What's Your Story?

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...

GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT

I'm happy to say that my son's prosecution team won three Mock Trial competitions in a row over the past month, sending the school into the final round. The original field of about 40 schools has been winnowed down to two, with the final contest to take place this Monday. The semifinals took place in one of the larger L.A. Superior Court courtrooms, as will the final round, so we know there will be no shortage of space to accommodate what we expect to be a big turnout of support for both schools.

The semifinal contest was, of course, close, but I believe what enabled our team to prevail was a solid week of practicing both objections and redirects. Objections can be voiced to probe the consistency of a witness' story, and redirects are an opportunity to repair your witness's credibility after the opposing side has tried their best to undermine it.

As such, objections and redirects are two of the most difficult weapons in a trial attorney's arsenal. They both demand an ability to react in the moment and instantly form--and articulate--a logical reaction to what has just been said. One must be able to nail the inconsistencies and immediately point them out to the judge.

Watching both sides verbally joust over the fate of the suspect in a fictional murder case, it was easily apparent that, on one level, that's what the legal system boils down to--keeping your story straight. The attorneys on both sides construct a narrative to explain a suspect's innocence (or guilt) with relation to a criminal act, and do their best to undermine the story offered by the other side.

And that is the essence of many forms of writing, as well, whether it's persuasive writing (like Op Ed pieces), traditional journalism, magazine feature articles, industry white papers, whatever.

Telling a story remains the best way to illustrate your point, report the news, explain an industry trend, or argue the need for a particular service or product.

Pardon my Shakespeare, but, "What can saying make them believe when seeing fails to persuade them?"