Can Stories Change the World? By Sheila Athens

My favorite quote about writing is from playwright Tom Stoppard: 

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

I’ve always understood this quote to mean that the stories we write can change the world. In some cases, those changes are sweeping, impacting large numbers of people in significant ways. But more often than not, the changes are more intimate, individual and never to be shared with others. It is precisely those private realizations, wishes and dreams that made us fall in love with books to begin with.

We saw ourselves in Nancy Drew or Hermione Granger or Starr Carter. The lessons we learn from books often create a seismic shift inside us, teaching us how to love more fully or to empathize with someone who is different than we are or to embrace an aspect of our being that we hadn’t previously understood.

I was lucky enough to have studied as a book coach under Lisa Cron in the days when her fabulous book, STORY GENIUS, was about to be released. She is famous for saying that we come to story to navigate reality. We go to our stressful, impersonal and data-driven day jobs, where we become numb to what is going on inside us.

But at night, we snuggle under the covers, hoping to spend time with characters who fall in love or confront their grief or finally stand up to the person who has run them down all their lives. We come to books to see how others move about in the world, whether that world is real or imagined. 

What this means to us as writers is that our books need to be filled with emotion. Readers come to the page to feel something. Yes, a book needs an engaging plot, but it needs emotion, too. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a book coaching client who had too much emotion on the page. Yet it is common to see client work that needs more emotion on the page. To again paraphrase Lisa Cron in STORY GENIUS: “Story is not in what happens externally. It’s in how the external events impact the protagonist.” In other words, how does the protagonist feel about those external events? How does she make sense of them? 

If stories are to change the world, as Tom Stoppard says, do they exist specifically to teach us lessons? To examine the complexities of our lives? To show us the possibilities when it comes to sibling rivalries or getting revenge or embracing our true selves? 

Most importantly, should authors set out to write a story that will change the world, even in some small way?

Jennie Nash, CEO of Author Accelerator, and Lisa Cron both teach that a novelist should know the point of her story before she ever sets out to write the book. By having a clearly-defined point upfront, the writer can craft the story so that each scene is written to work toward and emphasize that point. This is the method of story planning that I embraced during my many years training under Jennie. I have continued to embrace it since starting my own book coaching practice several years ago.

Many successful writers, though, start with a character or a climactic scene or a “what if” situation. They write the first draft and maybe even the second draft before the point of the story becomes apparent, even to the author. In other words, the point of the story—what we are to learn from it—reveals itself throughout the revision process. 

I’ve had clients start their book thinking they were writing about X only to discover by the end of the first draft that they were really writing about Y. They might, for example, think they are writing about the injustices of war only to figure out by the end of the first draft that they are writing about the importance of family. Same plot points, but a different spin on what the book is really about.   

There are those authors, though, who will tell you that their books are meant solely for entertainment, with no lessons to be taught. I’m okay with that approach, too. There’s huge value in a book that’s written solely as a means to escape our everyday world. 

The pandemic has taught us many things, one being that our society turns to story—to books and movies and TV shows—in times of uncertainty. Stories soothe us. They take us to foreign lands or deep inside ourselves. They help us to navigate the world. They show us what changes are possible in the world. As Tom Stoppard has said, “the right words, in the right order, can nudge the world.”  

Whether a writer is at the beginning stages of planning her story or on her fourth revision, it is worth asking the question: “Do I want my story to change the world, even just a little?” and “If so, what do I want that change to be?” Knowing the answers to these questions can help you shape your story both in the planning stages and as you write it. 

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Sheila Athens is a traditionally-published author and a book coach. Within her book coaching practice, she specializes in mainstream, book club and women’s fiction, as well as romance. She lives in Jacksonville, FL, where she’s always on the lookout for quiet spaces, eccentric people and colorful reading glasses. Learn more at SheilaAthens.com. You can join Sheila for her daily #GratitudeForTheDay on all of her social media channels: Instagram.com/SheilaAthensAuthor, Twitter.com/SheilaAthens and Facebook.com/SheilaAthens

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: How To and Tips