One of the biggest fears my clients have is that by telling their personal stories they will appear grandiose, self-absorbed, or narcissistic. “Who am I to tell this story,” they ask. “Really, who cares?” Or, “It’s all been written about before, so why bother?”

“There is nothing new under the sun,” I tell them, “You’re right. But there’s nothing any of us can do about that fact except add to the conversation at large.”

And yet.

Often, it’s your story that someone really hears, that someone actually connects with for the very first time. Sometimes the scales fall from your reader’s eyes immediately, sometimes a tidbit gets tucked away only to be retrieved when the need for it arises.  It’s your story that switches up the game for your reader, even if she’s heard the lesson drawn from it a thousand times before. Often it’s the hidden lesson you tossed on the page in passing that resonates the most, something that never occurred to you to be important. It’s a mysterious thing, this transference of courage and wisdom.

Keep this in mind when you read this from Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know. The words are all his from this point forward.

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If the lead character in a Story gets what he wants, our brains are wired to believe that we can too. Stories fuel our courage, and offer the cautions that we believe will help guide our own paths.

Whether you know it or not, your desire to write comes from the urgent to not just be “creative,” it’s a need (one every human being on earth has) to help others. A well-told Story is a gift to the reader/listener/viewer because it teaches them how to confront their own discomforts.

In his wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the Story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on the ninety-eighth floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She recalled that when the first plane hit the North Tower on September 11, 2001, a wave of hot air came through her glass windows as intense as opening a pizza oven.

Panigrosso did not hesitate. She didn’t even pick up her purse, make a phone call or turn off the computer. She walked quickly to the nearest emergency exit, pushed through the door and began the ninety-eight-floor stairway descent to the ground. What she found curious was that far more people chose to stay right where they were. They made outside calls and even an entire group of colleagues went in to their previously scheduled meeting.

Why would they choose to stay in such a vulnerable place in such an extreme circumstance?

Because they were human beings and human beings find change to be extremely difficult, practically impossible. To leave without being instructed to leave was a risk. What were the chances of another plane hitting their tower, really? And running in fear? They should stay calm and wait for help, they must have thought to themselves, maintain an even keel. And that’s what they did. I probably would have too.

Grosz suggests that the reason every single person in the South Tower didn’t immediately leave the building is that they did not have a familiar Story in their minds to guide them. This from his book:

We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our Story. We want to know what new Story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even—or perhaps especially—in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients of psychoanalysts.

Even among those people who chose to leave, there were some who went back to the floor to retrieve personal belongings they couldn’t bear to part with. One woman was walking down alongside Panigrosso when she stopped herself and went back upstairs to get the baby pictures of her children left on her desk. To lose then was too much for her to accept.

That decision was fatal.

When human beings are faced with chaotic circumstance, our impulse is to stay safe by doing what we’ve always done before. To change our course of action seems far riskier than to keep on keeping on. To change anything about our lives, even our choice of toothpaste, causes great anxiety.

How we are convinced finally to change is by hearing stories of other people who risked and triumphed. Not some easy triumph, either. But a hard fought one that takes every ounce of the protagonist’s inner fortitude. Because that’s what it takes in real life to leave a dysfunctional relationship, move to a new city, or quit your job. It takes guts, moxie, inner fire, the stuff of heroes.

Change, no matter how small, requires loss.   And the prospect of loss is far more powerful than potential gain. It’s difficult to imagine what a change will do to us. This is why we need stories so desperately.

Stories give us scripts to follow .…

We need stories to temper our anxieties, either as supporting messages to stay as we are or inspiring road maps to get us to take a chance. Experiencing stories that tell the tale of protagonists for whom we can empathize gives us the courage to examine our own lives and change them.

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