Are Stories Dying?

Yesterday morning there was a very interesting article in the New York Times about stories and how they’re told, by Michael Cieply, titled Saving the Story (the Film Version). It appears that the movie industry is fearful that audiences are no longer interested in stories. At the same time, the article goes on to describe several new ways to tell stories, new technologies for storytelling and new structures for stories that are emerging all around us. MIT has started a Center for Future Storytelling that sounds fascinating. This is primarily a film-based project, a joint venture between Plymouth Rock Studios and MIT, but they will also develop and study projects in peer-to-peer media like Twitter, where people are already telling stories in new and inventive ways. Twitter novels are already hugely popular in China and have started to pass over into print. Now some people are writing Twitter novels in the U.S. as well. And this opens up a new discussion, for me.

The fact that Twitter novels are passing into print seems to be a contradiction. New media is interesting because it is new… and besides, wasn’t the book dead? Hadn’t we already decided that no one reads anymore, that books are obsolete, old fashioned, musty, moldy remnants of a reality that exists only in the nostalgic memory of elderly English professors?

I say, Long Live the Story! I feel that it is entirely untrue that stories are dying and that people will never tire of hearing them. I also think that people will never tire of reading. It is true that computers, the internet, new media, social networking tools, movies, iPods and all the other technological innovations of our time have changed the way we read. But we still read, and many of us read books, and magazines, and literary journals (for all the talk of how there is no money to be made in magazines and literary journals it’s amazing how many new ones continue to roll off the presses!).

Vladimir Propp told us, in his seminal book Morphology of the Folktale, that there are only 31 types of narrative structures, or narratemes and that all characters can be reduced to 7 broad types. Though he applied himself to the study of 100 Russian folktales, his structural analysis can be applied to any type of story, including films and new media stories. We have all heard the truism that there are only two stories: Man rides into town, Man leaves town; or something along those lines. The fact is that this is what makes stories so wonderful and timeless or rather enduring. It’s not so much the story you tell. It’s how you tell the story that makes it unique and newly fascinating and enthralling, or as my friend Mario likes to say, spellbinding. And the very fact that we recognize the structure or basic plot of stories reinforces our sense of community, belonging, culture and fellowship with other humans.

Just when I am thinking about stories and whether people are really losing interest, whether our attention spans have become so short that we just can’t be bothered to listen to a whole story from beginning to end, I was delighted to find another wonderful item in the New York Times online newsletter Urban Eye this morning: The Moth Ball. This was a benefit event held here in New York the other night to support The Moth, an organization devoted to oral storytelling. Here’s the thing, I think that listening to stories is a form of reading. Think about it; when Homer declaimed the Iliad and people sat around and listened, they were, in effect, reading. When a new installment of a Dickens novel came out, large crowds of illiterate Dickens fans gathered on street corners in London to listen to someone read the latest chapter aloud. They were reading too!

Let me tell you a story that brings all this into focus in a lovely way, I think.

About a year ago my daughter was having trouble getting to school in the morning. New house, new neighborhood, new school… let’s just say she would get lost along the way. So I started taking her to school again, something I had not done in a couple of years at least. We tried the subway, but ended up realizing that the best way was by bus. So every morning we left our Crown Heights house and took the bus further into the Heights to school. The whole trip took at most 20 minutes. The first few days she experienced this as a little bit of a punishment and an embarrassment, but after a while, surprisingly for both of us I think, we got into a rhythm. It was our time together, during which we could really do nothing but talk to each other. We could be silent, of course, but silence lasts only so long…

My daughter does not like to read. Rather, she thinks she does not like to read. I contend that she loves reading, she just hasn’t realized it yet, or perhaps her idea of what reading is and mine do not coincide exactly. A few weeks into our new routine I started reading a book called The Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer, a book that I loved for its delicacy, its characters, its insight, its quiet courage, its style, its story. Right from the first chapter I was sucked in, so the next morning on the bus I said to Zoe, I’m reading this great book. Do you want to hear what it’s about? And I told her the first chapter.

Now, people who know me say that if you have listened to me tell a movie you lose all desire to see it because you already have. Some say they are disappointed by the movie if they see it after I have told them the story. The same goes for books. So, in my usual way, I told Zoe the first chapter of Dalia Sofer’s book blow by blow, word for word, with all my comments and asides thrown in. She listened quietly.

The next day, I told her the following chapter, and the day after that the third. And so we went on. Every morning we got on the bus and I would tell her another chapter in the life of the family living in Tehran and struggling to decide what to do in the face of the Islamic revolution. One morning we got on the bus and I was distracted by something I remembered about her schoolwork. So I asked her about it. She said, Mom, forget that, we left off that the little girl was at that party at her friend’s house. What happened next?

People can say all they want about the death of the story, the death of the book, the death of the movie as we remember it. None of this is true. There is nothing, nothing at all in this world, like a good story.

Vladimir Propp in 1928

The image above of Vladimir Propp is a link that will take you to a fun site called Proppian Tale Generator, which will allow you to use all the elements of folktales as identified by Propp to craft your own story. Great fun if you run out of things to make up at night to put your kids to sleep!

What do you think? Do you have stories like this to share? Feel free to comment and leave a story for us all to enjoy!

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Tagged as: Dalia Sofer, Fiction, Storytelling, The Septembers of Shiraz: A Novel