This post aims to describe what I mean when I speak about narrative, and how I think exploring narrative is a meaningful endeavour.

The research I’m planning is focused on the construction of personal narratives. In conversation with a friend this week, I realised it may not be entirely clear what I mean by this. What is a personal narrative? How do they come to be? What are the roles of truth and fiction? And why do I think they’re important?

First, imagine: you are sitting in a cafe. Someone sits beside you. It’s…

>> Your mother. Because of all that's been going on in your life, you haven’t seen her in-person in twelve months. She says, “Now, what have you been up to?”

>> Your best friend, who you haven’t spoken to one-on-one since they had a baby a year ago. They say, "All right, tell me everything."

>> Your manager. It’s time for your annual performance review. He says: “Okay, first, tell me how things have been going for you.”

What will you say?

Depending on which you’re speaking to, the story you tell about those twelve months will likely be very different, for all sorts of reasons. You don’t have just one story about your one life, but infinite iterations which include and exclude various details depending on what you believe your audience cares to hear, and how you want to make them feel.

Every narrative you relate is a unique construction, pieced together from memories you’ve chosen as significant, events you believe are connected, people whose behaviour has affected you, planned or imagined actions you might take in future, and yes — sometimes a judicious little fib to help grease the wheels of causality. Narratives are always constructions, usually deliberate, although sometimes we are so swept up by the way that narrating makes us feel that it takes our story to places we didn’t plan. This can be fun, or deeply upsetting.

And this is what I mean by personal narratives.

I think it’s important not to conflate these constructed, reflexive, purposeful tellings with the idea of “life as a story”. Writers like Anthony Rudd suggest that by making decisions and taking purposeful actions, we are each engaged in “creating the narrative of [our] life” (p. 178). This, to me, is a hopeful metaphor for the practice of living. And living is not the same as narrating.

Some people are just not storytellers. Even if they have lived incredible lives, they are uncomfortable or plain uninterested in telling you what they did and what it meant to them. They are capable perhaps of reciting the chronology, but imbuing the events with significance is not a task they’ll undertake willingly.

But narratives do, of course, have tremendous power. We use them to share our experiences with each other, to entertain, to warn, to educate. We send billions of dollars a year to Hollywood in exchange for their stories. Stories are how we try to understand the universe – through both science and religion.

A story contains characters, settings, conflict, a plot. But most importantly, a story contains a chain of causality over time. Events of a certain nature unfold somewhere, affecting people and leading to further events unfolding. The significance of these events is not in their happening, but in the relationships between their happenings. And this is why narrative is so powerful, and matters so much:

Causality is the story of why.

By articulating a logic that links events in our lives, we move beyond description to explanation and, so my reasoning goes, we begin to develop a sense of our own agency.

I don’t mean that by narrating our stories we suddenly feel all-powerful. Agency is bounded by capacity, circumstance, power.

But when we narrate, we are not merely hapless observers of the ticking clock. By working to understand and explain the mechanisms that turn the cogs, we begin to position ourselves in relation to the cogs. The closer we stand, we can begin to write stories in which the events can change based on our actions. What is our relation to the cogs?

Do we build them?

Do we turn them?

Are we them?

And what does that mean for what we’ll do next?