Story and Narrative

A story is a structured sequence of related events. A story can be as simple as “I went to the grocery store and bought some carrots and came home,” or as a kindergartener’s contribution to sharing time: “My dad and I went to the park yesterday and I swang on the swings and it rained and we went home and it was lots of fun and then we made hot chocolate.” But a good story describes relationships among events in ways that emphasize how those events are connected—how and maybe why things unfolded as they did.

All science writing is storytelling, including peer-reviewed scientific articles, because authors must choose how to recount related events. You can never (and would never want) to recount everything that happened. Writing an article requires choosing which events are important (prior research findings, specific experiments) and which can be omitted (what the researcher ate for lunch, a flood that led to a lost week of work, an experiment that had to be repeated because of contamination), and then choosing how they should be sequenced and detailed. The order in which events originally occurred is rarely optimal for helping readers understand how the work you’ve done connects to your main point—that, is, to the story you want to tell.

A good scientific story emphasizes how elements of the story relate to each other. Stories are more memorable than lists for this reason; they involve logical connections that make the parts of the story easier to remember. Stories also do more work than lists for the very same reason; they convey how and why, in addition to what. The kindergartener would be telling a better story if they said that “I swang on the swings but we had to go home because it started raining but then my dad let us make hot chocolate because we were cold and wet.” (This is the logic behind the popular “And But Therefore” or ABT storytelling strategy.)

A narrative, in contrast, is a generalized (and generalizable) way of telling a story—a pattern that stories tend to follow. Most romantic comedies follow the same narrative regardless of the exact story they tell: single person meets other single person in a cute way, experiencing instant attraction but with some kind of barrier to connecting (they dislike each other for superficial reasons, they’re from different social classes, etc.) that causes an argument or other major tension and then is resolved in some way that lets the happy couple be together. “The American Dream” is another socially shared (and similarly fictitious-but-based-on-selected-true-events) narrative: young immigrant or young person born into disadvantaged circumstances works hard, finds opportunities in the United States, takes good advantage of those opportunities through initiative and effort, and is rewarded with a comfortably middle-class life.

Science writing (for other scientists and for broader audiences) also tends to follow one of a handful of common narratives. “Researchers in our field have long wondered why X does Y yet been unable to find out, but our novel method sheds new light on the properties of X.” Or, “it has generally been thought that X does Y for this reason, but by asking the question in a different way, our study provides evidence that the relationship between X and Y is more complex than was previously recognized.” Researchers are often aware of these narratives, and they’re useful to both writers and readers in helping everyone understand what kind of contribution is being made.

But science stories can also participate in wider social narratives of which researchers may not be aware. Research that involves (often white) researchers from high-income countries collecting data in low-income countries (often with the aid of non-white locals) can participate in a “white savior” narrative that perpetuates racist assumptions, in which wealthy white people recognize the plight of less fortunate minoritized groups or places, generously devote their resources to helping, and “save” the locals through their superior knowledge and abilities.

Metaphors are an important way that science stories can end up reinforcing narratives that authors might not want to support—and might not recognize, in the absence of recognizing the metaphor as a choice that matters. Describing molecular relationships in terms of “master” and “slave” molecules, for example, relies on the metaphor MOLECULES ARE PERSONS and participates in the narrative that human relationships “naturally” involve powerful people giving orders and subordinate people being required to follow them. Describing bacteria and fungi as “chassis” for bioengineering relies on the metaphor MICROORGANISMS ARE MACHINES and participates in the narrative that humans can and should manipulate, manage, and control other creatures to serve human needs. Describing evolution in terms of a “molecular clock” relies on the metaphor TIME IS CLOCK MOVEMENT and can participate in the narrative that contemporary Western timekeeping is a universal description of how time operates for all other creatures and processes.

Avoiding narrative, let alone storytelling, is no more possible or desirable than avoiding metaphor. They’re all features of ordinary language use, and therefore also necessarily features of scientific language use. They’re part of how we all make sense of lived experience through language, and thus also part of how scientists make sense of observation. They’re also useful to enable understanding! As with metaphor in general, we shouldn’t aim to avoid narrative, but to recognize how we’re invoking narrative, so that we can consciously choose which narratives (and which stories) we want to help tell.

Further reading

• On psychology research that supports the existence of a handful of common narratives in fiction and in fact-based writing, see this article on “The Narrative arc: Revealing core narrative structures through text analysis”