what is a story?

What is a story?

And why should the definition of a story matter to you?

Let’s answer the first question first:

A story is a narrative told out loud that follows the Hero’s Journey.

That’s it.

A book is not a story. A book contains a story. A story is a book’s spirit: invisible; guiding; essential to its purpose.

Movies and TV shows aren’t stories either. Like books, they contain stories, but they are not stories themselves. Same with video games, anime, text messages, social media posts, articles, and 99.83% of all the storytelling-stepchildren we actually experience on a daily basis.

If you've chatted around a campfire with friends or strangers recently, you experienced a genuine story, in its purest possible form. But even if you spoke or zoomed with a friend over coffee, or had a heartfelt phone call with a friend going through a rough patch, you experienced a genuine story.

As they spoke, you listened. They dug deep to tell their story, and you dug deep to listen. In a genuine story, these two actions are simultaneous: listening and telling, telling and listening. Your voices and expressions interacted with each other's. Your listening shaped their telling, and vice versa. During the story - inside the story - the two of you became one.

Books and movies and TV shows can be overwhelmingly powerful. But they do not deliver simultaneous listening and telling. Books and movies and TV shows are, for all their beauty and strength, diluted forms of genuine stories.

A play, on the other hand - a live play, performed in front of a live audience - comes close to being a genuine story.

Is it one?

Let’s go back to the three requirements.

A story is 1. a narrative 2. told out loud that 3. follows the Hero’s Journey. A play is:

1. a narrative ✅ 

2. well, it isn’t "told" out loud, exactly. But it’s kind of rendered out loud? 🤔

3. it follows the Hero’s Journey ✅

That ever so slight difference between rendering and telling differentiates plays from genuine stories. Dramatization - the craft of translating a story into action and dialogue - deflects a pure story, just a bit, causing it to be rendered indirectly instead of directly.

So no, a play is not quite a story. But it is perhaps a story’s closest relative. A play’s close proximity to pure story is the central reason why those who spend a life in the theater feel - in fact, they know - live theater’s superiority over other story forms. This knowledge may be closer to a scientific fact than you might imagine.

Let me be clear: a well-written and -acted play, book, or movie may be even more impactful and transformative than a pure campfire-style story. (Transformative is a big word in storytelling. More on that down the road.) Most of the stories that have changed our lives have been rendered unto us as plays, books, and movies.

But that is not the point today. The point today is simply to understand the definition of a story, and to understand how it is different than one of its adapted story forms.

In a nutshell, a story is to one of its adapted story forms as a soul is to a human being. A soul is not a human being. We fall in love with human beings, not souls. But there is no such thing as a human being without a soul. And the soul might just be a human being’s most important ingredient. So too with stories and their descendants, as it were.

So now, the second question: why should any of this matter to you? Why should you care about the definition of a story?

I’m going to be discussing this in future posts over the coming weeks. But today, let me answer this question in a slightly glib manner.

This Saturday, July 26th, at 11 o’clock AM, I’m gathering with a small group of storytellers, teachers and just plain old folks at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT. We’re going to place our chairs in a circle and practice the craft of genuine storytelling. We're going share our stories with one other: books we dream of writing, lives we wish to live, and that insane jump that our cousin did off of Chicken Rock. Attendees will include kids and adults, teenagers and grandparents, storytellers and story-curious folks of all ages. Snacks will be served. If you can make it, amazing. Please RSVP here. Admission is free. And by all means bring a friend. And oh by the way, if you're an educator, struggling to get your students to write, on Saturday you're going to hear how out loud storytelling is changing the way that kids across the country learn and love to write. Several brilliant teachers from Waterbury Public Schools will be in the room. (Hi, Steph, Jennifer, and Cassi!) They may even bring a couple of their transformed students.

Here's what I know. This experience on Saturday is going to be a turning point for at least a few people in that room. I’m not saying it will be a 180-degree or even 90-degree turning point. But a few lives will actually turn - slightly but concretely - as a result of sharing a pure storytelling experience. The kind we only tend to experience 00.17% of the time.

If you want to make it but can't, no worries. I’m going to be doing more of these on the regular, starting in the northeast, and then moving wherever these gatherings organically move. If you’d like to co-host one with me near you, just let me know.

These gatherings are going to grow. I’m confident of that. And if you've read this far, my guess is that you can sense it too. Because you’ve been a part of experiences like the ones I'm talking about. And you know that something transcendent tends to happen in these kinds of gatherings: a small but undeniable movement from here to there. The experience will stick in the memory, for all of us.

Most importantly of all, as a result of this experience, the people who do attend this gathering are going to stick together. Whether we write our books or screenplays, or simply root on those of us who do, we’re going to stick together, listeners and tellers, woven in to each other’s journeys, from Saturday onward. That's not an exaggeration. That's actually going to happen. We will do this not because we’re charitable or generous, but because this is what genuine storytelling does. "Sticking together" is what stories deliver. It's what stories are for. It’s why we invented them, hundreds of thousands of years ago, we needy little upright hairless monkeys, feeling our way forward in a harsh, cruel world.

Sticking together is what indirect forms of stories don’t quite tend to deliver. We don’t exit even the most transformative theatrical experience, hug the audience member next to us, and vow to stay in touch.

But this will 100% happen on Saturday. Not between every single one of us. But between a few of us. Maybe many of us.

If you’re interested in finding a small community to help inspire you to tell your story; to invigorate your classroom; to really write your book, or help others write theirs, I invite you to join us at the Mark Twain House. Saturday, 11am.

I hope to see you there.

All the best,

Josh