In order to make sense out of anything -- analyzing the past, explaining the present, predicting the future -- the human brain relies on story.
Once, when someone at a party mentioned to me that they were not originally from Los Angeles, I asked, "When did you move here?"
A simple enough question, I thought, but I got a short autobiography in reply. The person framed their decision to move to southern California within (1) the context of the circumstances leading up to the decision to move, (2) the factors going into the timing of the move, and (3) the reason why they ended up where they did.
Far more information than I had sought, but I have to admit that I felt I had gotten to know this stranger a bit better through their story.
More evidence that a story's power lies in its emotional context.
And our strongest memories are those tied to powerfully felt emotions.
For example, I had the good fortune to drive across the country from New York to Arizona with my father at the age of eight. The memory of that trip -- nothing less than an emotion-packed, life-changing adventure for a young boy, especially when he gets to share it with his father -- is still fresh in my mind and I've always attributed my love of travel to that first journey.
And I retain what I call "snapshot memories" of specific happenings of that trip, still very clear in my mind:
* Scrambling into a darkened cave, a known outlaw hideout in the Old West, I can still see the stalactites and stalagmites in the shadowy light, still hear the drip, drip, drip of water onto the stone floor
* I can still hear the yowls of pain when seeing another young boy trip and land onto the spiny thorns of a short barrel cactus outside a motel where we had stopped
* I can still see a large, long-legged dog with half-closed eyes as he saunters up to me and displays a freshly killed Gila monster dangling from his mouth
In the last half century or so, the general sense of our society's "progress" has been largely based on technological achievements, from the moon landing to the invention of the computer, the Space Age to the Digital Age. In the process, science has seduced us with the allure of precise measurement, exactitude in a constantly changing world. As a result, facts have assumed a great importance in the Western world.
At the same time, stories have been dismissed as unimportant, even useless, yet stories remain how we transform facts into knowledge, how we give facts meaning. All explanations are stories. Stories are how we remember facts in the first place.
Oh, and Happy Holidays...
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
THE POWER OF NARRATIVE
Last evening found me in the L.A. Superior Court Building to watch my son's prosecution team in their debut effort at trying to nail a suspect accused of murder in this year's Mock Trial competition -- GO LIONS!
Mock Trial provides the opportunity for high school and middle school legal teams to both prosecute and, separately, defend a fictional suspect accused of a fictional crime. Each team goes up against another school, citing evidence, grilling witnesses on the stand, voicing objections and delivering final arguments. Ever since 1980 the Constitutional Rights Foundation has sponsored these yearly competitions, wherein students of opposing schools portray prosecutors, defense attorneys, suspects, witnesses and even bailiffs in the proceedings. Thousands of judges and attorneys volunteer their time to give students a direct lesson in our legal system.
Students prepare for weeks with teachers and volunteer attorneys, but in the courtroom they're on their own. The case is decided by the real judge sitting before them and, separately, their performances are graded by a small team of lawyers who score the individual participants. The total scores of each team determines who wins that evening's trial.
My son's team did well and won a guilty verdict, and today we learned that they had also won the evening's competition by outscoring the other team. Next week, on to the quarter-finals.
An impressive performance by all, and what I remember particularly well is that, in his closing remarks, one of the scoring attorneys complimented both teams on their ability to create and convey compelling narratives, noting that the ability to tell a convincing story is what a trial is, in essence, all about.
That was another reminder that the narrative is one of the writer's most powerful tools, and that a good writer always looks for ways to use it.
Even in many forms of business writing, narrative is useful.
For example, when I first began researching and writing industry white papers I quickly developed what I call a straightforward "challenge/solution" narrative structure.
By that I mean simply describing the issue to be addressed in a narrative form, then proposing the solution as a possible "ending" to the story. The deficiencies of inadequate solutions, or failing to address the challenge in the first place, can also be spelled out as alternate--and less satisfying--conclusions. The "moral" is simply contrasting the benefits of a satisfactory solution with the price of not dealing with the challenge successfully.
Before I sign off, I'd like to draw your attention to a great Profile of legendary (and award-winning) storyteller Horton Foote, who passed away in March of this year. It's in the October 26th issue of THE NEW YORKER, and it's by John Lahr, who at one point describes Foote's writing style when he was starting out in the 1940s:
"In Foote's plays, the big dramatic events happen offstage. Foote examined the ripple, not the wave. He was a quiet voice in noisy times."
I also particularly enjoyed a quote that Foote gave in an interview just this past January: "If I ever teach writing again, I guess the first lesson is to listen."
Mock Trial provides the opportunity for high school and middle school legal teams to both prosecute and, separately, defend a fictional suspect accused of a fictional crime. Each team goes up against another school, citing evidence, grilling witnesses on the stand, voicing objections and delivering final arguments. Ever since 1980 the Constitutional Rights Foundation has sponsored these yearly competitions, wherein students of opposing schools portray prosecutors, defense attorneys, suspects, witnesses and even bailiffs in the proceedings. Thousands of judges and attorneys volunteer their time to give students a direct lesson in our legal system.
Students prepare for weeks with teachers and volunteer attorneys, but in the courtroom they're on their own. The case is decided by the real judge sitting before them and, separately, their performances are graded by a small team of lawyers who score the individual participants. The total scores of each team determines who wins that evening's trial.
My son's team did well and won a guilty verdict, and today we learned that they had also won the evening's competition by outscoring the other team. Next week, on to the quarter-finals.
An impressive performance by all, and what I remember particularly well is that, in his closing remarks, one of the scoring attorneys complimented both teams on their ability to create and convey compelling narratives, noting that the ability to tell a convincing story is what a trial is, in essence, all about.
That was another reminder that the narrative is one of the writer's most powerful tools, and that a good writer always looks for ways to use it.
Even in many forms of business writing, narrative is useful.
For example, when I first began researching and writing industry white papers I quickly developed what I call a straightforward "challenge/solution" narrative structure.
By that I mean simply describing the issue to be addressed in a narrative form, then proposing the solution as a possible "ending" to the story. The deficiencies of inadequate solutions, or failing to address the challenge in the first place, can also be spelled out as alternate--and less satisfying--conclusions. The "moral" is simply contrasting the benefits of a satisfactory solution with the price of not dealing with the challenge successfully.
Before I sign off, I'd like to draw your attention to a great Profile of legendary (and award-winning) storyteller Horton Foote, who passed away in March of this year. It's in the October 26th issue of THE NEW YORKER, and it's by John Lahr, who at one point describes Foote's writing style when he was starting out in the 1940s:
"In Foote's plays, the big dramatic events happen offstage. Foote examined the ripple, not the wave. He was a quiet voice in noisy times."
I also particularly enjoyed a quote that Foote gave in an interview just this past January: "If I ever teach writing again, I guess the first lesson is to listen."
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