Until I was forty-two I was an impoverished professional, college-trained storyteller and part-time writing teacher at San Francisco State. Then I wrote something completely different, a software program, and life changed. Seriously: my life, your life, life on this planet, the only life we know, changed, overnight. It was the early eighties and software changed life forever for everyone--I just happened to be there, at the beginning. That would have been a completely different story if there hadn't come a wave of renewed interest in 'storytelling' as a business strategy and investment opportunity. And where there are business strategies and money to be had there is software to be conceived, designed and written, which is what I have been doing for decades since.
Now, suddenly, I find myself in meetings with entrepreneurs, marketers, media experts, all on the make, as usual, over The Next Big Thing, and all bubbling with enthusiasm for storytelling and Big Data, storytelling and communications, storytelling and social networks. And the one thing they all have in common, as they pursue TNBT, is they have not a clue what storytelling actually is. Oh, they recognize a story when they hear one; they can tell stories, too--personal stories of triumph, opportunity, poor timing, thwarted ambition. But they haven't the slightest notion how stories are made, or what's required in the telling; they cannot tell you, me, or one another, what defines a narrative, or when a story is not a story, but simply expositive writing. They certainly cannot explain how to do any of that with video. All of which would be fine by me if they didn't resist wanting to know.
Willful ignorance has certain advantages when selling TNBT to investors. But that ignorance can be a real disadvantage designing actual products and services. And that ignorance is deadly when you finally come to market. They were talking storytelling: crowd-sourced storytelling, storytelling beyond PowerPoint, transmedia storytelling. But what they were describing were web-based non-linear editing and collaboration on the iPhone. They were describing tools. It was as if they saw me writing in a notebook with a pencil and tried to upsell me a pen with no idea what I was trying to capture on paper. Got a smartphone? You can be the next Spielberg--just download our software and sign up. Record yourself and conquer the world via YouTube.
Don't misunderstand me; I wrote that first software application to retrieve a lost novel from the damaged floppy disk on which it was irretrievably stored. Anyone who has hand-written and transcribed a 600 page manuscript, then consumed a carton of whiteout typing out six revisions, hails the day the word-processor and daisy-wheel printer arrived--and rues the first time their hard drive died with no backup. Word processing certainly made delivering clean manuscripts easier. But the word processing tools had no good effect on actual storytelling.
Tools in the hands of people who know what to do with them can produce things that appeal to the imagination, that are, to Emerson's mind, truly beautiful. But in untrained hands good tools are wasted; they produce garbage.
There is a connection between storytelling and writing software we will get to. But, for now, I am going to turn back the clock to where I started, over three decades ago, before software, to that time when I spent several evenings each week in the company of eager minds, exploring together a few basic questions:
- What is a story?
- How are stories made?
- How are stories told?
- What qualities make a story worth telling? worth hearing? worth remembering? worth repeating?
