I have a spiritual relationship with stories. I believe that all the best art is reliant on storytelling, or at least has a big storytelling component. I believe that stories shape our perceptions and beliefs and that they’re core to our psychology. I think we can hold stories in our heads without knowing it and subconsciously act them out. I think a good story has its own internal logic to it, a wisdom or a line of thinking, and that more powerful stories have clearer and more powerful wisdoms behind them.

Therefore, if you want to understand why people do what they do, you should should think about the stories they tell about themselves and the world they live in.

Let’s make the abstract concrete with an excellent character: Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Zuko was exiled from his homeland by his father to hunt the Avatar. His father gave him a burn mark on his left eye, a grisly reminder of his lost honor, figuratively and literally changing the way Zuko sees himself. The Fire Lord had impressed on Zuko that compassion was weakness and that only strength would make him worthy to return home.

With those internal stories as a framework, Zuko becomes a tireless hunter of the Avatar, devoted and disciplined and compassionless. I think the burn mark is crucial to his single-mindedness. It has a powerful narrative built into it, and it’s a traumatic memory, so he’s slow to reexamine that memory and reframe that narrative. Character progression happens as characters retell their internal stories. Zuko slowly redeems himself as he adjusts his beliefs about honor and strength.

From what I can tell, people tend to think “Characters aren’t people, they’re totally different things and you can’t apply the same framework to people as characters.” I don’t believe this. I think it’s a difference of scale: the average person has endlessly more memories and experiences than the most developed character, and a person’s internal narratives are much more nuanced as a result. I think we enjoy hearing about characters because of this: they’re much easier to understand. A character in a story is like a narrative experiment, a way of isolating variables and simulating their effects.

Presumably, wisdom is not irreducibly complex. I have to believe that the lessons we learn from the small stories will scale up to the complexity of life itself.

Nietzsche conceived of the mind as a collection of “drives” or “passions,” each with its own internal logic, that competed for expression in our actions. I see them as stories instead, and they live and die by their clarity and their usefulness.

Let’s apply a little evolutionary thinking. If a human mind is a community of stories, then personal growth comes from good community management. We should maintain a healthy diversity of stories. We should mutate stories and experiment with them constantly. We should do our best to account for “hidden” stories in the corners of our mind that we dare not explore. And we should deliberately practice the skill of writing narratives for ourselves.