How and why we use narration everyday: the art of storytelling
I’ve been skeptical about creative writing courses for years. I thought that, to write something, all you needed was to sit on a chair and start… writing. Well, that’s still true, but a little help is always welcome. If you do this (writing) constantly, you will get some knowledge, learn some tricks, and the task will become easier and easier as you learn how to do it properly.
Still, I have trouble using this word: “properly” can be understood as anything — and that’s why I looked at creative writing courses with some concern. For me, they were like a big villain telling me how bad my writing is. I wish I could say I was wrong because I’ve taken one of these courses, but I haven’t, yet. I simply know I was wrong.
Yes, there are some people for whom writing seems like the easiest thing to do in the world, a piece of cake. But Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t start painting faithful portraits by merely looking at his models. He studied dead bodies and different kinds of style. Writing follows the same ideia. What’s the point of reading thousands of books (the ones most people find it good enough to be considered a classic) and not stop to analyze what they have that makes them so unique? We must not copy them, but use it to find our own style. It’s impossible for an author not to be a reader — and, most important, an eternal student.
But I’m trying to get to another point. I’ve been so concerned about the ideia of having someone telling me to write this and that that I didn’t notice we tell stories everyday, every second. We don’t write them, but the narration is still there. Being it by telling a friend what we did on the weekend, or by predicting the score for a soccer game, we always use the imaginary line with a beginning, middle and an end for the actions we want to talk about.
A funny fact: after I started thinking about that, I had a class about the use of stories at college. It was almost as if destiny wanted to tell me something. We read a Jerome Bruner text for class, in which the author exposes his vision about how ordinary narration is —thus, how important it's to study it —, the way we use it to control the things that happen in our life and its origin. Bruner says that, for narration to exist, an unexpected thing must occur, allied to culture. Our life as a society wouldn't be possible if we weren't able to organize and communicate an experience through narration. This is where the story shows up.
Telling stories, according to Bruner, is a way of taming human error and surprise. Tales are told since the beginning of humanity, generally about
tragedies and comedies — an issue that the main character must solve, for example—, which helped (and still does) our social interactions. However, the author didn't highlighted this social interaction derivative from storytelling applied to today's life.
Prepare to remember all you've learned about Adorno and Horkheimer at school. Analogous to the Culture Industry, storytelling became a tool used by companies to promote their products. That cute animation you see telling a cute story about a polar bear's family? Publicity. Everyday, the oldest way for maintaining a nation's culture and values can be most seen by turning on the TV during advertisement.
That's not a bad thing necessarily. It only shows that the purpose for telling stories has changed. The creation process is the same, there is a script there: pure narrative. The intention? Convince you to buy their products. In fact, the advertising and marketing areas can benefit (and create benefits) from storytelling.
The humanity was gifted with the ability of narrating, therefore, why not used it in other areas rather than Journalism or Literature? We can always improve it, and we must not be ashamed of needing improving (or even needing a creative writing course).
Narration gives shape to the world around us, it allow us to ask ourselves: what if? For Brunner, the application of narratives in other areas can most be seen in law. Judges base their decisions on stories told by lawyers and promoters.
Narrative meanings stand out when compared to other communication instruments. It structures or distorts the reality we —believe— to know, molding our experiences not only in the fictional world, but in the real one.
Language is the weapon for convincing, and, after all, we do it it quite often. Thinking about how we tell stories everyday is an important way of realizing we conduct narratives with different purposes. All human actions have a goal, and narrating our point of view is one of them. Think about that: when, and why, was the last time you've told a story?
