1.1 Primary effects of stories

Stories have two primary effects.

Firstly, they create a shared sense of identity. Stories make identities come alive because they enable people to recognise themselves in the details. Telling someone these things in the abstract does not carry the same power because it does not make that immediate connection with experience and feelings.

Secondly, stories operate at the level of feelings. They try to generate feelings from the listener, something that is not necessarily the case with a purely factual telling. Telling a story comes with artistic license:

• Time can be slowed down or sped up.
• Spaces, and the items and people within it, can be given evocative colour and features.

People will judge a story’s validity according to different standards than they would a set of facts, because of the primacy of feelings. Did the story ring true to experience? Did it convey a set of values that seemed true? Could they empathise with characters and recognise situations?