The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
Will Storramazon.com
The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
Storytelling, then, is born from our need to order everything outside ourselves.
John Yorke • Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them
At present, we seem to be suffering from a widespread failure of literary imagination. We have become worse at imagining the experiences of other people, less inclined to credit these experiences as being as valid and real as our own. Why is this? In part, I think, because of the methods by, and pace at which, we acquire our stories. After all, eve... See more
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more
We’ve discovered where a story begins: with a moment of unexpected change, or with the opening of an information gap, or likely both. As it happens to a protagonist, it happens to the reader or viewer.