This book by Will Storr was my favorite of all the ones that I used for this research. Even though it was a research book it was easy to read, engaging and fun. I liked that his voice felt like he was directly talking to me which made it not feel preachy.
I have collected a few different quotes of topics that I found interesting and useful. There was a lot of information that felt like and enlightening moment or when you realize something that had been in front of you this whole time, the quote below was one of them.
“Many stories begin with a moment of unexpected change. And that’s how they continue too. Whether it’s a sixty-word tabloid piece about a TV star’s tiara falling off or a 350,000-word epic such as Anna Karenina , every story you’ll ever hear amounts to ‘something changed’. Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. ‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. ‘Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect.’ In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity.”
I had never particularly noticed this, even though I have read hundreds of books and stories in my life. And I think this is a really important element to keep in mind for my project and that I can probably explore more with the creatives that I collaborate with.
“This is what storytellers do, create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists extension, their readers and viewers. Those who’ve tried to unravel the secrets have long known about the significance of change. Aristotle argued that ‘peripeteia’, a dramatic turning point, is one of the most powerful moments in drama, whilst the story theorist and celebrated commissioner of screen drama John Yorke has written that ‘the image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.’”
It is interesting to consider where the written/oral stories and the visual ones merge and what are the elements that they have in common, particularly since the creatives I will be working with might have interest in visual storytelling as well and so to understand how both compliment each other I believe is also important.
Another thing mentioned by the author is the importance of curiosity in storytelling, he says that humans have a thirst for knowledge so being able to awaken their curiosity in some way is very important to create engagement. I think this is something that might be challenging in general because usually people when they have a project or a business or want to present themselves to the world, they want to show the whole thing from the start. And I think it will be important to consider the very famous saying show don’t tell and think about the element of curiosity on being able to withhold information that is not indispensable so to create interest with the audience. Also, consider that people are always looking to learn something so think about what is it that you know that others might not.
Below are some examples the author talks about regarding to creating curiosity:
“In his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’.”
I was so excited when I read the example of Lost in the book, this TV show was one of the reasons why I became so interested in TV storytelling. I had never become so obsessed with a story in my life, this story plagued my dreams, my free time, my day dreams at school, I was determined to figuring out what was the big mystery with this strange island. In the end I came to the same conclusion that most people did that they were actually dead and it was some sort of purgatory. The ending of this show really dissapointed me as so many times happen with many TV show’s endings I believe that the story get to big for the writer and they lose control of it. But I think it’s interesting to read what the author says about Lost.
“Some of our most successful mass-market storytellers also rely on information gaps. J. J. Abrams is co-creator of the long-form television series Lost , which followed characters who mysteriously manage to survive an airline crash on a South Pacific island. There they discover mysterious polar bears; a mysterious band of ancient beings known as ‘the Others’; a mysterious French woman; a mysterious ‘smoke monster’ and a mysterious metal door in the ground. Fifteen million viewers in the US alone were drawn to watch that first series, in which a world was created then filled until psychedelic with information gaps. Abrams has described his controlling theory of storytelling as consisting of the opening of ‘mystery boxes’. Mystery, he’s said, ‘is the catalyst for imagination . . . what are stories but mystery boxes?’”
Lastly, only because I cannot include this whole book in my blog I have chosen this excerpt on the metaphor. This I think is one of the most powerful tools we have as writers it gives you the opportunity to make the reader feel or see something in a very particular way, which I think helps us as writers control our stories which is very powerful. Metaphors don’t need to be cheesy and they can also be used in many different presentations, I think this will be an interesting element to include in my next sessions with creatives and see how they can incorporate some metaphors into their own stories.
“Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to concepts that have physical properties: things that bloom and warm and stretch and shrink.”
Works cited:
Storr, Will. The Science of Storytelling : Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better, Abrams, Inc., 2020.ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=6119479. Created from ual on 2022-11-21 15:11:02.