The Power of great Storytelling

Reflections on reading, writing and storytelling and Harari's book Sapiens

Questions about reading, writing and storytelling

After months of reading fiction last year, I felt drawn to return to reality with a non-fiction book. Given the year's end, I didn't want to start a new book. Instead, I revisited an old favourite: Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

It turned out to be an inspired choice and a great way to end my year as it helped me clarify and synthesize my thoughts on some of the questions about reading, writing, storytelling and language that I had been contemplating and mulling for a while now.

Below some of the questions:

• What compels writers to write? Anyone who has tried to write a half decent and coherent non-fiction essay or god forbid an entertaining piece of fiction or heaven forbid an inspirational piece of poetry knows that writing is not easy. Putting your thoughts on paper and being satisfied with the effort is one of the most torturous experiences one can go through with tenuous financial rewards. Why do writers put themselves through so much pain without the prospect of a commensurate financial return?

• What compels writers to write fiction? Over the last year I read quite a few great works of fiction with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Gogol’s Dead Souls still fresh in my mind and I kept on asking myself the question why these writers chose to write fiction? If they had something to say about society, about the human condition, about relationships then why not say it directly in a work of non-fiction? Why go through the non-circuitous and extremely painful and painstaking task of creating an imaginary world?

• What compels writers to write huge tomes? War & Peace, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Emma, Brothers Karamazov, Portrait of a Lady are not small pieces of work. Some of them can better be used as a door stopper than as reading on your desk. As I read some of these over the years I kept asking myself: If these writers indeed had a message to deliver, and if they, for some reason, had chosen fiction to deliver it, why did they have to write such long pieces of work?

• What compels writers to write poetry? Throughout the year I also read works of poetry. Both in their original language such as the works of Iqbal and Ghalib in Urdu and Woodsworth, Shelley, Dickinson in English; and in translations such as the works of Homer, Goethe, Hafez and Rumi. Throughout this time I kept asking myself the same question: What compels these writers to give up not only the medium of non-fiction but also the medium of fiction novels to express their thoughts in the extremely obscure, opaque and perplexing language of poetry?

• What comprises good storytelling? A few works of fiction that I thoroughly enjoyed this year were Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and Chekhov’s fifty-two short stories. The three works however are as far apart from each other in the stories they choose to tell and how they choose to tell them as night is from day. What comprises a good piece of fiction then? What makes us love one and not the other?

• Why do I/we read fiction? Seems pretty obvious. Why in fact do we do this? Go to any bookshop or library and books are grouped into fiction and non-fiction before being sub-categorized further. Think about it, why is it that half, if not more of our places which deal in books are filled with books that have nothing to do with the real world?

• How important is storytelling in non-fiction? A a few pieces of non-fiction which have struck out to me over the last few years have been Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions; Mary Beard’s history of the Roman Empire in SPQR; Harari’s unique blend of history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology and biology in Sapiens; and Jim Khalili’s brief and enjoyable The world according to Physics. Above all else what has captivated me most about these books is their quality of storytelling

• How important is storytelling in our professional lives? Having worked for more than a decade now in various leadership capacities I have been struck by how much of leadership is about storytelling. A leader at the top of any organization, whether in politics or business, essentially has the challenging task of creating a story and then selling it to himself, the board, the investors, the employees in the hopes of motivating everyone around him, including himself, to put in the effort to make it into a reality.

• How important is good storytelling in our personal lives? The most important question for most of us, I’m guessing? Psychologists, Psychoanalysts, Psychotherapists and Psychiatrists have long understood how the stories we tell ourselves influence our perception of our work, our relationships and ultimately ourselves. In my journaling practice particularly I have noticed how the language I use and the stories I write impact my view of the world.

How Sapiens emphasizes the importance of storytelling

Sapiens turned out to be a great book because the central message of the book is essentially about the significance of storytelling in the history of our species.

Over the course of the book Harari compellingly shows how the ability of our species to tell stories: to create and believe in shared fictions such as Religions, Nations, Money, Ideologies (Communism, Socialism, Liberalism etc.) enabled us to increase the scale of our cooperation and essentially create the globalized world that exists today.

Below some of my key highlights from Harari’s book which show how our species developed the power of storytelling which allowed us to dominate the world around ut (I borrowed from Harari’s other works where he made the same point more elegantly)

We developed the power of Language to talk ~30k-70k years ago. Various theories exist as to why this happened but nobody can be sure:

“The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We're not sure.” — Sapiens

Language gave us to talk about ideas (things that don’t exist)

“Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.” — Sapiens

Common belief in ideas allowed us to increase the scale of our cooperation as a species:

However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

Which allowed us to achieve bigger things:

“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation - whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe - is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination.” - Sapiens

And subjugate nature to our will:

“The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.” - Sapiens

But the fact is that most of the institutions and concepts we commonly take for granted as objective are mere fabrications:

“Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” — Sapiens

Further Explorations

Harari does not directly tackle any of the questions I posed previously, but by highlighting the importance and power of storytelling his book motivated me to collect my thoughts in this post. If human history is indeed shaped by stories then questions on why we write them, why we read them and how we can write them better are crucial to us understanding and influencing the world around us.

The book, however, is not without its flaws with one of the big ones being its failure to address the lack of meaning in a world without objective truth. This, and other thoughts on the book probably deserves another longer post as I don’t want to make this into a full blown review of Harari’s book.

I do also want to continue to explore thoughts on some of the questions above in the coming editions. I have also been thinking about posting a review of the books I enjoyed in 2023 which I will get around to.

In the meantime I would love to hear what you think about some of the topics above related to reading, writing, storytelling? Do any of them interest you? Have you read any of Harari’s books, what did you think of them?