weaving their stories together into a larger whole. The Beatles were able to survive their meteoric rise and phenomenal changes (at least through the 60s), because of their stalwart friendship and love of making music together. They balanced and completed each other. As they lived through their group and individual sagas, they reflected among themselves, and collaborated in an epic human story which helped them process all their dramas, their explosive growth, without losing their balance and falling apart. Until “The End”.
Storytelling can also be a solitary pursuit. When I write in my journals, I often start with words all jumbled, tumbling through my mind. I pour the words into ragged paragraphs. I pause to reconsider, then trim and twirl them into shape. Eventually, the mess recedes, and more sense appears. Thus I craft better stories to tell you, so you can understand more of what I really meant to say. But I, too, am in my audience. As my story grows clearer and stronger through editing, I grasp my thoughts and themes more firmly, and develop a fuller self-awareness. Our tales, when we tell them well, grow us larger and saner from their telling.
Young writers are advised, “Write what you know”. Hence many first novels are autobiographical, just fictionalized enough to shape them into more compelling and colorful stories. James Joyce began his first novel, of this ilk, on his twenty-second birthday. After a couple of years, Stephen Hero was 914 pages long, but that only covered 25 of his 63 planned chapters. A decade later, Joyce had distilled that work, and transformed it, into his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Autobiography is a pier for embarking on a career in fiction, and the writer’s own life is a lens to start examining the seas of stories beyond, and the crafts of character, plot and world-building.
Stephen Dedalus, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was spun out of Joyce’s self, and the events of his youth mirrored Joyce’s own. Joyce’s next novel, Ulysses, opens on a Stephen grown slightly older, and very distant from his creator. Joyce removed most of his own DNA from Stephen, transforming him instead into a character who belonged entirely to the Dublin of Ulysses, Joyce’s masterpiece. For this is what fiction does: we take the truths we know best, then transform those seeds into a garden for our boldest dreams.
Embarking from the familiar pier of autobiography into the seas of stories, our first port of call is the Bildungsroman. From its German roots, this is a Novel of Forming or Education. In English, it means a novel that starts with a young protagonist, then maps out their psychological and moral growth—like Joyce’s Portrait. Other Bildungsromane include Tom Jones, Candide, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Little Women, Huckleberry Finn, and all seven Harry Potter books. Journals and autobiographies help us see ourselves more clearly and completely, then bildungsromane carry us further, into the hearts and minds of others. Beyond those, we find romances and stories of best friends (or nemeses), whose lives and development are intertwined. Then we have books about families, and other groups who live, work or travel together. Some books are famous for their portraits of cities, bringing a city to life in all its particularity. Finally there are books that dream whole countries, that express the spirit of a nation, as Virgil did for Rome and Dante for Italy, as Chaucer did for England. Some novels and epic poems have imagined a nation that was still being born, and helped their people to dream in concert, then to build that union.
As books grow more epic in their grasp, they show us groups growing larger around us, until we find ourselves united with all of humanity. As books grow more alien to our experience, they show us more classes, countries, colors, genders and species, and so they enlarge our understanding and our empathy. Good books, read closely, deepen and enrich our humanity.
Storytelling is not just a passive experience, which we submit to, and find ourselves miraculously grown as we put the book down. We are all active storytellers, in our writing, and in our daily lives. We explain to our friends what we did or heard or thought, and in telling each tale we find more clarity and shape in it. We listen to our friends’ tales, we give our feedback, we teach each other to see further. Those we love closest, we share our worlds with, and are always writing new chapters of our lives together. I think the greatest piece of luck any child can get is, to be born into a family where your parents and siblings listen and care for you, and tell brave stories and true. When you start from there, your world is warm and makes sense: it is both understandable, and worth building meaning in. We will grow a better America when we make it so that every child in this land is born into a home like that, and all our lives are adventures worth living, in families worth loving. That is how all our stories should begin.
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