A short article on 'story'

Story is has been a way of making sense of the world throughout human history. Of course story began as an oral form. The idea of writing down stories was a later development. It is important to recognise this, for ideas passed on orally are much more fluid and changeable. Committing something to paper, while ensuring the fact that it can be passed on for longer and further does limit its growth. Once a story has been committed to a written form, there is an element of the finite about it. Stories passed on through families or from storyteller to storyteller are ever-growing and ever-changing. Although we know this, it is as well to remind ourselves of it from time to time and to recall that the idea of 'objective fact' is really something that emerged with the spread of writing and was ultimately enshrined in our thinking at the time of the Enlightenment.