Writing narrative

Narrative can be intensely pleasurable because storytelling is central to human existence. Narratives are deeply affective, engaging and consequently also potentially painful. Narratives throughout time have had social functions: people in every tradition and location have created community and continuity through stories and transmitted wisdom through their telling and repitition. Narrative is “international, transhistorical, transcultural ... simply there, like life itself”. With the rise of literacy and the emergence of the novel as a modernist literary form, there was a turn from the community story to the story of the individual. The emerging disciplines of philosophy and psychology have also brought new ways of understanding human experience and its relations to story. Psychoanalysis understands the function of the individual unconscious to be the production of narrative. Lived experience is sorted and ordered and made sense of through stories laid down as memory, fantasy and dream