What Is a Story?
Ask a room of seven-year-olds what a story is and the answers arrive fast. "Something that happens." "Something you read at bedtime." "Something made up." They are all right, and none of them is the whole answer.
Ask a room of adults and you tend to get a pause. We spend our whole lives swimming in stories, yet few of us stop to ask what they actually are. It seems the right place to begin, because Our Town Our Story rests on one simple belief: everyone has one.
So, what is a story?
At its simplest, a story is about someone (or something) we care about, who wants something, and who meets something that gets in the way. By the end, something has changed. Character, desire, obstacle, change. That is the skeleton.
A recipe for a sponge cake is not a story. The day your grandmother burnt the sponge an hour before the wedding, and everyone ate it anyway and pretended it was meant to be that way, is definitely a story.
But a story is more than a shape. It is how we make sense of a world that otherwise arrives as one long jumble. Facts tell us what happened. Stories tell us why it mattered. Facts are forgotten by teatime, while stories can be remembered for thousands of years.
The very first stories
Nobody knows what the first story was. Speech leaves no fossils, and the earliest storytellers left no notes. But we can make a good guess about where it happened: around a fire, after dark, with tired people listening.
Imagine the first person who came back from a hunt and, instead of simply pointing at the injured friend, explained how it happened. Where the river was too high. What the animal did. Why they should never go that way again. That was information, but it was also a story, and the story did a far better job of keeping the next hunter alive than a list of warnings ever could.
The first stories were the first school, the first news bulletin and the first memory a community shared. Before anything was written down, remembering was a team sport. Oral cultures developed remarkable ways of keeping stories accurate over generations: rhythm, rhyme, repetition, song, and characters vivid enough to stick in the mind. Some researchers argue that certain Aboriginal Australian stories describe coastlines as they were before the seas rose at the end of the last ice age. If that is right, those stories have been carried faithfully for something like seven thousand years, with no paper at all.
Stories on the cave wall
Then people began to make marks. In the Chauvet caves in France, painters more than thirty thousand years ago depicted horses, lions, and bison moving across the rock. At Lascaux, some seventeen thousand years ago, the walls fill with running herds. Anyone who has seen photographs of them can feel the movement. These artists were not decorating. They were telling us something.
Further back still, researchers working in Sulawesi, Indonesia, have dated a cave scene showing human-like figures and animals to more than fifty thousand years ago. It is described as the oldest known picture that appears to tell a story rather than simply show an animal. Think about that. Someone, tens of thousands of years ago, held a lamp up to a wall and decided that what had happened was worth keeping.
Clay, papyrus and the birth of writing
Writing arrived much later, and its beginnings were dull. Around five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, people pressed wedge-shaped marks into wet clay. They were counting things: sheep, grain, jars of beer. Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared at roughly the same time.
But once people could write, they could not resist writing stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh, set down on clay tablets, follows a king who loses his dearest friend and becomes terrified of his own death. It is the oldest great work of literature we can still read, and it is about grief and friendship. Four thousand years on, that still lands. In Egypt, the Tale of Sinuhe follows a man who flees his homeland and spends years longing to go back. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey began life as spoken poetry and were written down perhaps twenty-seven centuries ago.
Notice what these stories are about. Not kings and gods, really, but loss, homecoming, fear, loyalty and courage. The costumes change. The people inside them do not.
Where do stories come from?
They come from life. Every story, however wild it becomes, starts with something someone saw, heard, felt or feared.
The great flood in Gilgamesh may echo real floods along the Tigris and Euphrates. The king himself may have been based on a real ruler of Uruk. Troy, long dismissed as pure invention, turned out to have a real city buried beneath it. Even a dragon may begin with a farmer who dug up an enormous bone and wondered what on earth had made it.
Even the stories I write, with all their rockets and space rangers, are built on things that are true: curiosity, nerves, and being brave when you do not feel brave. The details get stretched, polished and passed along until they take on a life of their own.
Exactly when a true event becomes a story, and a story becomes a legend, is a big and rather fascinating question. It deserves its own post, so I will leave it there for now and come back to it soon.
How stories have travelled
Stories have always gone wherever people could carry them. For a long time that meant fireside and market square. Then monks copied manuscripts by hand, slowly and beautifully. Around 1450, Gutenberg's printing press made books cheaper and far more widespread, and stories began to reach people who had never been in the same room as the teller.
The novel arrived. Victorian readers waited eagerly for the next instalment of a Dickens serial, much as we now wait for the next episode of a series. Radio brought voices into the kitchen. Cinema and television brought pictures. The internet has since put a publishing house in every pocket, and anyone can now tell a story to the whole world in a matter of seconds.
That is wonderful. But something has quietly slipped away in the process. We know the characters in a dozen streaming series better than the people who live three streets away. The stories closest to home, about the old cinema, the flood, the shop that everyone's mum worked in, the wedding where it snowed, are rarely written down anywhere. When the people who remember them are gone, the stories go too. Oral cultures understood this danger better than we do. They treated remembering as a duty.
Bringing it back home
That is where Our Town Our Story comes in.
Our pilot project in Haywards Heath, made possible with National Lottery funding through Arts Council England, is built on a simple idea: the best stories are often the ones already sitting in our own community, waiting for someone to ask. We work in four stages: Discover, Create, Shape and Celebrate.
We are visiting schools, libraries and community spaces to gather stories from people of every age. Children write and illustrate. Older residents share what they remember. Local writers and illustrators help shape it all into something worth keeping. The result will be two books. The Haywards Heath Story is a work of fiction woven from what we find, and The Best Stories of Haywards Heath is an illustrated collection of the finest stories we gather. We are also creating a story trail that links places around the town, so you can stand where something happened and read about it.
In a way, it is the oldest idea we have, brought up to date. Gather people. Listen. Keep what matters. Pass it on. The people around that first fire would recognise every part of it.
The pilot runs until early 2027, and if it works as I believe it will, Haywards Heath will be the first of many towns to do the same.
So, what is a story?
A story is the way we tell each other that something happened, that it mattered, and that we would like you to remember it too. It is the oldest technology we have, and it still works better than most of the new ones.
You have one. Everyone does. It may be funny, or sad, or a bit embarrassing, or so ordinary that you have never thought to tell anyone. Those are often the very best ones.
Come and tell us yours.
Matthew Newnham is a children's author and co-director of Our Town Our Story.
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