Stories are just lies. Fairytales your mum and dad told you. Like Santa. And the 1960s. So you might as well just chuck them away and forget about them.

Such was my grumpy attitude after listening to Will Self last summer. He basically said stories are entirely false. Life doesn’t happen that way. Life is a long string of continuous stuff, with no beginning middle or end. We look back on our experiences and construct stories around them so we can grasp them better, and maybe give them a little meaning, but they remain constructs.

It floored me for a bit. What the heckery are we doing here, if stories aren’t proper reflections of life? Why aren’t we all like Will Self, striving to write the kind of stream of consciousness, post-modern stuff that is tough to read but is probably a lot more true? Part of the answer is that Self is a bit of a rock star at it, and we’re not. When Self does it, it ends up being Man Booker shortlisted. It ends up being actually pretty good, albeit hard work. If we did it though, it’d be pants.

So yeah, this whole thing knocked me a bit. Then I thought more about stories. Sure, they’re constructs, but that doesn’t make them useless, right? We need them. They’re how we interpret the world. They’re how we inject meaning and entertainment and graspable emotion into life. I honestly don’t care if that meaning is faked. I don’t care if the entertainment is shallow. I don’t care if the emotion is manufactured. I need it all the same.

Follow Self’s reasoning, and you end up in a pretty grim place. You end up without a narrative to life, and without a reason for any of it. On a philosophical, pretentious level, I worry I agree with him. I’m not sure there is a huge purpose for it all. I tend to think that life is just a bunch of stuff happening.

But that is absolutely zero fun. So what’s the harm in putting some structure to it all? What’s the harm in building stories around it? Maybe that’s the point. Maybe stories are it. Maybe we’re here to take the world and make something more out of it; create a memory and a record that has some order and sense to it all.

And maybe not.

But either way, making up and listening to stories are at our core. Everyone does it. We can’t help ourselves. Everyone has anecdotes; episodes of their lives they’ve turned into little self-contained entertainments to tell and re-tell. They rarely happened as neatly as we tell them. And there’s always a bunch of other stuff going on as well. But we construct the story anyway. It’s just how we’re wired.

So I’m going to stop worrying about it. I bloody love stories. Traditional, beginning middle and end stories. Will Self can keep that other malarkey. I’ll dip in now and then – Umbrella was ace, after all – but for the most part, I think Will Self and I are going to stay in different literary places.

I’m certain he’d be cool with that.