After talking about a panel I took part in this year on game mastering, a friend told me about their struggles as an autistic person regarding storytelling. I thought about my own journey with it. I am on the spectrum too, AuDHD, and I remembered that it was never something I felt came naturally to me. I always admired those who seemed to have a knack for spinning a tale. My competence as a game master built very deliberately, and one where storytelling is still an intentional effort despite having developed a decent feel for things in some areas.
What is a story?
And why do we tell them? My own definition:
A story is a way of transmitting experience to an audience who wants to know something about that experience.
At first I thought a story is an answer to a question. Stories exist to give information. But that isn’t really it. There are theories that explain story as a survival adaptation: we’re interested because it might give us data that helps us survive a similar situation. I think that has some merit, but it also rests on “survival adaptation”. This concept bothers me because it encourages the idea that all lifeforms have secret unconscious motives. It puts the cart before the horse. Living things like to do all kinds of things, and the ones who end up reproducing through the course of them doing the things they like to do produce the next generation. Its a subtle distinction, but it helps me to remember that other lifeforms (as well as human) aren’t evolutionary robots.
Stories are useful for survival. But that doesn’t mean that is why we are interested in them. The ones who survived better because of stories weren’t in it for species propagation. I think they were in it because stories let them have experiences, even dangerous ones, and bond with each other, which feels good and increases the feeling of safety. Even a scary story does this. Stories pass along information, build bonds, break them. The uses are immense. At its core, I consider story to be the fundamental magic.
The problem for direct communicators
For those of us whose communication style jumps to the end: My tire was flat and I was on the road for hours, and now I am back. This is good communication. I really appreciate direct communication and I generally say it’s the way to go. If you need to communicate a thing, say it.
But a story doesn’t start with the end. We hide the end for later. It’s the payoff for listening. The communication is indirect. And that’s the part the direct version misses: not the information, but the experience.
What is a story good for?
Direct communication is the right tool when
you need convey hard data. Storytelling is the technique you use when the thing you need to transmit is experience rather than facts.
Story is not just about answering a question, its about conveying an experience to another person. The reason we don’t give the payoff first is that we need to take the other person’s brain on a journey, and brains are annoying and don’t operate the way we consciously tell them to. They have their own thing going on.
Managing annoying brains
There was a book I really loved when studying art: Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain she describes the left hemisphere as analytical, verbal, and logical, representing the world with simplified icons learned around age two or three. Think “cup” and what do you see? An icon of a cup, most likely. Ask someone who never got past the barriers we put up around art to draw one, and that icon is about all they can produce. The right hemisphere, in her account, is experiential, sensory, direct, present. It’s what you draw with.
The neuroscience here is shakier than the book made it sound (the strict hemisphere split doesn’t hold up as a description of how brains are actually organized), but if you’ll indulge me with this model: Experience brain (the ‘right’ brain in the book) is experiential, sensory, direct, and very present. It is also what you use when drawing. Efficient brain wants shortcuts and easy answers and minimized energy expenditures. It is glad to have a less rich option. And honestly its doing a good job. But the problem is that it tends to run the show, and if you are curious about an experience someone had, and they tell you the “ending”, then the logic brain says DONE! NEXT!, and the experience brain feels let down, and conversation stalls out.
So what does that mean for those of us who value directness? To convey an experience, we have to withhold information from the efficient brain so the experiential part can absorb enough so that we can have an immersive experience.
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