One of my favorite stories and also one of the shortest in the world is this by Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso:
“And when he woke up the dinosaur was still there.”
I had never thought of truly reflecting on what makes, this one sentence story so special until I delved into the research of this project. There are so many elements that make up a good story, but not only that, there are so many elements that influence humans to be genetically programmed to be attracted to stories.
I did not know the full extent of psychological behavior behind the “innate ability of humans to tell stories” and be attracted to them. I was particularly enlightened by Will Stor’s The Science of Storytelling : Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better.
I will get more into it this author in the next post, the main thing that I started to notice when I dived into my research on storytelling and narrative, and how it is so connected to human behavior, was that while we are apparently born storytellers that doesn’t mean we are born with an actual talent to construct a good story. Though some people may be born with a gift for storytelling and story construction that is not true for the majority of the population. It is a skill that can definitely be learned. It is however, also influenced by factors that maybe you can’t control like charisma, “a quick mind”, an interest in reading. That is why I think people must find their own storytelling voice and persona, one that aligns with your personality and what you feel comfortable with.
Anyway, let’s get into the hard research of it all.
In his article “Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind: Cognitive Narratology, Discursive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction.” David Herman explores many aspects around how the mind work in relation to narration in face to face interactions. Below is an interesting excerpt from his text:
“In a discursive-psychological approach to communicative interaction in general and storytelling in particular, memory, perception, emotion—in short, the mind—do not reside beneath the surface of participants’ verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Rather, the mind is spread out as a distributional flow in what participants say and do, together with the material setting that constitutes part of their interaction. In the case of narrative, the question is how cognitive processes can be lodged not just in storytellers’ reports about their own or others’ behaviors, utterances, and experiences, but also in modes of narration (individual or shared, retrospective, embedded, etc.), types of perspective (internal or external to the storyworld, stationary or dynamic, fine- or coarse-grained, etc.), and strategies for situating narrated situations and events in space and time. I argue in what follows that, in conjunction with ideas developed in traditions of narrative study, discursive psychology can contribute at least some of the tools needed to explore the mind-relevance of these aspects of narrative, though extending this initial sketch will require integrating other, complementary frameworks that have been used in cognitive approaches to narrative research (Herman, “Cognitive Approaches”).”
What I found so interesting about this text is the amount of factors that come into play in the mind for a narrative to be built. Not only internal factors like perception, emotion, memory but external too like other’s behaviors, the way they experience something, personal biases, your positionality, etc. It made me think: How much are these factors being taken into account by your run of the mill branding and marketing agencies? My assumption is: not much, it is impossible to cater to and control all of these elements.
I did some research and found some common factors that ARE taken into account in branding and marketing and they are mainly basic information about their target audience: age, gender, social media consumption, level of education, etc. I did not find this metrics particularly useful for my project so I will state this as one of the main ways my project differs from typical branding and marketing agencies. A good story knows no age, gender or level of education, it can be told on any medium and adapted to any situation.
Let’s move into another different, but related topic: digital storytelling. To delve into this interesting topic I will quote Storytelling Practice in Sectors of Education, Psychology, Communication, Marketing: A Narrative Review (full citation at the end of the post)
The authors of this article recognize that “a pattern of digital storytelling include health, identity, strategic communication, and the creation of interrelationships. […] the best practices emphasize relevance and reaction, informing and educating people. For instance, a healthy digital version of storytelling should provoke a response, and the person telling them must reach as many people as possible.”
They continue stating: “the digital understanding of storytelling practices is to connect emotionally with the audience to impact their actions. Digital storytelling depicts a challenging form of generating a connection between old style oral storytelling and the communication form utilized in the modern era and information advancement.”
This statement resonated deeply with me and what I’m trying to do! I agree wholeheartedly with this previous statement however it is not something that I am used to seeing constantly in the digital storytelling that I consume. Why is that?
The answer I can come up with is it usually becomes impersonal and inauthentic, which is quite funny since what people crave the most is personal and authentic stories, that they can relate to and engage with. Maybe, just maybe, the digital age that we live in has overwhelmed our minds and demands so much from us that we don’t know how to tell those stories anymore? As a young creative you are expected to dominate technology and social media, to know how to create an online image that is perfectly curated to reflect you and your practice, in an articulate, compelling and of course aesthetic way. But nobody actually taught us how to do it! It just became an expectation of society.
Another quote from our previous authors: “Over the past ten years, our universe and how we narrate stories has changed in a myriad way. For example, people have shifted from face-to-face physical levels to digital platforms to stimulate social movements via digital smartphones through social media accounts. First, in the past decade, there has been an evolvement of digital visual storytelling. The rise of this form of storytelling has allowed numerous people to show stories more than before. Through such evolvement, it has added a storytelling dimension that demands improved connection and creativity.” Keyword being DEMANDS. There’s no other option but dominate the social media narrative and succeed or become irrelevant and fail. I’m talking about particularly millennial creatives, the ones that got to see the transition to the fully digital age and had to learn it on the go, we must not be confused with Gen Z who are digital natives, they were born when the switch had already happened.
How can I help this millennial creatives not get lost in the demands that our digital society is asking of them? This project focuses on this problem that I have identified, and I intend to provide an aid to some of this creatives to help them create a good story that will hopefully help them reach their goals.
Works Cited:
Herman, David. “Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind: Cognitive Narratology, Discursive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction.” Narrative, vol. 15 no. 3, 2007, p. 306-334. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nar.2007.0023
di Furia, M., Nicoli, N., Akyar, Ö.Y., Rossi, M. (2022). Storytelling Practice in Sectors of Education, Psychology, Communication, Marketing: A Narrative Review. In: Limone, P., Di Fuccio, R., Toto, G.A. (eds) Psychology, Learning, Technology. PLT 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1606. Springer, Cham.