ABSTRACT
People are storytelling animals. They love stories for the pure pleasure of telling and hearing them told, and they need them for emotional reasons. Stories help us work through anxieties or explain mysteries or justify our feelings and actions. We are constantly running stories through our minds and repeating them to ourselves and other people. Into those stories people weave their assumptions, prejudices, hopes, and fears. You can tell a good deal about people from the stories they tell.
