my debt to scheherazade – this is kinda poetic but it’s more of a chapter/subheader than the actual title. this is meant to be a post about storytelling. how can i frame it in a way that’s shareable? we are always living in stories. in media res. who gives a shit? that might be a separate title for a separate post entirely.
People care about stories. Stories are trojan horses of meaning. Trojan horses of caring.
we are always telling stories whether we like it or not. we might as well get good at them. a story is a context. a story is a way of seeing. a story is a little map scrawled onto the table. a story is an invitation to consider, to inhabit.
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The importance of storytelling, frame stories
When I was a child I spent a lot of time reading. To me this seemed like the most natural thing in the world, and it wasn’t until later that I realized this was something relatively unusual about me. I spent what felt like most of my waking hours reading. I would always carry books with me, I would read late into the night, and I would pick up where I left off first thing in the morning. I would read on the bus. I would read at mealtimes. I would read under the table at school. I just couldn’t get enough. Later I would also get into video games, and music, yet I can’t help but see all of these things through the lens of story.
Non-fiction is storytelling too. The etymology of the word “story” is downstream of Greek “historia”, in turn downstream of Pan-Indo-European wid-tor – seeing, knowing, witnessing, accounting.
One of the earliest set of stories that I remember making a deep impression on me was One Thousand and One Nights – a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales that was continually updated, revised, modified by many storytellers from many places over many years. I can’t remember the specific edition that I had, though I do remember that it had an early version of Aladdin in it, which means it was probably downstream of Antoine Galland’s collection – a French orientalist from the 1600s who Borges credited with kickstarting the era of Romanticism.
A quick sketch: One Thousand and One Nights…
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(thread) “A thing I noticed fairly early-ish on is that people care about things more once they’re framed properly. Like, if you watch a documentary about a pit crew or a kitchen or a tattoo shop, you become invested in those people’s struggles and you start to care about them personally. Witnessing this, I think I always thought… I want that! I want people to care about me. What I’ve been grappling with recently is whether that was some innate thing all along, or a response to perceived injustice. I *was* a pretty reclusive bookworm. In some ways I feel like I still am.
If you think about it, this broader phenomenon also explains why people so often have stronger feelings about fictional characters (the ones that make it are well-framed) than real people (seldom well-framed). Once I witnessed this I could never unsee it. You can manipulate words to make things more valuable, seemingly creating value out of thin air. It’s “just” about better framing.
One of the reasons I‘ve always been drawn to study fiction, marketing and philosophy is the following, non-judgemental observation: People care more about fictional characters than real people. It’s because fictional stories are told more skillfully, and framed better. You can get upset about this, or you can learn the art of framing and presentation. It might be the single most powerful life skill that my elders seemed to have the least conscious appreciation for.
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This is kind of a sidenote or a digression: there was a period of time where the phrase “storytelling” got adopted by people who work in marketing and PR. You’d see people put “storyteller” in their LinkedIn bios, and advertising agencies would use copy like “hire us to tell your story”. I’m conflicted about this. On one hand, it’s not wrong. On the other hand, phrases get corroded when they’re misused. And I’m not saying that advertisements aren’t stories – in fact I’ve always also been obsessed with advertising, and I might do a separate essay about that. Advertising can feel dissonant and dishonest in the moment, but if you collect advertisements over an extended period of time and study them, you’ll find that they form a map of aspirations, anxieties, desires. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace described an advertisement for a fictitious tongue scraper as doing “what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
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this is an excellent question to really think deeply about. I think Dunbar is right when he said that gossip evolved as a proxy for physical grooming & displays of affection, which make us feel safe as social animals. Storytelling is to grooming somewhat like hypertext is to text
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So thank you, Scheherazade, for your stories, for your sacrifice, for your courage, for your wit. I’m so glad you exist, even if you technically don’t.