In Defense of Modern Story Telling

Rage -- goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles.

So begins one of the earliest works of dramatic poetry in human history, the Iliad by Homer.  Contrast that with the famous opening of Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War.  "All of Gaul is divided into three parts."  The latter introduces a work of nonfiction and is just what one would expect from a general writing in the field.  There is no preface.  The work jumps straight into the facts.  The opening line in the Iliad, however, makes it clear that this work is something different, and although both works describe events of war, Homer's first line declares that he has something more to communicate than facts alone.  He draws our attention immediately into the emotional world of one man.  He takes us to another time and place, immersing us in a tale of his own creation, and in so doing shows himself to be a story teller.

Immersion in Time and Place

A story does more than convey facts.  It attempts to draw people into a time and place different from their own, and it is one of the extraordinary powers of language to do just that.  It is one thing to state that a picture taken in 2021 is of a spiral galaxy and something else entirely to say, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."  The famous opening to the Star Wars movies, which is nothing more than a string of words that do not even form a complete sentence, triggers something in our minds.  It sparks our imagination, and we enter a time and place we have never been.  This is what good story telling does, and we have been doing it for thousands of years and always with one goal, to transport our audience ever deeper into, ever closer to the image that we have in mind.

Thespis

We quickly learned that for all the power of spoken language to accomplish this feat of transportation, acting out those words brought our audience a bit more into the story, and hence was born the stage play. Thespis in the sixth century B.C. was the first to perform a story, and thespians have continued his work unbroken to today.  And then the roof blew off.

Non-Book Snobbery

I have never understood the snobbery of those who look down their noses at stories presented in a form other than that of the written page.  For those of us who enjoy reading, there is an immense pleasure in the activity, and the preference for images conjured in one's own mind by written words over those given to us visually is fair enough, but the underlying goal of storytelling remains to draw the audience ever deeper into, ever closer to the story in the author's mind, we have been adding to the written word ever since Thespis first trod the boards.  We have added music and costumes and sets.  With the advent of cameras we created motion pictures and then motion pictures with sound.  Suddenly anything seemed possible.  We could travel to the moon long before Neil Armstrong was old enough to pronounce the word.  Always the goal remained of becoming more immersed into the story, and a major leap forward was the introduction of 3-D technology.  Images leapt out of the screen, causing us to flinch as our brains told us that an object was in fact about to hit us.  Homer, with his poetic descriptions of brazen arms clanging about a warrior's head as his teeth clenched the bloody dust, would surely have approved.

From Georges Méliès's 1902 film A Trip To the Moon

Flying Through a Quidditch Pitch

My family recently visited Universal Studios in Orlando for the first time, and as we thoroughly enjoyed each other and our experience, I could not help but think a bit as we strolled through the blazing Florida sun.  We went on many of the rides, but one will suffice for the purposes of this piece, Harry Potter and The Forbidden Journey.  In this as in most of its other attractions, Universal has constructed a seamless blend of video and physical set pieces to take guests directly into various stories.  In the case of The Forbidden Journey, guests walk through Hogwarts, the legendary wizarding school, and everything convinces you that this is the real thing.  By the time you have made your way through the queue, you are deeply immersed in the sense of the place, and then you enter the ride itself.  The video below does not even begin to do justice to the experience.

Your brain becomes utterly convinced that you are in fact flying...soaring out of Hogwarts, swooping over a Quidditch pitch, and hurtling just beyond the reach of a dragon's flaming breath whose heat you can actually feel....and your body reacts accordingly.

From Homer to Thespis to...

I love reading.  In fact, I took one novel with me on our trip to Florida and downloaded two others along the way.  Yet as a reader and a writer, I never lose sight of the fact that connection, immersion, and identity are what it is all about.  We want to share ideas and experiences by helping other connect with them, immerse themselves in them, and become part of them.  Current technology has taken storytelling to the next level in this, and I for one cannot wait to see where we will go next.