Narrate Your Way to a More Meaningful Life

Source: Ivana Tomášková / Pixabay

In the fiction and creative nonfiction classes that I teach as part of the creative writing program at my university, I routinely stress the importance of every story having a plot and a purpose. No matter how intrinsically interesting the raw material may be, unless the story has a coherent structure (i.e., a beginning, a middle, and an end), and an overarching theme of some kind to give it meaning, readers are more than likely going to check out before the end of the second page, or, if they do go the distance—as I am forced to as the instructor of the class—wish they had checked out rather than waste 20 minutes of their valuable time. The students who take this advice to heart typically produce some fine pieces and exit the class with a good grade. And, according to a study recently published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, they might just also go on to live more meaningful and productive lives than their less successful storytelling peers.

Building on research suggesting that people use “narrative thinking” to make sense out of their lives, mentally narrating stories to construct their reality and formulate a sense of what they are experiencing at a given moment, researchers at Reichman University in Israel conducted a series of studies exploring how skill at storytelling, or lack thereof, impacts the sense-making function of narrative thinking. Hypothesizing that storytelling “strengthens the sense of meaning in life and favors the endorsement of high-level goals while organizing and enacting goal-oriented actions,” they assessed participants’ storytelling abilities and then cross-referenced the results with a self-report scale measuring their sense of “meaning in life” and “endorsement of high-level goals.”

In the first study, participants completed self-report scales assessing their perception of their skills in storytelling and their sense of “meaning in life” and “endorsement of high-level goals.” The self-reports on meaning and goal endorsement were used in the other two studies as well.

In the second study, participants’ storytelling abilities were rated by a personal acquaintance. After completing the self-report scales in Study 1, each participant was asked to nominate “a friend who knew them very well,” and this person provided a global rating of the participant’s storytelling ability.

In the third study, participants created and told stories, which were rated by two different sets of listeners. Divided into groups of three, they were instructed to create two separate stories—one a two-minute story about an event that exemplified a personality trait that characterized them, and the other an original two-minute story using three random words—and tell these stories to the other two people in their group. The pairs of listeners then rated the storyteller’s proficiency, rotating through the groups until all three participants had been scored. Another pair of listeners, who had taken a course in storytelling and were trained to rate storytelling quality, watched video recordings of these stories and then assigned a score to each participant’s proficiency.

Across all three studies, participants who were rated as proficient storytellers exhibited a stronger sense of meaning in life and endorsement of high-level goals than those whose storytelling abilities received lower ratings. In affirming the sense-making role of storytelling and the relationship between narrative and a sense of meaning in life, the results of the study suggest a beneficial and possibly even therapeutic role for storytelling workshops.

While the concepts of “meaning in life” and “high-goal endorsement” are difficult to teach due to their abstract nature, I know from personal experience that storytelling can be taught, because I do it in my creative writing classes every semester. A little training in various strategies for providing structure and coherence to narrative can turn a student with a notebook full of colorful but inchoate ideas into a proficient (even if not necessarily published) storyteller.

And if, as the study suggests, storytelling skill is positively related to meaning in life and high-goal endorsement, workshops that teach storytelling may serve as “psychological health interventions,” enhancing a sense of meaning and purpose in life by providing tools for organizing the colorful but inchoate details of our daily lives into a meaningful and purposeful life narrative. Whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, then, having a plot and a purpose in your stories can translate into deeper meaning and higher goal-setting in your life.