Are stories the way to motivate people toward action?
I believe so.
I also believe that the word Story is easily misinterpreted.
A story is not the sum of facts.
A sum of facts is called boring.
So what are stories?
Let me explain by saying why the work.
A story has an emotional effect on everyone that spends enough time to listen to it.
This is quite important.
If you don’t spend enough time experiencing the story, you won’t be influenced by that.
Let me share a couple of examples:
Up’s Intro
This is one of the finest examples of story telling. I shed a tear, I believe most of us do.
As a male I cannot speak for women, yet I believe this is Carl’s story. It is framed to be the story of a little kid that likes exploring, that meets a little girl that shares that passion.
And in a sort of sense Carl is introduced by Ellie to be a real explorer.
And then they fall in love and get caught up in what we call life.
And they have the best time of their lives.
Things do get moody but their love outlast everything.
And in the end we are left with abandon.
Because we are Carl, and we just lost out Ellie.
This video, this story, wasn’t just a little background (although that’s the role it plays in the movie), it’s a full journey in it of itself.
How?
My call is that in this 4 minutes we don’t just get to spend 4 minutes of time with them.
We experience a lifetime, made of ups and downs, in that brief amount of time.
The way that’s possible stands in how we remember things.
Most of us cannot remember a full day.
There would be no reason, because memory is both a creative process and a reconstructive process.
We learn by extrapolating concepts from happenings.
Hence we don’t remember the actual happenings.
But we remember based on what we think the happening means.
So people that get their reality smashed when they understand new concepts, tend to get confused.
Stories are a way of making people confused, without having them being confused on what’s right and wrong.
The good guy and the bad guy, the protagonist and the antagonist, are not good nor bad.
It’s how we frame the story that makes them stand out toward one of their opposite.
We polarize their behaviour by creating a context that immediately tells us what’s right and what’s wrong.
Let’s close this out.
Stories are emotional travels that we allow people to have once they are in sync with us.
The buildup, the premise, the introduction, is the path that we need to take to get them to see the world in a way that allows us to tell them a story that will move them.
The fabula, the plot, is similar to a session of pacing and leading, in which we make them know what’s going to happen before we say it.
And then, the best stories do something unusual, they break the expectations.
One day,
the main character of every movie will die.
And the story will be about how he dies,
how he get’s to die and what consequences arise from his death.
We are easily used to new things, stories will always change the way we think,
But stories need to change too,
To keep up with our world.