The world needs stories
I never dreamed of writing the “Great Australian Novel” or selling enormous amounts of books. I just wanted to tell stories. The world needs them. It always has.
Stories reach people when all the arguments and debates don’t. There can be understanding and connection on an intuitive level. Points can be made without anyone feeling they’re being beaten over the head. And stories stay with us. We may not remember all the detail, but a story we’ve loved will stay in our heart. Who doesn’t hold on to the memory of a book they loved as a child? I can’t remember the details of many of the books I read as an adult. But my early adventures in reading stay with me, with amazing clarity.
Sometimes we revisit the tales that moved us. We know how they made us feel, the realisations they gave us, the way they sparked our imagination. A good story can reach out to people. Unlike other forms of writing that are located in a specific time and place, they can be, in a way, eternal. Enduring.
We are narrative beings.
Something about tales speaks to a spark that lies within all of us. Children who are denied stories are denied a chance for a garden to grown in their soul. Perhaps what we learn through books needs to become more nuanced as we grow to adulthood. The world is not divided into good and evil. But the tales we encounter early on give us a framework to start with.
In fact, we could understand the world better if we questioned the stories that underpin it. Every society has its own narratives. In Western society the enduring story is that everything must be done in service of the economy. We are told this so often we don’t even realise it’s just a story. Nobody questions whether there is another way to conceive the world. What would our society look like if the underpinning narrative, the story we all believed in, was that everything should be done in service of humanity? What if the cultural stories placed living beings at their heart?
Fiction writers use their imagination to create worlds that are underpinned by different stories. They show us other possibilities. We need that now, more than ever. To change the world, we need to see how it can be different. And we need to care. We need our hearts and minds engaged. Stories can do all of that.
Dreams of story telling
This is why I chose at a young age to be a story teller. Not a ‘writer’. I didn’t have visions of sitting in a garret starving while I carved out some masterpiece from blood and suffering. I didn’t picture myself appearing at writers festivals, exchanging words of wisdom for book sales. No – I just wanted to tell stories, because they seemed magical.
I’ve been told I’m naiive for imagining writers can change the world. But all it takes is for one idea to light a spark that grows into a flame, and change can happen. I suppose that belief is why my central character in The Tales of Tarya, Mina, is a story teller who changes her world with her stories. Art and imagination are tools for doing magic in the world.
Artists, whether writers, painters, sculptors or any other medium, are generally not paid well. This has been true throughout history. We know the image of the struggling writer starving in a garret so well it is almost a cliche. And the painterly genius who died in poverty. It’s part of the story we tell about artists. To create true art, the idea goes, we need suffering. Hunger is apparently a great motivator.
There have always been gatekeepers to the creative arts. These were once known as patrons. Now they have many different titles but they are always the ones who decide whether artists will be paid for their work or not. And since the ‘economy’ narrative places a low value on art, the gatekeepers don’t feel the need to pay them very much. In fact, the unspoken argument is often that artists do what they do for the love of it, so reimbursement doesn’t need to be that high. Their reward is the joy of creating. There is a growing trend of asking creatives to produce something for ‘exposure’ or so they can ‘put it on their CV’.