our dreams are our stories

Why do we read/write/watch stories? Why do we need thousands of them and always new ones?

It’s not just escape and fun. It’s also survival of the species.

Each of us has the potential for thousands of different personalities/lives. Some are stronger than others, but all are capable of growing and becoming dominant.

When a group of people faces a crisis together, the individuals by nature (like water finding its own level) take on roles (like “leader”) that are necessary for survival — with previously hidden potential coming to the fore.

In reading and writing storise, we exercise these potential lives within us, and vicariously acquire experience, which could, under unexpected crisis situations, prove important for the survival of the group or the species.

That’s also why it’s important to preserve and read thousands of old previously out-of-print and forgotten books.

That is from an e-mail from Blogging about Books and I find it particularly true for myself. I live a normal life in South Dakota, going to college, and living at home. I don’t really have any adventure.

But with my stories, I can enter in any world I can create. I can do things that not only do I not have the money for, nor do we have the technology for, but that I cannot physical do here.

The other reason why I write is because I can create worlds. Yes, we have a pretty nice world here. But what if we changed something?

Writing is us experiancing the world in ways that we (hopefully) never will have to and it is us taking on personalities, hidden behind names and other occupations, that we wish we had, or that we wish we could overcome.

So maybe, instead of telling new writers to write what you love, maybe we should tell writers to write what they want to do. Write themselves. That’s what I did after all.