The Storytelling Animal

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories

The brain is not designed for story; there are glitches in its design that make it vulnerable to story. Stories, in all their variety and splendor, are just lucky accidents of the mind’s jury-rigged construction. Story may educate us, deepen us, and give us joy. Story may be one of the things that makes it most worthwhile to be human. But that doesn’t mean story has a biological purpose.

While our bodies are always locked into a specific here and now, our imaginations free us to roam space-time.

The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it.

While your body is always fixed at a particular point in space-time, your mind is always free to ramble in lands of make-believe. And it does.

Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

Children don’t need to be tutored in story. We don’t need to bribe them to make stories like we bribe them to eat broccoli. For children, make-believe is as automatic and insuppressible as their dreams. Children pretend even when they don’t have enough to eat, even when they live in squalor. Children pretended in Auschwitz.

Why are children creatures of story?

To answer this question, we need to ask a broader one first: why do humans tell stories at all? The answer may seem obvious: stories give us joy. But it isn’t obvious that stories should give us joy, at least not in the way it’s biologically obvious that eating or sex should give us joy. It is the joy of story that needs explaining.

Children adore music by nature. I remember how my own one-year-olds would stand and “dance” to a tune: smiling toothlessly, bobbing their huge heads, flailing their hands. And by nature children thrill to fictions in puppet shows, TV cartoons, and the storybooks they love to tatters.

To children, though, the best thing in life is play: the exuberance of running and jumping and wrestling and all the danger and splendor of pretend worlds. Children play at story by instinct. Put small children in a room together, and you will see the spontaneous creation of art. Like skilled improv performers, they will agree on a dramatic scenario and then act it out, frequently breaking character to adjust the scenario and trade performance notes.

warns me that I am about to step into the jaws of the dragon he is slaying. I thank him. The bold fighter asks a question, and as I veer toward safety, I answer, “I’m sorry, buddy, I don’t know when your mom will be here.”

At the back of the room, two princesses are tucked in a nook made out of bookshelves. The princesses are sitting Indian-style in their finery, murmuring and laughing—but not with each other. They are both cradling babies on their laps and babbling to them, as mothers do. The small one with the yellow hair notices me. Leaping to her feet, she drops her baby on his head. “Daddy!” Annabel cries. She flies to me, and I sweep her into the air.

At about the age of one, something strange and magical buds in a child. It reaches full bloom at the age of three or four and begins to wilt by seven or eight. At one, a baby can hold a banana to her head like a phone or pretend to put a teddy bear to bed. At two, a toddler can cooperate in simple dramas, where the child is the bus driver and the mother is the passenger, or where the father is the child and the child is the father. Two-year-olds also begin learning how to develop a character. When playing the king, they pitch their voices differently than when they are playing the queen or the meowing cat. At three or four, children enter into the golden age of pretend play, and for three or four more years, they will be masters of romps, riots, and revels in the land of make-believe.

Children adore art by nature, not nurture. Around the world, those with access to drawing materials develop skills in regular

that spirit, here are some modest suggestions based on the research in this book.
Read fiction and watch it. It will make you more empathic and better able to navigate life’s dilemmas.
Don’t let moralists tell you that fiction degrades society’s moral fabric. On the contrary, even the pulpiest fare usually pulls us together around common values.
Remember that we are, by nature, suckers for story. When emotionally absorbed in character and plot, we are easy to mold and manipulate.