A Brief History of Stories
a wikipedia deep dive into the firsts of their kind
I love stories. Movies, books, bedtime stories in all their forms. It’s what made the idea of our doing a Wikipedia deep dive so attractive.
We’re talking the stories of history — from the post-prehistoric epic to modern times — and how they’ve evolved with tech!
The history of fiction that made our team fall in love with stories. The stories that brought together 16 writers, 19 stories, 61 characters’ accounts, and 7,843 tweets published in our open rehearsal of LongShorts. The history or deep dive that I’ll recount for you below.
Epic!
If it’s going to be the first surviving story you know it’s got to be epic! And it is… it is the Epic of Gilgamesh.
A story of Gilgamesh who’s so powerful the gods created another man to put him in his place, only to find that man goes on to become Gilgamesh’s best friend. A man so charismatic even the goddess Ishtar couldn’t help herself. A man so unattainable he could help himself and spurned Ishtar, the goddess of love and sex. A man who survived the great flood that the immortal man sent down. A man that pondered the questions of life that we all ask.
Some even say Gilgamesh evolved into what others say is the true first and the last, the beginning and the end of stories ever recorded. Then again we’re looking at fictional stories, so whatever your beliefs Gilgamesh wins this one.
Better than my summary though, is this one:
Something Novel
There are many poems and epics that came before The Tale of Genji, what set it apart though was the advent of a new written alphabet in Japan, hiragana. With hiragana it was now possible to write what “is sometimes called the world’s first novel, [at least] the first modern novel…” The new Japanese characters (hiragana) made it possible to express the deeper sentiments and thoughts of Genji’s characters, even more so than the epic Gilgamesh.
What was all the fuss about the feelings though? There was a lot of them in the love affairs and tryst that took place in Emperor Kiritsubo’s court. The scorned feelings of an illegitimate son, forced to recognize not the emperor as his father, but another. The oedipal feelings that he grows for his step-mother. The gratifying feelings that come when his blood finds its way back into the royal bloodline by way of love, lust, and another illegitimate son. That’s not to mention all the other feelings that can’t fit in our shallow dive here.
While The Tale of Genji doesn’t have the the strong arc of other later pieces, it is one of the first examples of a character driven story.
And if you want to start a much deeper dive you can dive in with this first episode of the animated The Tale of Genji…
Sidenote: The author of The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu over 1,000 years since having written her “novel” is featured on the 2,000 yen note in Japan.
Connecting The Rural Radios
Music was the first sound recorded in 1857, but the first experiments in storytelling came much later, with the Théâtrophone. The Théâtrophone didn’t have original stories though, and was simply relaying what had been performed at the theatre. To get to the first original stories you have to wait until later in 1921 when radio dramas began to play.
Way before War of the Worlds blurred the lines of fiction and reality, A Rural Line on Education birthed the trend, albeit without the panic. This wasn’t as exciting as an alien invasion, but just meant to be an overheard conversation between two farmers on a phone call using a party line. It even included a phone ringing to start the call and interruptions by others waiting to use the party line. Producers at first objected to the idea of the blurring fiction and reality, saying listeners weren’t interested in such nonsense, not knowing what was to come. http://www.oocities.org/emruf7/1922.html
Unfortunately I couldn’t find any record of “a Rural Line on Education,” if you can please pass it along and I’ll add it here! This example is particularly interesting because it was a blending of two new inventions, radio and telephone, that made the story possible. It was not purely a narrative, but a performance.
A First Trip to The Moon and The Movies
Stories didn’t come into movies until long after the first moving picture was recorded (for a great history of the moving picture check out N. Bashaw’s history of Nickelodeons). Film makers based some of the most early narratives on the life of Jesus Christ. As with many early attempts at movies these were interspersed with “choral numbers” and “lectures” to lengthen them. It wasn’t until tkYear artists started shooting for the stars and literally hitting the moon that a “true” story was told.
That story was the 14-minute long A Trip to the Moon. A movie that ended with “Labor omnia vincit” (Work conquers all) scrawled across the screen, even aliens! Work can get you to the man on the moon. Work can give the man on the moon a black eye. Work gives the wherewithal to even conquer or kill the king of the Selenites (aliens). That hard work can even get your spaceship to fall back down to earth! Hard work or luck!
Sidenote: Jules Verne’s novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon were what inspired this early film. As they TK Filmmaker was still getting his sea legs under him he was relying on past stories to prop him up.
Before a Final Fantasy
There may be a back story to how the TV got broken by a thrown controller after a marathon Pong match, but games themselves lacked a narrative until the arrival of Zork.
Zork was a text based interactive fiction adventure that Dave Smith could tell you about a lot better than I can. He’s journeyed into the Great Underground Empire as a nameless adventurer. Encountered the Flatheads and treasures like a portrait of “J. Pierpont Flathead.” He avoided and outwitted the Wizard of Frobozz and wrote his own story as a “Master Adventurer.”
As you can be seen in the video below, we’ve almost come full circle with Zork with the resurgence of chatbots. You might even call Zork the first chatbot. You can definitely say it laid the groundwork for the not so Final Fantasies that followed.
Sidenote: With Zork came the first stories where the reader was really in control. That is if you ignore The Adventures of You on Sugar Cane Island, in 1975. Then again, what story hasn’t borrowed either an arc or an idea from one that came before!
Social Storytelling
And that brings us to the latest change of technology and the first real-time stories like Excellences & Perfections told by Amalia Ulman, Sickhouse, and Lonely Girl.
These are stories told with characters who live in the same timelines as ourselves, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively their timeline is ours, with the hours ticking by at the same pace. Literally they are telling their stories across the social timelines we do. Just like Lizzie Bennet living out her life over a year on YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr.
We see these new stories trekking into new territories, all while continuing to explore the themes of the past. That’s where our team is today. That’s where LongShorts is getting ready to go. That’s how we’re hoping to support the all new generation of storytellers that are telling the first tales and leading the way down a new path.
We’re working to have the tools ready for those authors to tell new stories that fit our lives. Stories that fit our lives the same way War of the Worlds did when it was time to gather around the radio on a Sunday evening. The same way How A Trip to the Moon did when it was time to get dressed for the theatre.
Now there’s almost no time to fit as we’ve kept moving forward, almost never stopping. We’re rushing through our daily lives with quick glances at the streams of Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook; so that is where we’re bringing the stories to. Where you are, on the go, in your stream, hoping to spark the imagination and inspiration that comes with stories.
Like the first stories of the past we’re borrowing from what came before. Exploring the deeper themes like Gilgamesh. Putting the characters first like in Genji. Trying to blur the line between fiction and reality like A Rural Line of Education. And looking for inspiration in works of the past like A Trip to the Moon.
I hope you’ll follow LongShorts story in the days to come, and the stories being told inside of it and all across social media. We’ll be posting a follow up to this piece with the very short history of how LongShorts came to be. That story will be told as soon as the next chapter of our story begins and our new stories our debut performances of stories begin to be published in real time.
Check out the open rehearsal version of LongShorts here and keep an eye out for the full debut coming soon!
