Books have been offering history, knowledge, inspiration and entertainment to readers for thousands of years.
But, take a look at 99% of books published throughout history. Are they telling your story? Do they tell the story of your ancestors? Your Culture?Books are special because they carry the history of a people, or culture through time. However, what happens when only a selected few stories are told, by a select few cultures.
Thousands of stories are lost to time. Never to be heard of or seen again.
The epic love stories….gone!
The brave warriors….lost!
The Children’s characters….non existent!
One of the most basic functions of stories is to teach. We use stories to quickly and easily learn facts, but stories also teach us how to be.
Through stories we communicate to our children (and to outsiders) how to act toward one another, what we value and what is possible. Stories preserve our own history and culture, passing it along in a form that’s easy to remember to the next generation. Stories bring order and meaning to the chaos and randomness of life.
If we cannot tell our own stories, we lose a huge part of who we are! Our culture and future generations are lost, while trying to live the stories “other people” tell about us.
With books, you don’t have to depend on oral history traditions to pass along stories. A book is one of the safest places to guarantee your story lives on after you do.
For thousands of years, the ability to tell your own story through books have been prevented by gatekeepers who wanted to control the narrative of society and it’s people.
These publishing gatekeepers held the keys to the printing presses and refused to “allow” anyone who threatened the story the “publishers” wanted to tell.
But not anymore.
Technology has allowed anyone to bypass the gatekeepers and tell their own story. So, even though it was thousands of years in the making, now is your time. You have the power to create your own story so you can pass down the values you believe in, to the current and future generations.
This is a moral imperative to do so.
Because, if you continue to allow other people to tell your story, you will always be subject to their rules and values.
What can you do?
- You can start to write down the stories you’ve been told as a child by your parents and grandparents.
- You can start to create a story that teaches the values you believe in for children all over the world to read.
- You can start creating.
