I was prompted by the question so many children asked when I told stories in schools, “Is that true?” I finally settled on this answer: “All of my stories are true, but not everything in my stories happened.”

That always seemed to satisfy the young questioners. They grasped intuitively what adults often seem to forget, that we can find truth in a dance, a painting, a story, a poem. It’s not a truth that can be counted, nor an experience that is suited to experimental processes.

But then, frankly, neither is the physical world scientists subject to measurements. Scientific research starts with a hypothesis, which is, in a sense, a story about the way some substance or process or creature or interaction is expected to behave. Stories start the same way, with speculation about the way people will behave.

Both are influenced by the life experience of the observer, whether scientist or storyteller. Both are subject to the surprise element. Both can be turned on their head when a scientist or storyteller comes at the research or story from an entirely different perspective.

So while I still like this quote, I no longer see the worlds of the scientist and the artist as separate and distinct. Both test hypotheses. Neither can successfully separate from the larger context. Both are essential to our lives.

An artist also asks questions. But instead of utilizing rigor and skepticism to provide experiential answers that exist in a direct causal relationship to those questions, he or she focuses upon a medium that provides the experience directly. The artist works to convey a perceptual message in a manner that requires no operational definitions and no rigid rules of correspondence to expel the subjective perception of his or her own consciousness. And whereas a scientist thrives on absolute answers expressed as numbers, an artist thrives on process. A scientist seeks to expand humanity’s frame of reference; an artist seeks to expand humanity’s depth of insight. ~ Jim Nollman, Spiritual Ecology

“We find stories in the unpatterned restlessness of our lives, and in the histories of the places we have lived, and we tell them and retell them, if only to ourselves, living them out and sharpening and reinventing them, discovering significances and defining and redefining ourselves. It is the most universal thing human beings do as in their secret hearts they work to achieve some positive effect in the world.” ~ William Kittredge, Owning It All

When my daughter was little and scraped a knee, what brought the swiftest diversion wasn’t candies or toys, but stories. Stories soothe us, teach us, take us to other worlds. Even when we grow up, our hunger for stories remains. ~Anu Garg, A.Word.A.Day

[T]o make sense of our experience by creating a story is an essential human characteristic, and whatever story we tell at a given time reflects our level of consciousness. At one point we may tell a story of victimhood or revenge, and later one of compassion and empowerment. It is the exercise, moment to moment, of free will, of doggedly looking for beauty, joy, and possibility, that offers us the greatest hope for generating stories that will contain the creativity and inspiration we need to solve otherwise insurmountable challenges. ~ Nina Utne, UTNE Reader, May-June 2004, page 6

“Australian Aborigines say that the big stories-the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life-are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.” Robert Moss, Dreamgates

“So storytelling is central to community building and maintenance. It can also build new kinds of community. If stories define our communities, then changing the stories would change the community.” Jay Wentworth, “Coral Atolls and Cosmic Tales”

“When we become fully aware of the stories that make up our lives, we also find ourselves being much more careful about the kind of information we want to let through the portal of our eyes and ears.” Jim Nollman, Spiritual Ecology: A Guide for Reconnecting with Nature

A new edition of the 1989 book was issued in 2004 so I’m clearly not the only one who thinks Stone did a brilliant job of diving beneath the surface of the stories we tell about ourselves.

Here’s a quote: “…one’s autobiography is made up not just of what happened but of a view of oneself from a certain perspective. Given the perspective, certain facts, though true, are irrelevant, while other facts are accorded importance because they seem to support the vision of oneself, stated or unstated, that governs the autobiography. But even the facts that do matter have to be presented so that their significance is clear.”

Re-reading the quotation reminds me of the differing versions my mother and her two sisters told about the same people and events. Each fit differently into the three autobiographies. I used to shake my head. Now that I’ve spent decades editing my own life, I think it’s completely normal.

NB: Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins is still in print