Fake storytellers vs. the real thing

The resurgence of narrative at the end of reading

A century ago, in the era of high modernism, a generation of avant-garde writers and artists declared war on the “beginning, middle, and end” story structure that had been central to Western narrative theory since Aristotle’s Poetics. Experimental works such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—which attempts “the abnihilization of the etym,” or the unleashing of the atomic/etymic energy from within language itself—jettisoned traditional narrative in the interest of radical formal experiment. Other anti-narrative movements, such as deconstruction and postmodernism, flourished in the latter decades of the 20th century, only to fizzle out themselves in due course. Amid the 21st-century “narrative turn,” story once again is everywhere. Age-old concepts of story are—ironically—the “beginning, middle, and end” of how we see just about everything. 

Moving beyond the purview of the bookstore and movie theater, storytelling has now been incorporated into economics, law, medicine, marketing, and business strategy, among many other fields once presumed to have nothing to do with narrative. When Harvard Business Review’s Bronwyn Fryer flew to Los Angeles twenty years ago, seeking story expert Robert McKee's views on improving business communication, readers may have questioned what a screenwriting guru could possibly offer the corporate boardroom. But McKee’s perspective—that we can create more emotionally resonant and effective corporate communications, business strategies, and marketing campaigns if we rely on telling stories rather than promulgating facts—is now so mainstream as to be accepted without hesitation. As Parul Sehgal notes in her recent New Yorker piece “The Tyranny of the Tale,” we have reached the point where “Story has elbowed out everything else, from the lyric to the logical argument, even the straightforward news dispatch.” 

Sehgal correctly notes that the current appeal of narrative — and implicitly our instinct to push back against everything from high modernist poetry to information-dense white papers — is supported by modern brain science, which tells us that we recall facts and statistics better if we absorb them as part of a story. We also naturally gravitate toward story to connect us to ideas and people: We are “pattern-seeking, meaning-making creatures,” as she puts it. The brain wants story, in other words. It looks for stories. And when it finds a story, it locks in. We are never tired of riding the arc of the hero’s journey, over and over again, across a zillion variations. Story is sticky—and it makes things stick. We remember stories easily—and we also easily recall the information contained within them.

But just because we can all get hooked on story does not imply—despite it being a common platitude—that “we are all storytellers.” In a 2014 speech, Austrian graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister pulled no punches about “the mantle of bullshit” surrounding “storytelling.” People want to bill themselves as storytellers “because it’s in the air,” he warned. But that doesn’t make them storytellers, any more than attending the philharmonic makes one a virtuoso violin player.

Today, “storyteller” is a profitable buzzword. A lot of people who know nothing about story have anointed themselves as storytellers. All of them are selling something. But expertise or knowledge in genuine storytelling is arguably becoming rarer. Over the past decade, many college campuses have seen their number of English majors decline by around half. Recent Gallup polls show that all Americans are reading far fewer books — even in populations where reading formerly had strong appeal, including women, college graduates, and older Americans. In 2021, just 6 percent of American adults named reading as their favorite way to spend an evening, the first time that figure had dipped beneath 10 percent since Gallup first asked the question in 1960.

One could propose that today’s Americans are simply immersed in storytelling by other means — notably movies, streaming television, social media, and video games. But this gets back to Sagmeister’s point. Those who try to write without being readers — even if they are great consumers of visual media— do not have the grounding they need to become true storytellers. Steven Spielberg knew this, and pointed it out when he accepted the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1987 Oscars:

The literature of Irving Thalberg's generation was books and plays. They read the great words of great minds. And I think in our romance with technology and our excitement at exploring all the possibilities of film and video, I think we've partially lost something that we now have to reclaim. I think it's time to renew our romance with the word. I'm as culpable as anyone in having exalted the image at the expense of the word. But only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.

Here we have the highest-grossing movie director of all time telling us that we need to “renew our romance with the word” and saying “only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.” But we no longer now have generations of readers; rather we have fewer people who read anything at all, even fewer people who read seriously, and rapidly dwindling numbers engaged in systematic, informed collegiate study of literature. This hardly seems to bode well for the future of storytelling—whether written or filmed; between the covers of books or on HD screens—ironically just as brain science is proving the enormous power of story to persuade, seduce, and sell. So hang on to that battered copy of Aristotle’s Poetics … it may yet be needed.