I was told to come here and tell you all sto­ries, but what I’d like to do is in­stead tell you why I’m sus­pi­cious of sto­ries, why sto­ries make me ner­vous.

In fact, the more in­spired a story makes me feel, very of­ten, the more ner­vous I get. (Laughter) So the best sto­ries are of­ten the trick­i­est ones. The good and bad things about sto­ries is that they are a kind of fil­ter. They take a lot of in­for­ma­tion, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this fil­ter is that it al­ways leaves the same things in.

You’re al­ways left with the same few sim­ple sto­ries. There is the old say­ing that just about every story can be summed up as “a stranger came to town.” There is a book by Christopher Booker, where he claims there are re­ally just seven types of sto­ries. There is mon­ster, rags to riches, quest.

When asked to de­scribe their lives, what is in­ter­est­ing is how few peo­ple said “mess”. (Laughter) It’s prob­a­bly the best an­swer, I don’t mean that in a bad way. “Mess” can be lib­er­at­ing, “mess” can be em­pow­er­ing, “mess” can be a way of draw­ing upon mul­ti­ple strengths. But what peo­ple wanted to say was, “My life is a jour­ney.” 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, “My life is a bat­tle.”

I was told to come here and tell you all sto­ries, but what I’d like to do is in­stead tell you why I’m sus­pi­cious of sto­ries, why sto­ries make me ner­vous.

I was told to come here and tell you all sto­ries, but what I’d like to do is in­stead tell you why I’m sus­pi­cious of sto­ries, why sto­ries make me ner­vous.