Storytelling isn’t everything, it’s the only thing

Here’s a question that annoys me.

Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?

People have said this to me a lot over the years. As if it’s my job to satisfy their need for certainty so they can check their little plot box.

But the reality is, my brain is anything but straight. It’s not a linear system, it’s an associative one. What happens inside my head goes in cycles and convergences and explosions, and that means very few things will come out in a clean, straight, tidy fashion.

Baby I was born this way.

And yes, this behavior is understandably frustrating to someone who thinks in a more straightforward manner, but everyone’s mind works differently. We have to learn to live with that if we’re going to make it out of here alive.

My cousin is similar to me in that vein. He’s a fashion designer who specialized in creating and manufacturing clothes that are stylish and sustainably sourced. If you ask him where the title of his new collection comes from, he’ll tell you a three minute story that takes you on a beautiful journey of creative inspiration that doesn’t quite make sense or answer your question, but you don’t really care because he’s so goddamn passionate about it.

Like watching an art movie that kickstarts your imagination through a glimpse of the free associative world of ideas instead of plot. It’s definitely not a straight answer.

Plot seems to be the agreed upon structure we’d prefer to hang moments on, but then again, our lives don’t have plots. There are turns in the narrative, but what we remember are moments.

That’s what you have to understand about the creative brain. Storytelling isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

Narrative is our basic tool for making sense of the world, the currency of human contact, the fundamental instrument of thought and the foundation that psychologically sustains us.

Strangely, though, in the past few years, scientists keep reporting that human attention span has declined to a mere six seconds.

Really?

Tell that to the millions of viewers who watch thirteen hours of a television series in a single day.

Tell that to the legions of fans who buy eight hour audiobooks by their favorite comedians.

Time is an irrelevant construct. It’s totally subjective. Einstein even said that time dilates based on what we’re doing and our intention while doing it.

This is good for the artist. Because when we tell stories, we can focus less on how much time we have, and more on in taking people on a tour of our heads and hearts. We can share crumb by crumb and clue by clue of the universal human experiences and great sweeps of change that convinced us to believe what we believe, so that by the time we get to the end of the story, the story that we paid for and earned the right to tell, the audience is already nodding and yessing and laughing so much, they’re intellectually and emotional satisfied and can’t imagine another final action beyond where we’ve taken them.

Narrative beats brevity. People would rather hear a strong story than a straight answer.

Do you want to give people an answer that checks their box, or engage them with a narrative that wins them over?