Who owns a story?

This past fortnight I have been pondering what stories are ours to tell and if there are ever any that can be said to belong to someone else entirely. On Friday I sat in my garden talking with a friend about everything under the sun. Some of my stories were mine to tell as they had happened to me; they were part of my life and I could pick and choose when I would share them. Yet other stories I told were not from my own experience but ones that had been told to me and I was now sharing. These stories were  nothing secret or private instead they were examples of innocuous topics such as the tale of the Smurf tattoo or the story of the abandoned holiday. 

Did I have any right to tell someone else's story? Would it have been immoral for me to have passed them off as my own? Could I fully recall if any part of them had been confidential? Who had originally told them? What would they think of the version I had heard? To whom did my story now belong? Could my friend retell it to someone else? Would she?

Our stories are only truly our own when they exist in our minds. The moment we share them we have to give up certain ownership rights to them. I certainly cannot police my friend and control if and when she decides to share 'my' story. I cannot control how she tells it, the tone of voice she will use, the details she will omit or expand upon. In one sense, she will make my story her own. It will be added to her repertoire and dragged out when the occassion suits. 

Narratives are a central part of our lives, both positive and negative. Stories influence all of our actions from morals to beliefs; from how we learn to bake a cake to what career we take. We learn through stories and we impart our knowledge and life through stories. I recently helped a 9 year old bake a cake. As we were working through the method we both told stories linked to cooking and cakes. One of my stories to her was about eating banana cake on holiday as a child whilst watching my brother's ship sail of to the Gulf War on the Spanish news; every time I eat a banana cake I recall that moment of panic and the frantic call home to find out if it was really true. I cannot think of when I would ever have felt the need to tell her that story but our joint action of baking allowed for associated stories to arise. 

If we live in a narrative world, can stories be protected and kept safely controlled? One cannot fully retract a story once it is told even, I would suggest, if we are conducting research and the story is requested to be removed. The physical words of the story may leave the page but that does not remove the influence of the story from the person who has heard it. Some stories are so powerful that the soft tendrils of their telling can last a life time and can influence even in their apparent absence. Even confidential stories do not remain so. One can be told and then retell a story so that any obvious facts are protected; names and settings are easy to change. So they can be retold in such a way that their essence is passed on even if the specifics are not. It is important to look at why we pass on stories that are not freely given but the ethics of this is for another day and something I am still grappling with in my research (for how can a child give consent to share a story if the story grows away from their control and becomes a faded image of their original telling? In fact, is there a point when it stops being their story? Is it truly their story if the subsequent retelling bears little relationship to the original?).

Trying to claim ownership of a story is like trying to own the wind: you may try but your chances of success are likely to be slim. Instead we need to accept that, once told, a story takes on a life of its own and will travel beyond our single telling. I do not believe we can judge the rightness or wrongness of this but must try and accept that this is just the nature of narrative.