Stories are everywhere. From commercials to great literature to Pepperdine’s Malibu campus— real life stories heroes and villains surround and affect us. The stories that we are exposed to and the stories we connect with help us develop our own identity and interpret the world around us.
Before I came to Pepperdine the stories that I heard about college life and the characters that came with it had a strong effect for better or worse on how I initially interacted people at Pepperdine and how I gauged my success as a freshman. As my college career has progressed from the first day of my freshman year to this day in my last year at Pepperdine I cannot emphasize enough the effect that the stories of my fellow students literature and the world around me has had on my life.
The basic structure of a story both exists in books and appears in every day life: a hero or heroine encounters and reacts to conflict. The conflict could be anything from an accounting midterm to climbing Mt. Everest. How the hero reacts to it and the final outcome vary across the whole human spectrum in theme and intensity. Add in setting secondary characters plot action and the numerous other parts of a story and the story’s connection to its recipient its message and its power grows exponentially.
As the reader or listener connects and relates to a story he not only has an intellectual stake in the ideas that the story is conveying but also has an increasing emotional stake in the characters to whom those ideas are inseparably linked. For example I think we all had trouble not crying at the end of Braveheart. On a deeper level though beyond a mere emotional reaction that story helps shape our conception of what bravery and honor are and how someone with those traits would interact with the world around him. We have an emotional connection with the character of William Wallace in that movie so we more readily accept the ideas it presents regarding what bravery and honor actually mean.