In the world of marketing, communication, public relations and the web, the big buzz word these days is “story.” What is the story? How do we tell our story? Is there a story to tell? The buzz list goes on and on.
Stories are hip these days. I, of course, knew this a long time ago. Stories are what makes the world go round. It’s the reason why we go to a movie, read a novel and stay glued to a magazine article.
Stories resonate with us. We get them and with good reason. Well, a couple of reasons, actually.
First, stories are familiar to us. They are built into our DNA. Long ago, before we could speak in any comprehensible language, all we could do was “ugh.” Not a great tool for telling a story. But we could draw. And pictographs became the first story boards, painted or drawn on the walls of caves. Think of these as the first big screen TVs, though you are going to have to live with an awful lot of repeats since the medium was both primitive and permanent, lasting right up to this day.
Stories, of course, began to morph over time. Once we could whip out a couple phrases in our native tongue, we’d sit around the campfire and tell stories orally. Then print was invented and we ended up with books. Shelves of books. Entire libraries of books. We basically went nuts for stories.
Then came the web, which opened up a door for a world of folks who had no idea how to tell a story. The web was run by dweebs who could punch fierce code but didn’t have the social skills to say hi to the dweeb in the next cubicle. Stories went to hell, especially when the Second Anti Christ (Google) came along. Microsoft was the first, in case you’re wondering.
Ah, Google and their damned search engine optimization strategies. Keywords were the bomb, not a story. A story was only as good as its ranking in the search engine, so the masses flocked to the idea of writing information so that it ranked high. That meant lots of keywords and the story be damned.
Then a funny thing happened, something I knew would be the case long ago. No one read the information. This miracle of communication, from web pages to Facebook, fell on largely deaf ears.
Why? Because people love a good story. They can’t help themselves because their brains are wired this way.
Yes, your brain wants a good story. Researchers have found that the components of a good story, a really detailed description, an exchange of dialogue between characters or an evocative metaphor, sends the brain spinning. Different parts of our brains are activated by the elements of a story and it helps us feel alive.
For example, the words lavender and cinnamon titillate our language center as well as the part of the brain that processes smells. We can smell the lavender just by seeing the word in print or hearing it.
A metaphor, it turns out, is an extremely powerful thing. It can set off the sensory cortex, which is how we perceive textures through touch. Descriptions such as “he had leather hands” or “she had a velvet voice” are actually touching – we feel the words as well as hear them.
A couple days ago I wrote about my life being all fiction. There is some truth to the idea. These studies have shown that your brain can’t really tell the difference between reading about an experience and actually experiencing it in real life. Your brain processes the information the same. In other words, a good book is just as good as life itself in the way your brain perceives it. This is why you feel so alive. Your brain is simulating reality when you read, much as it does when you dream.
In fact, a good story can actually improve your social skills in the real world. People who love a good story are more likely to understand other people, empathize with them and see to world from their perspective.
Now here’s an interesting twist. Stories can make your mind keener and more perceptive when they are told in print or in the movies, but not television. Well, at least in children. That’s because children are often left to watch television alone, so there is no real world interaction to add context to the story. It is just information. However, if a parent sits with the child, it will come to life, just as it does with a movie or book.
I love the fact that stories are in again. I have spent much of my adult life telling stories. I love the whole art of storytelling, keeping someone glued to a page or a screen with every word I write.
In the process, I connect with them. They can see themselves in what I write, or see my perspective on something that may or may not be familiar to them. Through this, we all learn more about our world and the complexities it offers. Like a simulator or a computer game, stories let us train for real life. It helps us become better at it because unfamiliar ideas and situations become familiar to us through the stories we read. It gives us comfort when new things inevitably come along, because we have experienced it before, at least in the words of others.
In a world of article spinners and banal writing on the web, it’s nice to know that a good story still turns us on. We are hard wired this way. We can’t help ourselves. It is one of the things that has and will always set us apart from the machines we create. Someday they may be able to create a story, but they can’t experience one. That is our pleasure, and our pleasure alone.
In the Emerald City, making it all up as I go along (as any good Story Laureate should),
– Robb