It’s the story, stupid!

Remember as a kid, you’d come home from school and one of your parents would ask, “Hey, what happened today?” And your answer? “NOTHING!” 

This was never true. At that moment you were either a surly pre-teen, or you had no story to tell. Some days, though, maybe the events at school would coalesce into a tale about the food fight in the cafeteria or an argument with a boyfriend. (You’d skip the story about smoking in the lavatory.)

Storytelling is the dominant way we make sense of and create meaning in our lives. When HBO’s “Game of Thrones” finished its first season, a lot of viewers complained about the ending. I liked the ending, though, especially when Tyrion asks: “What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags?” 

“Stories,” he answers himself. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story.”

“Game of Thrones” is a fantasy, of course, but the reality is we have a massive global media industry dedicated to telling and selling stories. Writers create them, industries produce them, and audiences need them. Narratives are the currency of television, film, music and novels, not to mention journalism, YouTube, politics and politicians who love talking about “controlling their narrative.” And then there’s social media. Facebook alone enables nearly three billion users to share stories.   

When we meet new people, we often ask (or think), “So what’s your story?”   Corporate recruiters expect new employees to be able to tell their own story and, later, the story of their organization. Companies sell products through 60-second ads structured as narratives. Every football game is a story — complete with a setting, a plot, characters, and lots of conflict — a central element to any good story. 

At AA and Al-Anon meetings, people make sense of addiction by telling each other their stories.  A good therapist helps patients heal by listening to their stories. A reporter makes sense of what happens on a given day by transforming events into news stories.  Don Hewitt, creator of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” once told me the secret to his program’s success: “Four little words,” he said, “Tell me a story” (which later became the title of his autobiography).    

After my stint teaching high school English and working briefly as a reporter, my academic interest in storytelling began in the late 1970s, in part, from a book I read as a graduate student. The book was “Adventure, Mystery and Romance” by John Cawelti, a literature professor at the University of Chicago. In one of the first academic books to study popular culture seriously, Cawelti argued that stories are popular for three reasons. First, stories affirm what we believe and offer characters who seem familiar. Remember how children wanted us to read the same story to them over and over? They wanted the comfort and familiarity stories provide. In our house, we always returned to “Good Night Moon” and “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Next, stories help us “resolve tensions … and conflicting interests” — in other words, narratives can model solutions and help solve problems. Finally, stories enable us, according to Cawelti, “to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden.” In other words, narratives help us confront the inexplicable, deviance, and evil. In the 1970s, Bruno Bettelheim in his famous study, “The Uses of Enchantment,” defended dark fairy tales – think “Hansel and Gretel.” He argued that such stories empowered children, letting them know not only that there was evil in the world, but that they could defeat it. 

I would add a fourth point to this list: stories help us bond. In my family, my daughter and I bonded over “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Harry Potter. My son and I connected over “Northern Exposure,” “Star Wars” and NFL football — these days, the Detroit Lions. My wife and I share an obsession with Scandinavian crime mysteries — the darker the better. Our whole family bonded over “Twin Peaks,” and over Christmas vacation one year, we binge-watched four seasons of the “X-Files.” 

Stories have helped me get through my own life. When my father died in 2012, my brothers, sister and I started writing about him the next day — stories about hunting squirrels and mushrooms in Beavercreek, shagging golf balls for Charles Kettering during the Depression, shooting a 79 when he was 80, transporting the dead and wounded from Omaha Beach on D-Day when he served in the Navy. Remembering those stories and writing them down helped us with our loss. The Dayton Daily News printed our story on Father’s Day that year. 

Whatever our age, gender, religion, politics or tax bracket, storytelling is our common ground. As the late Joan Didion wrote at the beginning of “The White Album,” “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

A version of this column was part of my commencement address at Miami’s 2019 winter graduation.

Richard Campbell is a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Miami University. He is the board secretary for the Oxford Free Press.