We are all storytellers. Each and every one of us is a world-builder and a creator of characters and stories. We just refer to it differently. We call our world a “bubble”, our character creation “education” or “learning” or “manipulation” or “judgment” and we call our stories “life”. But we are all observers and creators. None of us holds the ultimate truth, if there is any.

This also means that we all hold unique truths, initially defined by our parents and the environment in which we lived as children, but which we later develop into a distinct view of the world, the people around us, and their stories. We all have our own subjective truths, our own world, our identity and our view of the identities of others, our stories. All based on our individual experiences.

As a child, I learned that I could theoretically ask “why?” until the explanations reached the end of the universe and all that remained was another “why?” without an answer. Of course, my parents’ patience never reached that far. People have busy lives, and while our curiosity is endless, our patience is not. Add to that the usual (if ineffective) focus of communication on having said our part rather than reaching a common understanding, and eventually we stop asking. But our brains don’t. To make sense of all the things we encounter in life that are unexpected, unusual, unknown, or uncomfortable, it tells us stories.

In the first part of this quest to define story, we’ve talked about actors, events, and plot. In the second part we looked at empathy and conflict, both of which in combination create suspense and carry the audience through the story. This creates an experience that makes the story feel personal and relevant to the audience and allows them to internalize what is happening.

Both empathy and conflict serve another purpose that we haven’t discussed yet: They help to convey a message.

We began this journey by taking a look at the story definitions provided by dictionaries. These definitions introduced us to actors who are defined by their ability to choose and perform an action, not by being a human character. We’ve talked about events, which are things that happen to these actors, or things that happen because of their actions. And we’ve talked about creating a plot by arranging these events in a logical order.

Think of a handful of stories.

Was that hard? Probably not. But have you ever thought about what a story actually is? It is not a book. A book can contain a story like a canvas holds a painting. Paint strokes can tell stories just as melodies and words do. But they are not stories. They only form them, when put in the right order. Woven like images created from colored threads.