On Telling Stories
This 2 minute read was written by Poncho, published 8 years ago, and updated 3 months ago. It is under an MIT License, here is the source.What are stories? Are they just words on a book or frames on a movie? To me, they the base unit of complex human perception.
What is a story? What does it mean for something to be real? What is the scope of telling stories? To me, stories form the basis of human perception. Beauty and despair are both human experiences that arise as a consequence of a story. Pain, pleasure, curiosity, deep fear and our biological urges (whatever they may be) seem intrinsic to the animal part of our humanity, even though that boundary is blurry.
What does your inner speech sound like? Mine is almost always conversational, and I like it so much that I try to do it way as often as possible. If you could develop mind‑reading abilities and used them on me in an average moment, you would likely hear an imaginary conversation with myself disguised as another person, potentially anyone.
People who know me know that I can be annoyingly anecdotal when I talk. This happens because, whenever I have a conversation, I have probably already had it to some extent in my head. I don’t see this as a goal but as a consequence of my preference for naturally conversational inner speech. Even when I deliver a monologue, I feel as though it has a conversational soul. I love it when others get involved during a monologue; I often ask questions sometimes rhetorical, other times genuine. I really like to pause when telling stories to give people space to comment on each part. It’s not that I plan my stories ahead of time before sharing them with friends. I can barely plan the stories that I want to tell the world without spiraling into a pool of distractions and side ideas.
What actually happens is that I have a profound trust in how things make me feel. If something happens recently, or if I watch a movie that moves me deeply, I trust that feeling when I remember and retell it. I don’t think about plot devices, character arcs, motifs or any kind of structure beforehand. I firmly believe that an unbiased perspective and an honest retelling of events allow you to be sensitive to the impactful stories that arise from day‑to‑day experiences.
The biggest difference between children and adults here is that children can still feel surprise, which in my opinion is one of the most powerful emotions for capturing and directing attention. Too many people are too wrapped up in their mental processes to be surprised by anything anymore.
Great stories are everywhere. Whether they are remembered depends on how you tell them.
Author Comments
Commented 3 months ago
Back in 2017 when I wrote "On Telling Stories", I had Design all over my mind at the time. I was very serious about the impact good design has on modern life. I felt like many poor human experiences came from fails in Design practices. Design englobed every single decision on the production of almost anything in modern day-to-day-life. Things like traffic, crowded movie theaters, renewing your passport, retail work, etc where like that because of poor design, which itself has infinite causes like incompetence, disinterest, impatience, or greed. This huge space in my mind occupied by Design, there's a certain bias on the original idea of this article, and on retrospective, it makes it look as if storytelling was merely a device or dimension of the Design practice. But really, for me, the art of telling stories is something even more profound than that, so I had to make an update.