How stories shape our world
The last two books I read were Andrea Dworkin’s debut, Woman Hating and Salvation: Black People and Love by bell hooks.
The conjunction was coincidence — the former had arrived in the post (thanks Awesome Books), the latter had been lurking in the shelves since I scooped it up in a Yorkshire charity shop last year.
Hate. Love.
What’s the common ground?
Quite a lot, it turns out. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they are about exactly the same thing: how narrative shapes society thus determines the shape of relationships in society thus dictates individual experience within that society.
The bulk of Woman Hating is critical analysis of specific stories that embody and enshrine violent misogyny. Some are textual, like The Story of O, some are cultural narratives that systematise(d) violence against women, such as the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages and beyond.
Dworkin is crystalline on the role of words in forming social experience:
Books are for the most part in Amerika commercial ventures. People write them to make money, to become famous, to build or augment other careers. Most Amerikans do not read books — they prefer television…. books and the writing of them have become embroidery on a dying way of life. Because there is contempt for the process of writing, for writing as a way of discovering meaning and truth, for reading as a piece of that same process, we destroy with regularity the few serious writers we have. We turn them into comic-book figures, bleed them of all privacy and courage and common sense, exorcise their vision from them as sport, demand that they entertain or be ignored into oblivion. And it is a great tragedy, for the work of the writer has never been more important than it is now in Amerika.
Many see that in this nightmared land language has no meaning and the work of the writer is ruined. Many see that the triumph of authoritarian consciousness is its ability to render the spoken and written word meaningless — so that we cannot talk or hear each other speak. It is the work of the writer to reclaim the language from those who use it to justify murder, plunder, violation. The writer can and must do the revolution work of using words to communicate, as community. …
To keep the sacred trust of the writer is simply to respect the people and to love the community.
When words are misused, ignored or weaponised, people suffer. And this is as true in 2025 as it was when she published Woman Hating in 1974.
Published in 2001, hooks’ Salvation is equally trenchant on how narrative shapes reality. One area, she writes, where narrative has transformed experience is the glorification of materialism/condemnation of poverty in the United States.
In the past, by not attaching negative stigmas to material lack, black people effectively refused to allow material status to determine substantive value. In our churches we were constantly taught that being rich was not a virtue, that it was more virtuous to love one’s neighbor and to share resources, that greed was a sin. As the church started to become a site for class mobility (as churches evolved from places of worship to corporations, institutions requiring more money), these values were no longer emphasized… black folks of all classes began to buy into capitalist consumer thinking, which equated worth with material status….
More than racial assault, which black folks were quick to recognize and resist, this type of thinking was demoralizing. It was also terribly dangerous. It helped create a social climate in poor and destitute black communities were individuals were willing to rob, beat, and kill one another for material items…
When poor and destitute people of any race are made to feel that they really have no right to exist because they lack the material goods that give life meaning, it is this immoral climate that sets the state for widespread addiction. In recent years, when poverty has been depicted as a crime against humanity, poor people of all races have been seen as criminals and treated accordingly.
Dworkin and hooks both point to the creative power of narrative. The stories society tells itself become its reality.
Any meaningful change, at a personal or societal level, must begin with understanding narrative — how it’s formed, what it means, why it mattes.
Learning to craft stories isn’t just diversion, it’s our only chance of changing the world.
This means we must read as well as write, because we learn about stories from stories.
Some of the books that have changed my understanding of social stories:
Where Do We Go from Here? by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
As you can see from this list, socially significant writing is not limited in form or genre. Drama, poetry and fiction have as much to say and as active a role in shaping our world(s) as does philosophy or polemic.
Whatever we read, whatever we write, we have the privilege and duty to continually shape and reshape our self-narrative and the larger narratives of our communities.
What stories are you helping to write?