With vision above and reality at the base, creativity resides beteen the two.*
(Kelvy Bird)

We live within many different stories and we carry many more within us. The large majority of these will never be written down but we couldn’t get by without them. We couldn’t live our lives as lists of data, although our stories do contain lots of information.

We despair when we are treated as a number, a fact; we want to be treated as a person with a name and a story. Numbers and facts bring clarity but stories help us to know and understand why we do things.

In his letter to young readers, Chris Anderson outlines what makes us different to other species – and it’s not language or using tools or being kind to others outside of our families:

What is your superpower? […] You dear child, can create worlds that don’t exist.**

Some of the most amazing things happen when we share our stories with others:

But even more amazingly, you can conjure up that same world in someone else’s mind. You know how you do that? With words. You just tell them about it. Gently, carefully, piece by piece. Until they can see it as clearly as you can.**

These remain stories inside our heads so we need to do something more to make them real and become something we can actually live inside:

And when two or more humans can see the same imaginary world, extraordinary things can happen. They can play with it together. The can get excited about the event that might take place int hat world. They can dream of stories and inventions and almost limitless possibilities. And sometimes, they can act to me our own work more like their imaginary world.**

This is the creative place between the imagination and reality, and it’s why love stories so much and will never give up on telling them.

(*From Kelvy Bird’s Generative Scribing.)
(**From Chris Anderson’s letter to you readers in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)