The Meaning Of Life Through Story

Our minds can't help but self-organize into structured storytelling.

In the video Dramatica: Past, Present, Future, and Beyond theory co-creator Melanie Anne Phillips mentions the use of Dramatica in the analysis of real world situations.

Late last year we ran a series on Structuring Narratives in the Real World that discussed the various approaches towards using Dramatica to make sense of the senseless.

This is a challenging hurdle to get over. How can our lives be structured into stories if so much of it seems random?

Melanie addresses this in her post on Narrative in a Chaotic World:

True chaos has no predictable pattern.  Narrative is our attempt to find more stable transitory patterns in the ebb and flow – like the Red Spot on Jupiter but rather in terms of behavior – either ours or those around us.  Narrative puts a box around a part of our chaotic world and says that within this box, we can accurately predict the inner workings of things, assuming no force from outside the box disturbs or influences our captive slice of reality.

Combined with the notion that Our Minds Are Narrative-Generating Machines , one can begin to see that we quite easily self-regulate into storytelling.

When the proscribed behavioral plan suggest[ed] by each of our myriad of individual narratives come into conflict, we must rise above a series of independent solutions to create a greater narrative in which each smaller narrative becomes an element.  And then, we must arranges the interactions and contextual specifications of each of the smaller narratives, favoring one at times and another at other times or in other situations in order to co-ordicnate a larger truth to chart the overall course of our lives.

Our narratives craft the meaning we seek.