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Writing Tips for Receive Our Writing Tips Newsletter by Email Origins of a Story by Melanie Anne Phillips Imagine the very first storytellers.
Actually, what they told would certainly not be considered a
story by today's standards. Rather,
they probably began with simple communications with but a single meaning
at a time. Even animals recognize a cry of pain or a coo of
love from another creature, even across species.
So it is not a great leap to imagine that rather than just crying
out in immediate response, early man might have come to intentionally
make sounds to indicate his physical and emotional conditions.
Ask any cat or dog owner if their pets don't speak with them! Nevertheless, a grunt, coo, scream or growl does
not a story make. First we
need to ratchet things up a bit and take one small step away from simple
sounds that have direct physical or emotional meanings. For example, if you are hungry you might make a
"longing" sound and point at your belly with a wistful
pointing motion. As simple
and silly as this seems, it is actually quite a leap in communication.
No longer are we tied to single symbols or single experiences;
not we can string them together to create more complex meanings. What about jumping up another level and stringing a
few complex meanings together? Well,
before you know it, early humans were chatting in non-verbal sentences,
describing journeys, experiences, and even warnings. And, of course, language would evolve as more and
more people had more and more to say and discovered the benefits of a
common vocabulary. Now such a sophisticated communication is still not
a story. But it is a tale.
A tale is simply a statement that starting from a particular
place and state of mid, if you follow a particular path, you'll end up
at a particular destination. That's what fairy tales are all about.
Paraphrased, they all basically say, "If you find yourself
in a given situation, you should (or should not) follow this given path
because it will lead to something good (or bad). As long as the physical and emotional journey is
credible, the statement is sound. Now,
your audience may simply disagree with your conclusion as author of the
tale, but if your statement is sound, at least they can't argue with
your logic. Of course, the very first tales were probably true
stories about someone's encounter with a bear or directions to find the
berry bush that makes everything look funny when you eat them.
But it wouldn't take long or our early storytellers to realize
that they could create fictions that summed up the value of their
experience in a single, message-oriented tale. But beyond this, a clever storyteller with an
agenda might realize that he could influence people
to take (or avoid taking) particular actions in specific cases.
No longer were tales just descriptions of real events, means of
imparting the value of experience, or entertaining fictions.
Suddenly then became a tool with which to manipulate others. To do this, there must be no gaps, no missed beats,
no emotional inconsistencies. And
in addition, the tale must be captivating enough to grab and hold the
intended audience - to pull them in and involve them so deeply that they
are changed by the experience. And yet, despite all its power, the tale has
limitations. Primary among
these is that the tale speaks only to a single specific situation and a
single specific course of action. So,
as a storyteller, you'd need to fashion a whole new tale for each
specific path you wished to "prove" was a good one or a bad
one. But wouldn't it be far more powerful to prove not
only that a path was good or bad but that of all the alternative paths
that might have been taken, the one is question is the best or worst? Now, the simplest way to do this is to simply say
so. You write a tale about
just one course taken from a given situation, and then state at the end
that it is the best or worst. So,
rather than being a simple statement, this new kind of tale has become a
blanket statement. If your tale is being told just to your own
village, to the people you grew up with, then there is a good chance
they will accept such a blanket statement since your tale probably
reflects a local truism - some "given" that is already
accepted by your audience as true.
The tale simply serves to reinforce existing beliefs, and at the
end everyone nods their heads in agreement with the outcome. But what happens when the tale is told in another
village. What if their
givens are not the same. There
may be one or two in the crowd who question the storyteller and ask,
"I can see why that path is good, but why would it be better than
xxxxxx?" When confronted with an alternative approach, the
storyteller might then briefly describe how the suggested path might
unfold, and why is it not as good (or bad) as the one presented in the
tale itself. Again, being among friends (or at least among those
who share a similar if not identical world-view) they will likely be
easily convinced. And, it
is also likely that due to that similar outlook, only a few alternative
paths might be suggested, and all rather easily dismissed. The development of story structure probably
languished in this form for centuries, as nothing more advanced or
sophisticated was really needed. Enter that advent of mass media.
As soon as books began to circulate across micro-cultural
boundaries, ad soon as plays were performed in traveling road shows, to
important things happened that forced the further development of the
tale into what has ultimately become the structure of story. First, the audiences became wide and varied.
and was no longer drawn from a homogeneous pool of consensus.
Rather, they cam from many walks of life, with a variety of
beliefs and agendas. And
so, as the tale traveled, blanket statements were not nearly as easily
accepted. Many more
alternative approaches would be suggested or considered individually by
audience members. So, such
a tale would be considered heavy-handed propaganda and discounted
unceremoniously. And second, due to the mass distribution of the
tale, the original storyteller would not be present to defend his work.
Whatever other paths might occur to the audience would not be
addressed, robbing the work of its previous ability to be revised on the
spot as part of the performance. In response to this reception, many authors no
doubt retreated from the blanket statement form of the tale to the
simple statement, thereby avoiding ridicule and strengthening the power
of the tale. After all, is
it not better to make a smaller impact than no impact at all? And yet, there were some authors who took another
tack. They tried to
anticipate the alternative approaches that other audiences might
suggest, and took the radical step of including and disposing of those
other paths in the tale itself. A
brilliant move, really. Now,
even when the storyteller wasn't physically present,
he could still counter rebuttals to his blanket statement. Of course, the key to the success of this approach
is to make sure you cover all the bases.
If even one reasonable alternative is left un-addressed, then at
least part of your audience won’t buy the message. As mass-distribution moved tales farther a field
from the point of cultural origin, more and more alternatives we
required. By the coming of
the age of recorded media, a tale might reach such a wide audience and
cross such boundaries that every reasonable alternative would come up
sometime, somewhere. Eventually, the tale had been forced to grow from a
simple statement, to a blanket statement,
to a complete argument incorporating all the ways anyone might
look at an issue. This
effectively created a new and distinct form of communication that we
recognize as the story structure we know today. By definition then, a tale is a statement and a
story is an argument. And
in making that argument, the structure of a story must include all they
ways anyone might look at an issue.
Therefore, it certainly includes all the ways a single mind might
reasonably look at an issue. And,
effectively, the structure of a story becomes a map of the mind’s
problem solving processes. No one ever intended it. But as a byproduct of the development of communication from simple tale to complex story, the underlying structure of a story has evolved into a model of the mind itself. Copyright Melanie Anne Phillips Download Melanie's Complete Writing Tips Book
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