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Storytelling 101: Symptomatic for the People

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Murky conclusions

Click image for Haiku Deck–Image c/o Haiku Deck

I totally wrote this whole entire post about one of the chapters of Wired for Story, analyzing whether a particular bit of advice was useful or not (it very much was) by looking at two different depictions of the X-Men character Jubilee (NOTE FOR NERDS: I was pointing out how you couldn’t possibly have moments like her and Logan’s chat in SoCal in X-Men Vol. 4 #4 without being hecka familiar with X-Men #244, Jube’s first appearance).

I didn’t just think about writing it, and I didn’t just outline it. I wrote it. I was even going to write a one-issue script combining the three (!) moments that I think are most important in Jubilee’s character history. But even though I’m enough of a nerd to do that, I don’t actually have time to just this second.

I’m not just telling you about this post I wrote and didn’t publish because I want some credit for writing more than I show (but I do! Oh, I do…) but because I think the way that I really want to engage with Wired for Story is not to engage with individual chapters and pieces.I want to deal with the text as a whole.

Wired for Story is full of good writing advice. Don’t waste time. Don’t get bogged down in digressions and useless subplots. Make details count. Surprise the reader. All great advice. You should totally follow it.

But the connections between the individual pieces of advice and the neuroscience studies that are supposed to justify what are incredibly traditional-sounding bits of writing advice (tradition-sounding, but still solid, I should remind you), these connections aren’t always consistently strong. Some later chapters feature a quote or two from neuroscience experts and anthropologists in the beginning of the chapter as a way of setting up a bit of writing advice that Cron wants to get to. Using only a few quotes makes it seem like the advice came first and the research was cherry picked to go along with it, as opposed to starting with the research and then searching for implications and applications. The links aren’t reliably strong.

But this, I think, is symptomatic of the moment that we’re in. We have all of this information about storytelling—Wired for Story, like Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, holds a bibliography chock full of research papers and pop neurosci books—but we don’t really know how to apply any of it yet.

Add to that the massive upsurge in multimedia story consumption and the explosion of storytelling potential in free (and cheap)(and expensive) apps and software, all because of the Interwebs, and it makes sense that, as a culture, we’re paying more attention to what good storytelling consists of and what effect it has on us. Wired for Story is one early effort to draw real lessons from all of that science and theory.

I made a brief presentation using Haiku Deck to communicate some of my thoughts on this stuff visually. Enjoy. 

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