I - QUESTIONS

How can I make my life better?

What should I do?

How do I tell right from wrong?

Why do I feel so different from other people?

Why do I sabotage my own happiness?

How can I get ahead?

What is the meaning of life?

Have you ever asked questions like these? Most of us have. I certainly have. If your experiences were like mine, the answers fell into one of four categories. The first were some variation on I Don’t Know. The second were nominally humorous answers aimed at discouraging such questions. The third type came from people who gave me answers that would have me put all my efforts toward improving their situation, not mine. And then there were the standard answers we’ve all heard a thousand times that never really work. We also ask ourselves these same questions and can’t do much better, so eventually we give up trying and do what we can to muddle through life.

I never gave up. I wanted to know. I wanted answers, real answers. I understood that these questions are so big that there might not be any final answers, but there had to be true, useful and productive answers.

The questions were easier to answer in hindsight: what I could have done, what I should have done, and, sometimes, why it happened that way. But I still needed to solve the problem of what to do now so the future would be optimum, a much more difficult problem given the vagaries of human nature, both my own and those of others.

Behind all the questions lay the same obstacle: human nature. What about us makes us be this way? Why are we so emotional, irrational, intelligent yet oblivious, capricious yet driven? Our behavior is neither random nor totally predictable. What deep pattern beneath our particular circumstances, culture and consciousness shapes our decisions and directs our lives? What is the source code for human nature? That was what I wanted, the underlying framework on which our lives are built. The problem was how to get at it.

Two forces drove me forward. The first was curiosity. Why are we the way we are? Why do people keep acting in all these ways that seem to make no sense? The second was my conviction that if I could understand the system, I could get on top of it and have the life I wanted.

The consensus held that human nature on the level I was after was unknowable and any attempt to reveal its secrets could only fail. Indeed, for years I made only minimal progress, but I never stopped trying, never stopped watching for some little opening, some little crack in the wall I could wiggle through and get inside the problem. As often happens, the break presented itself in the context of another adventure.

Adventures in Theater
Some years back my wife, Nancy Ory, a writer, suggested we might enjoy writing play scripts for the stage. So we read plays, went to plays, read books about how to write plays, and began writing. After various false starts, many rewrites and readings later, we had a script, Friends and Lovers, a romantic comedy that needed to be staged. We could get actors, but we soon learned that producing, directing, designing, building sets and lights, publicity, stage managing and cleaning the theater were up to us.

We had a one month run. Every night we would watch the audience watch our show. Each night the audience was different and the quality of acting varied from night to night. Yet consistently parts of the play did better than others. In comedy there is an unforgiving honesty—If They’re Not Laughing, You’re Not Funny. Beyond that, we could tell when the audience was engaged. They were paying attention, not coughing, squirming, or reading their programs.

Some lines always worked—the actors couldn’t kill them. Other lines that should have worked never did. I was faced with the question of what makes a line work, what makes a scene work, what makes a play work. Standard procedure in theater is when something is not working, try something else, anything else, until you get it to work. I wanted to do better than that. I wanted to be able to see exactly what the problem was and to fix it, quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

Mister Fixit
At the time, we were members of a local group of would-be playwrights who were remarkably good at writing scripts that needed a lot of fixing, so I got plenty of practice. Over time, I realized I was better at fixing plays than writing them.

To that end I worked with specific questions about play structure such as what makes an effective climax, how to give each character a different reality, and how to maintain meaningful conflict. In addition, I asked myself more basic questions about theater. Why do people go to plays? Why is it, at least when the play is working, that the entire audience will emotionally accept this obviously fictitious enactment as real? Why do people care at all about an obviously made up story that never happened? And why does good drama move people more deeply and thoroughly than good rational explanation of the same issues?

My policy was to pin the question down and wrestle with it and make it give me an answer, a real answer. Some answers just restate the question, such as “Why does comedy make people laugh? Because it’s funny.” I wanted answers that gave me new understanding.

Answers Emerge
Doing so, I learned a lot about plays. One point stood out. When the play is working, the audience is right there for it. The play goes directly into the mind of the audience and fits in all by itself. If instead of putting on the play, I had stood on stage and given a lecture about all the issues covered in the play, the audience would have had to think about what I was saying before the information could find a place in their minds to settle down. The play didn’t need the extra mental process. Why not?

It wasn’t just plays where this happened. It was in movies, novels, fairy tales, religious parables, ancient myths, and daily gossip. It was stories, any kind of story. There was something very special about stories.

Meanwhile, I had been immersing my mind in the details of play structure, how the parts of a play fit together to make it all work. Since plays are stories, I was also aware of what stories were made of, how they worked, and what a story looked like when I saw one.

At that point my world changed. I started seeing stories everywhere. Casual conversation was nearly all some form of storytelling. Television, radio, movies, newspapers, books: more of the same, an ongoing flood of stories. So were my own thoughts by day and dreams by night.

We live in an ocean of stories. Everyone does and always has. So far as is known, every culture, every society that has ever lived has told stories. If history is our guide, we can’t live without stories. Why not? Why are stories so central to human existence?

I had to answer this question if I wanted to understand plays and how to make them hold an audience. But soon my interest in the question grew beyond the theater as I went deeper into peeling apart why we are the way we are.

I watched people and what they were doing and discovered they were all doing the same thing. They were not acting like the semiautonomous rational beings we think we are, but rather as characters in many stories at once, making their way through multiple intertwined plots filled with all the conflicts, adventures, reversals, triumphs and catastrophes that can only be called the ongoing human drama. These stories were mythic, for myths are the stories that guide our lives. No wonder stories make so much sense to people. Story is the nature of our entire life experience. We all lead mythic lives.

I could see these same behavior patterns in myself. Even my thoughts followed story format. Thinking about what a story is led me to a startling conclusion. The human mind organizes all its information as stories. Stories are how we think. They are our world. And that is why a good story makes immediate sense. The mind has to translate everything else into story. Thus the play beats the lecture and people everywhere tell all kinds of stories. Which stories they tell matters, but the point is that they are all stories and as such all follow the same basic story structure.

As I came to understand human behavior as based on story structure, one concept led to another and what people did that seemed incomprehensible before came to make sense.

This book describes the role of mythic story in human life and how it affects everything we do. It presents a new explanation of human nature and gives you insights you need to understand the basis of human behavior, why we are the way we are. You can also use it to take control of your life.

This way of looking at life has a name. I call it Biomythology, which is another way of saying “the study of mythic story in life.”

Everything in this book comes out of observations of and thoughts about real, everyday human life. I make no appeals to spiritual arguments nor do I ask you to take anything I say on faith. I encourage you to see for yourself.

Your own life is full of examples of everything I am writing about. As you read, think about each idea in terms of examples from your own life and your own experience. If you need help in connecting what you read with what you have lived, Appendix D, Paths to Discovery, gives questions and other activities keyed to each chapter to help you get started.

The material in Appendix D can also be used as the basis for workshops and other group activities.

To study life’s mythic quality, you must be familiar with what a story is made of, how it is built, and what it does. Therefore we shall begin by exploring story structure.