One day I met a witch.
She turned me into a newt.
Then she turned me back again and for tea we had chicken soup.
This was the first story I ever wrote.
I was five years old. It lived in a scrapbook from my Prep class at Havenview Primary School for close to 30 years before being lost to the chaos of a life spent constantly moving from place to place.
The ending doesn’t really matter. It’s the fact that these 25 words are the beginning. The beginning of a life of telling countless stories.
The Human Need for Story
We are, at our core, storytelling creatures.
Long before we had social media, advertising, television, even books, we had fireside tales. We built myths to explain the stars, we carved stories into rock to preserve memory, we passed legends from voice to voice, parent to child, generation to generation. Story has always been how we make sense of the world, it’s how we carry information, pass down warnings, and hold onto hope.
Even today, despite all of the technology, we’re still shaped by narrative. We frame our lives in stories. We brand our businesses with them. We find our identity through them. We connect because of them.
We don’t just consume stories, we inhabit them.
The Story that Doesn’t Count
Despite all of this, we live in a world obsessed with metrics. We’re told both explicitly and implicitly that to be valuable, we must be productive. We’re told that our worth is measured in hours and minutes, in economics and effiiciency.
The arts are treated as a luxury, and creativity has become secondary to “real work.”
Look at the world around us, and compare it to the past. Smooth lines, cookie-cutter shapes, everything is modular. Design has become a question of how to create the most efficient, cost-effective aesthetic. Walk through a park, sit on a bench, and marvel at the wrought iron ornamentation of one that’s been sitting there a hundred years, then compare it to the blandness of the one that was installed recently. Open the door of a house built 100 years ago and note the decorative details that were crafted into the handle, then compare it to the dime-a-dozen shining smooth handles filling an aisle at Bunnings.
Efficient. Cost effective. But creative?
Creativity has been sidelined to efficiency.
Writers, musicians, artists, creatives of all kinds are expected to jusityf their time, their work, and their dreams in a language that often doesn’t recognise them.
Yet I would argue that creatives contribute more to society than almost anyone else. It is creatives who shape culture. Creatives provide the space for people to seek comfort, clarity, or courage. Creaties hold space for the ideas and emotions that others struggle to articulate.
But because what we offer can’t always be measured in a spreadsheet, we’re undervalued, underpaid, or overlooked entirely.
A World Without Story
Try to imagine it.
A world without novels. Without film. Without plays. Without music. Without games.
A world where children grow up without bedtime stories. Where history and language are taught in facts and figures, but without character arcs, without lore, without poetry.
Imagine a world with no ‘Once upon a time…’
Strip away every fictional world, every invented narrative, every hero’s journey, and what you’re left with isn’t a more productive society. It’s an empty one.
We would still have systems and infrastructure, but we would lack meaning. No shared myths, no guiding metaphors, no context for value and identity. The machines would still run, but we’d forget why we built them in the first place.
Without story we lose vision.
The Importance of the Creative
Whether it’s writing a novel, developing a TTRPG campaign, building a brand, or shaping a visual identity, you’re storytelling. Storytelling is making meaning out of information. It helps others to understand themselves or the world around them through the narrative lens.
And that matters, not just for your audience, but for you. It matters for your own sense of purpose and creative expression. For your own identity.
In marketing and communications we often speak about storytelling as if it’s a tactic. A hook. A method of persuasion. True storytelling, though, isn’t manipulation; it’s meaning, it’s alignment, it’s how we help people connect with something more. Storytelling is the voice that helps people recognise themselves through the narrative being told.
Storytelling Matters
The world as we currently know it is only going to try and move faster. Those in charge will continue to prioritise speed, output, and efficiency.
What we need now more than ever is intention, and story is how we find that.
Story is how we make sense of the chaos. It’s how we connect the universal to the personal. It’s how we make the big picture small.
It’s how we remember what matters.
My five-year-old self’s tale of a witch and some chicken soup didn’t change the world, but it was the beginning of my world. That first real spark of creativity, of imagination, of an identity that continues to burn today. Every book I write, every TTRPG adventure I run, every brand I build, every campaign I develop, and every strategy I design are all sparked from these 25 words I wrote as a five year old.
And that’s why storytelling matters.