Naked Storytelling

Stories may start off as words, but they don’t stay that way.

For a writer, storytelling is about words. That has not always been the case, nor is it in this day and age. There was a time before formal language, and during that time our human predecessors communicated bodily. That type of charade occurs to this day, not just as a game, but as a truly effective way of getting one’s point across.

But is it as thorough as the use of a common verbal language? I cannot argue that it is or isn’t. What if you need a bathroom while visiting a foreign country, yet you can’t speak a word of the native language? You can bet that your ability to pantomime what you need and be understood by one of the locals will seem much more valuable to you at the time than any lengthy literary classic.

I raise this point given the state of today’s technology and society’s growing use of multimedia. We are telling stories, whether our own or someone else’s, using more and more visual and aural augmentation,via news delivery, online streaming, mobile content, RPGs, or a slew of other concepts both traditional and groundbreaking. Through interactivity, we are also asking those who read/watch/hear/play our stories to become part of the tale by adding their own input. This very platform, for example, may originate with words, but after this essay is published, I will disseminate it using social media platforms that are rife with multimedia in order to attract collaborators and readers. Will that have an impact on the story I am trying to tell, which is that words don’t always make the story? Of course it will.

As a writer, I want to believe that stories always begin with words. They do not have to end there, however, and I will not be so austere in my appreciation for the written word that I close my mind off to that possibility. What I want most to believe is that anyone can tell a story if they want to, and their grasp of language should not keep them from doing so.

In this age of ever-evolving technology, I am hopeful that we aren’t destroying the art of storytelling by relying less upon words. We are, in fact, empowering more humans to practice an innate aspect of their beings by allowing them to strip the art down to what feels most elemental (though not necessarily primitive) for them — photography, sound recordings, long-distance collaboration, animation — so that the world is that much more enriched by the greatest variety of stories, no matter how they are told.