We humans love stories. Make us memorize dull facts and dates, and history is achingly dull. But tell us stories about people, with drama and action and poignancy, and yes, humanity, and now we're cooking!
Whenever we're writing, we're telling a story. Good writing tells the story well.
We've all known people who are such raconteurs that it would not be surprising for a lecture hall to be in rapt attention to their words, even if all they were doing was reading the phone book.
Captivating our readers with a clear, compelling story is as necessary for the most technical topics of mathematics and engineering as it is for poetry. They just present differently.
Take this two-speaker dialogue excerpt from Nathan Hill's novel Wellness:
"Nobody understood their real motivations."
"And isn't that the truth! Over the years, I've found that people tend to act automatically and think automatically, but when they're pressed to explain why they act or think a certain way, they rush into the void and invent a story. And then, incredibly, they believe that story."
"Even if the story isn't true."
"It doesn't need to be true. It merely needs to be satisfying. We all do it, to some extent. Between ourselves and the world is a story. Often it's a good story, a satisfying story, a personally appealing story....All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true. Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking. We're really very silly creatures."
When we are inhabiting the ultimate authority position of our writer-selves, how are we constructing a satisfying narrative? On what is the satisfaction based? Is it true? Does it need to be?
