During my stay at the Art Monastery,
there was a person who brought to my mind a certain idea that I had
thought of before but never in so much detail as he showed me. This
idea was how powerful stories can be. He showed us how some of the
best filmmakers create storyboards so detailed that the producers and
editors could not mess around with their ideas too much. In other
words, the story was so well set that they could not change it, and
so the original story came out fully. He showed us how he had
implemented this concept into a financing app he was creating; I
didn't fully understand it, but it has to do with laying out the
company's “story” into the app to ensure that things would go as
planned. A bit more complicated than that obviously.
This being an English blog though, I
thought it'd be a little out of place to talk about how good
storytelling can be used to ensure something is carried out in a
certain way. I thought it would be more interesting to talk in this
case about how stories connect to language and cultures. About how
stories are able to evoke emotions and teach lessons in a very
effective ways. There's a reason why all of the abstract art
(especially in areas like writing, theater and music) is not the
“mainstream.” And that's because people will always find the
relateable format of a story much easier to deal with than the
tough-to-grasp, more abstract forms of art.
The reasons why stories are so powerful
have to do with imagination and empathy, both innate human
characteristics. Through imagination, we are able to suspend our
disbelief of something and, to some extent, make ourselves believe
that the stories that we are being told are real. And that's
precisely what allows empathy to kick in and make us feel for the
characters in the stories. In psychology there is a theory of
something called a “Flashbulb Memory” and it is the idea that
when an event is accompanied by a strong emotional reaction it is
much more likely to be “burnt” into our memory. This is what
happens with stories. If instead of listening to a boring lecture
about moral behavior, you read/hear/watch a story that teaches about
those moral behaviors, you would be much more likely to remember them
and apply them, especially if the story involves you emotionally.
Even more if you are able to identify with the characters in the
story, which is the main reason why stories remain more popular than
abstract art. It leaves less to speculation and thus makes the
characters and the plot more relateable to the audience.
Despite that, stories are not the
perfect medium for communicating ideas. Despite not being an abstract
art itself, when attempting to teach a lesson through a story, as
many cultures have and still do, the story becomes a sort of
abstraction of the lesson. One must be told what the lesson
underlying in the story is, or otherwise that will be left to
speculation, just as if it were an abstract piece. That's precisely
where the fun part starts though. Stories can be more than just a fun
read or something to relate with; they can be a completely
unpredictable thing. With every person's individual interpretation of
the events that take place, misunderstandings included, a completely
new intention or purpose can surge out of the story.
And by intention I don't mean the
author's intention; rather, I am referring to the intention of the
story itself. The one that varies between readers. The one that makes
a single story fan out into so many different faces. Stories are a
powerful and unpredictable thing. Almost behaving like a living
being. Changing its intentions and stuff... Funny, it sounds similar
to how we described language at the beginning of the course. And with
good reason I suppose. After all, stories and language are quite
strongly intertwined. They compliment each other, granting each other
powers they would not have otherwise.
Humans and their imagination...
Exploring the universe one story at a
time...
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