Why write stories, anyway?

Quoting the video:

"I remember as a young boy my grandfather would set me down and he would tell me all kinds of scary stories - stories from his family, the Cherokee, and their legends that ran through these hills, and stories of ghosts, monsters, boogeymen that would keep you up at night. However, the stories he told me never really scared me. I understood that objectively they were scary, and that the things that happened in them were decisively not good, but they never bothered me because whenever he would tell me these things, he would just be excited.

"He would be so happy to share them, and any time I'd ask him about that, I'd be like, "How can you talk about this? It's such a scary dark story. Why are you so okay with it?"
And he would always say, "Well, I've already heard it, and now I get to tell it to you."

"And, uh, I didn't get what he meant for a long time. But a lot of these stories were stories that his grandfather would tell him, and his grandfather before him, and generations back, and like I said earlier, a lot of these stories are never written down.
They never exist outside of one person telling it to another.
But there's a sacrecy to that that's hard to wrap your head around.
These legends, these characters - they exist in my brain. They exist in my soul, so to speak.
And whenever you give them to someone else, you're not writing it on paper so that any passerby could see.
You are putting it in them.
It is their soul now. It is a part of who they are.
And there's something beautiful about, no matter how harrowing or disturbing the subject matter might be, that it is a piece of you that you are giving to someone else that will live on forever.

...

"What's interesting about all the stories that I've said is that they all derive from real world tragedies. There were people murdered and thrown into the gorge, there were people who died of starvation in the hills, and there were people whose families were lost while they were helpless to stop it.

"What all of these stories do, is they take these tragedies, these real world experiences people had, and they make them the stuff of legends. They make it to where their suffering meant something greater, something that still affects us to this day, other than a pointless tragedy."

Comments

[the dobermans]

Very well put.