Guest post written by author A B Endacott
A B Endacott is a Nerd Daily contributor and the author of several young adult fantasy novels. Mirror, Mirror, which was published by Debut Books, was published on December 7 and is available for purchase here.
Stories are my life. I mean, I suppose stories are actually everybody’s life. But the act of deliberately constructing, teaching, unpacking, re-packing, conveying, refining, and generally adoring stories in virtually any form they may happen to take is what drives the very essence of what I am as a person. Some may also add to that claim that the other part of the essence of what I am as a person is a little bit of a wanker. They’re probably not wrong. People who love getting into the nitty gritty and philosophical can lose sight of the general purpose of narrative and story because they’re enraptured by ‘the structure!’, ‘the prose!’, ‘the symbolism!’ and various other technical components of the story that very few people actually find fascinating. All of those things are beautiful, and very satisfying to observe. But they’re not why most people pick up a book, fire up Netflix, or start a video game.
In my short nonfiction book Mirror, Mirror (and when I say short, I mean you can blow through it in about an hour; no dense wade-through-500-pages-to-get-to-a-point stuff here), I make the claim, “we are all storytellers,” because “we navigate the world through narrative, through the tales that we spin and which are spun for us.”
In his 2011 book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari references a theory which suggests gossip served a crucial evolutionary purpose: to establish within communities who could be trusted, and who could not. Such things, Harari notes, are vital to ensuring that a group is able to know who can be trusted to look after the children, or who won’t take more than their fair share. Evidence of how crucial gossip is to the survival of group identity is argued to be seen in the fact that it is something we so innately—and universally—do.
But how do we construct and convey the gossip that we share? We tell it as a story. Think about the last time you gossiped with a friend or co-worker. Is it sufficiently satisfying to hear that Damien is sleeping with his boss, Zara? Of course it isn’t! As an audience, we want to know how it started, how long it’s been going on, how they sneak around. We want enough facts to piece into a story about the nature of the relationship to inform any number of things: how it might affect the office dynamic, whether there might be favouritism meted out when it comes time for performance review (pun definitely intended), whether that might mean it’s acceptable for you to pursue the co-worker with whom you’ve had a lowkey but definite flirtatious series of exchanges.
We don’t convey that information in the form of a series of verbal dot points. We convey it as a narrative from which the audience can divine their own interpretation.
It’s a simple, specific example, but it’s one that makes the point well: we navigate the world through stories.
More than that, what do the majority of us do in our leisure time? We read. We watch movies or TV shows, or play video games. We unwind by exposing ourselves to stories that are artfully constructed. Even so-called reality TV is a structured and stylised narrative that provides its views with a story. While the show’s subsequent seasons had issues, the first season of UnReal is a fictionalised behind-the-scenes of a Bachelor-esque show which focuses heavily on how the producers literally produce a story from the collection of people within the scenario. It’s a great example of narrative-within-narrative; the show demonstrates just how carefully reality TV crafts its storylines within the framework of a narrative.
I couldn’t tell you why we find watching other ‘people’ and their various contrived narratives soothing. However, there’s a growing number of sources which go into why we find such comfort in re-watching or re-reading familiar material; because we are soothed by knowing what’s going to happen.
At this point, it’s worth pausing and acknowledging my puzzlement at the fact that the oft-beleaguered humanities and creative sectors don’t point out that they are the ground spring where the people who write the books we read, and work on the shows that we watch often find their start. The value of television, movies, and books, and video games amid the weeks of forced lockdown during COVID-19 can’t be understated. They were the only way to escape the confines imposed by the walls of one’s own house.
But beyond the mere soothing and escapist offerings of the above-mentioned mediums, something I explore in Mirror, Mirror is that we use stories to help us understand the world we inhabit. The above example of gossip is an easy one. But let’s look at James Bond through the film franchise as a different example. As ridiculous as it may seem, Bond reflects back to society very real and very contemporary concerns about threats to global stability. In Bond’s early days, the primary antagonists were largely from the USSR; the Cold War was at its zenith, and threats to the world peace were perceived to most likely originate from some kind of plot or scheme leading to all-out war between East and West (of course, the films were also a form of propaganda which mostly showed the British—and sometimes the Americans—as the Good Guys). While perhaps not all of the films were incisive commentaries on the state of global politics (hey, they were for entertainment first and foremost), consider the following:
- Moonraker while whacky, had definitive links to the enduring legacy of the space race
- A View To a Kill looked at the rise of ruthless sociopaths in Silicone Valley
- Tomorrow Never Dies was about the extreme measures media moguls would go to in order to be ahead of a story
- The World is Not Enough had a large portion of its storyline centering on oil security
- Quantum of Solace explored water security in the context of global warming
So aside from the fact that I obviously like Bond films, we can deduce from the above that these stories reflected some part of our society back to us, even if it is in a warped and unusual mirror filled with outlandish supervillains, improbably exotic locations, and improbably sexually available women.
In Mirror, Mirror, I don’t look at Bond. I look at the retelling of fairytales—specifically the Disney film adaptations of Cinderella. But the same point reveals itself; stories tell us something about the world surrounding us.
More than that, they order facts in a coherent and accessible way which allow us not simply to easily digest the information, but to take some kind of message away from it.
Like many people, I spent a lot of time inside in 2020. I was in Melbourne, Australia, where we endured amongst the world’s strictest lockdowns for more than four consecutive months, and in excess of nine months in total. One of the things which kept me not just sane, but feeling safe was the stories I consumed as a reader, viewer, and gamer. When I re-watched Frasier, I was comforted by the fact that people find community and family even in the most unlikely of situations. When I re-watched Parks and Recreation, I found strength in the idea that basic human goodness will always win out in the end, even amid the treacherous and cumbersome (and incompetence) of government and bureaucracy. When I played The Witcher I believed that monsters could be slayed with know-how and skill. And when I read None Shall Sleep by Ellie Marney…well I was kind of terrified, but I also took heart in people’s capacity to be stronger than their worst experiences.
