Stories

“We read to know we are not alone” – C.S. Lewis

To read is to be human and the most common form of digested text is the story.  The story has three main components. Protagonist, antagonist and conflict.  That is the foundation of a good story.  And why do we read stories?  To see what is going to happen.  We are hooked in on the first line of a good story, just to see how it is going to end.

But more than that, we read stories to understand ourselves, our fellow humans and life, through the story.  As the characters play their parts, we learn about life.

We look to the lives of others sometimes to know how to be, how to act, how to respond to life.  We see the examples of others played out in dramas on the screen.  No good story is without drama, given through the mechanism of conflict.  It is so much like life.  All the juice is in the conflict.  That’s where the learning is, the pain, the heartache and the love.  All the goodness is in the juice.

Stories change the world.  True stories are my favourite.  And I’ve seen a few things and I’m happy to tell a few stories so you can see through the eyes of some amazing and weird folk I have met or witnessed go about their lives on planet earth.