Storytelling: A Definition of ‘Story’
At the most elemental level, when you consider what art or story is, you’re thinking about the first moment of consciousness or awareness. At the beginning of civilization, humans made marks all over the wilderness to chart their movements. These were just arrows or instructions on how to find an animal or a plant food source. Later, we began to put marks on the trees or structural walls that symbolized internal meanings.
That’s the start of creating a story where you have not only the external information, the goal or destination, but also the internal emotion that came with it. That is the launch of communication media.
At its base configuration, you’ve got art or storytelling as the meeting of external and internal story elements. And there are few exceptions when you’re thinking about art or media forms, whether high art, low art, big-budget movies, experimental films, literary novels, or paperback novels. There’s always an external and internal story.
In high art, the internal story is more strongly emphasized. The more base and genre-linked the story, the more attraction it holds for the masses when an external story is emphasized. A high-action film is all the physical activities. But if you have an action hero with no internal story, audiences are just not interested, we can’t watch.
But you can think about the story in other ways as well. The E.M. Forester example, which is often cited by writing instructors and literary gurus, is the king died and then the queen died, right? That’s not a story yet. That’s just external fact. The king died – and the queen died of grief is a story because the plot provides an internal story as well.
In journalism, it’s the same. It’s very hard to just report media facts without bringing an internal story. People will ask, “Where’s the story?” It’s something that can be quite irritating if you’re a journalist trying to share helpful information with the public: “These are important facts; I want to get this information out there.” But your editor, a staunch member of the media industry, is saying that there’s no story because there is no internal content.
The public has a really, really hard time remembering or relating to any external facts in media writing without internal content or media education. But I don’t think that that’s really part of storytelling as much as it is part of us. That’s just the way we relate to information and how we structure our memories. It’s also how that we relate to each other. With the help of online media education, people can learn to appreciate the internal story in art and journalism while developing a deeper ability to understand human nature.
