Writing (and rewriting) the moral of your story

An excerpt from “Write Your Story: A Simple Framework to Understand Yourself, Your Story, and Your Purpose in the World”

On the face of it, you know what a moral is. The moral of a story is a simple lesson that can be taken from the events that took place inside of the story. But in order to understand why the moral of a story matters so much, there are two things you need to see. 

The first thing is that, when a story has a moral, the story is told with purpose. No detail is random. Ever. Every single element of the story serves the moral to make sure that the reader doesn’t miss it. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is not really about a boy or a wolf. It’s about how being dishonest with others puts you in danger of losing their trust. 

A moral means a story can be “about” one thing but really is about something different, on a deeper level. Take a minute to think through what your story might really be about. On that deeper level. 

The second thing to understand about morals is that every story has a moral. Even when the moral isn’t stated explicitly in the story, your brain will, without fail, deduce (or concoct?) a moral, even if it happens outside of your awareness. Your brain is so concerned with meaning-making that it won’t rest until it finds the “moral” in every experience. 

Pay attention next time you watch a movie or listen to a friend tell a story from their weekend to what your brain is doing. It’s pulling from a catalog of morals you’ve heard or created in the past, looking for the right fit: 

• Nice guys finish last. 
• People are mostly kind and good. 
• This kind of stuff always happens to me. 
• Life isn’t fair. 
• It never pays to be dishonest. 
• You can’t trust anyone these days! 

Your brain attaches a moral to the story so you can file it away in its appropriate category. Once the moral of the story is defined and the story is filed away, it now acts like a filter for how your brain processes information. Information will come in and go through the filter, and anything that doesn’t “fit” gets filtered out. If you’ve decided the world is an unsafe place and people are always looking to take advantage of you, when you meet someone who is being kind to you, you might assume they have an ulterior motive and you shut them down. 

Make no mistake: Not all morals are created equally. Not all of them are helpful or supportive. Not all of them are interesting. Not all of them make very good “filters” for your life or anyone else’s. Not all of them take your story where the hero wants to go. Some morals don’t translate between time periods or cultures. Sometimes a moral “works” for a time in your life and then needs to be upgraded. The good news is, you can always write (or rewrite) a new moral, even to a very old story. 

The reason I’m telling you this is because when I was writing the story of my divorce, I would often wonder to myself why all of this was happening to me. That language—“happening to me”—is not language I would use anymore to talk about much of anything, but that’s definitely what I was wondering at the time. Why is this happening to me? 

I could feel the heaviness of the question, even though I couldn’t quite explain it back then. It’s an obvious question to ask when you’re handed the diagnosis or given bad news or uncover a piece of information that changes everything. Why is this happening to me? But no matter how I answered the question, I came up with a moral I didn’t love. 

The morals I came up with back then were things like, “Men are such jerks” or, “No one can be trusted,” or, “The world is an unsafe place.” I could feel those morals bumping around inside of my brain and body, but they weren’t meanings I wanted to stand by. They weren’t messages I wanted to write down. They weren’t blueprints I wanted to use to guide the rest of my story. 

Remember that when you choose a moral, it becomes a filter for all future experiences in your life. It acts as a blueprint for how your stories are built from here on forward. 

This is not woo-woo, self-help manifestation fluff. It’s basic neuroscience. The moral you write to your story (consciously or not) carves a pathway in your brain, and once that pathway is carved, it’s very difficult for the neuron to travel any other way. 

Wouldn’t you rather the moral to your story be something sturdy, something you’d like to build a house on? 

So, what I did back then to get my brain off the well-worn “he’s such a jerk” track was to change the question I was asking. Instead of, “Why is this happening to me?” I started asking myself, “Why am I telling this to a reader?”

As in, literally, why am I writing this down? 

At the end of each little vignette of writing, I would write the words: “The reason I’m telling you this is because…” 

Then I’d picture my imaginary reader and write the next few sentences directly to her. At this point, I had no plans to publish. I’d just imagine sending this story to my sister or one of my close friends and saying to that person, “I wrote this for you—here’s why I wanted to tell you this story.” 

Almost every phrase I wrote after that jump start would go something like this: “I’m telling you this because I want you to know how powerful you are, how remarkable, how incredible… I want you to know how this—the thing you hate so much right now, the thing that is nearly killing you—is the best thing that has ever happened to you. I want you to know how you dodged a bullet, how you can do literally anything you want, how this is the first day of the rest of your life.” 

Can you feel how much lighter that moral feels then the “Men are such jerks” moral I’d come up with before? 

I’m convinced (although there’s no definitive way to prove this) that the only reason I have the life I have today—a very happy marriage, two happy and healthy children—is because I changed the moral I was writing in that story. If I had continued forward with the “men are jerks” moral after my divorce, I never would have even noticed my now-husband, who is one of the kindest, gentlest, most sincere people I know. My brain would have glossed right over him or made up a story about how he must be faking it. 

The kinder he was to me, the more I would have dismissed it, thrown it out, pushed it away. This is how neural pathways work. There’s no way for you to “write” a story in your life that veers from your morals too much. Your brain cares way too much about staying in its well-worn tracks. 

Instead, I did meet my husband and we fell in love. Like any relationship, it’s not without its bumps in the road, but even when things don’t go the way I hope they will, the pathway in my brain doesn’t say, “Men are jerks.” It says, “You are powerful…you get to make a contribution here…this is the first day of the rest of your life.” 

What might become possible when you write a better moral to your story? 

I hear from people every now and then who say it feels trite and reductive to write a moral to your life story. Why would you want to put yourself in a box like that? Life doesn’t have one fixed meaning. I can see their point. And yet perhaps this is precisely why writing your story matters so much. How else could we continually construct—and reconstruct—the way we see ourselves inside the world? 

What if writing (and rewriting) the moral of the story is the bravest, most expansive thing you can do? 

Taken from “Write Your Story: A Simple Framework to Understand Yourself, Your Story, and Your Purpose in the World” by Ally Fallon. Copyright © 2024 by Allison Fallon. Used with permission.

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• Read “Write Your Story: A Simple Framework to Understand Yourself, Your Story, and Your Purpose in the World” (StoryBrand Books, 2024) By Allison Fallon.
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