Principles of narrative
The interdisciplinary nature of narrative study creates many lenses through which to view narrative, its nature and effects. These principles of narrative — at the intersections of biology, narrative theory, and modeling & simulation — form the foundation of this approach to communications.
Stories are useful, not true.
Stories are the language of change.
Stories are biological.
Literature is a technology.
Thought is in service to action.
Somewhere along the way we drifted off-course and found ourselves looking to stories for truth. Stories were never meant to store truth: they are the vehicles of possibility.
Change is constant — and sometimes contrived. We must first imagine change before we can produce it, and if it requires a collective effort we must communicate it. The construction of a story — beginning, middle, end — is the description of change, and story is the language we communicate it in.
Storytelling is an innate human ability: humans tell stories without being taught how to tell a story.
Nothing humankind has achieved would have been possible without literature. Full credit: Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks and Storythinking.
Thought — and stories — are in service to action, or movement.