Timothy Johnson

Category: Big Thinks

  • Why Storytelling Works

    A book lies open on a wooden table, and black and white images of a pirate with treasure and a pirate ship pop up off the pages along with floating letters.
    Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

    Most craft essays focus on how storytelling works, but we don’t talk enough about why it works. I think the question is relevant whether you want to write stories or you just like to experience them, and it gets at the heart of not only the deeply moving effect storytelling can have but also its utility—why it’s so profoundly important storytellers keep doing what we do.

    Once again, I’m inspired by my teaching experience. I previously wrote about how I see stories as arguments, and while I think it can be helpful to think of stories rhetorically, teaching or educating is another part of argumentation; if you want someone to agree with you, you have to ensure they understand and know what you do. There are many ways to do that, of course, but let’s talk about two categories of learning. 

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  • How I Have Benefited From Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (And How You Can Too!)

    Racks of doughnuts. Chocolate and cinnamon sugar. Mmmm.
    I couldn’t find a free picture of people sitting in a circle, so enjoy these doughnuts instead. Photo by Eneida Nieves on StockSnap

    I want to tell you a story about how I’ve benefited from interacting with diverse people in equitable and inclusive spaces. I want to share this story because I know not everyone has experienced these benefits first-hand, and I firmly believe in and support such work. Certainly, I’ve benefited personally in countless ways—many that I probably don’t even realize—but one specific experience comes to mind.

    Before we get to my tale, I think it’s important you know—in case you don’t know me and have come here from another corner of the internet—this is me:

    With more hair, fewer wrinkles, and minus a beard…I need a new headshot.

    I’m a straight, white, cisgender man with no disabilities from a middle class, blue-collar family that called northern suburbs and southern rural towns home. I have a master’s degree, and I have lived most of my adult life in and around the Washington, D.C., metro area.

    Which is to say, in these matters, I’m a pretty typical dude who was relatively isolated for a portion of his life but who has gotten around and seen the world a bit (but not enough because it’s never enough).

    Now, our story begins in my first year of grad school. Ah, I remember it like yesterday (so I’m probably forgetting or misremembering things, but stick with me anyway).

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  • Why I Love Storytelling

    The cast of Shrinking are gathered around a long park bench on a beautiful day.

    Recently, my wife and I finished watching the second season of Shrinking, and while the credits rolled, I leaned in, wrapped my arms around her, and just stayed there for a while because I cherish her so damn much.

    For me, it was a moment of pure storytelling magic. While stories can have myriad effects on us, depending on the story and the audience, Shrinking is a show about cherishing loved ones and growing by facing personal challenges together. It’s therapeutic and only natural that my response to it is an outpouring of love. Other responses also are perfectly natural or reasonable, though, if it makes you feel violent, you might want to talk to someone about that. I found myself profoundly moved.

    When I taught literature to undergrads, I distinguished between fact and truth with my students. One appealing aspect of nonfiction storytelling is it’s built on facts. We tend to call them “true stories,” but I wish we’d call them “factual stories” because there’s a larger truth to factual stories that goes beyond the facts. We watch a documentary about Bernie Madoff and think, “yeah, he had a really good life for a while, but when the hammer came down, they even took his underwear. Maybe stealing from people isn’t worth it.” We read a biography about a great political figure and walk away with a perspective of hope. We watch a 30-second clip on the Internet of a guy rescuing a doe from a frozen lake, and our faith in humanity is restored. 

    Fictional stories access these same larger truths even though they may be based on fabrications and fantasy. Fiction, despite being totally made up, contains truth or truths. 

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  • Why This Election Hurts

    I’ve been thinking a lot this week about presidents in the stories we tell. I love what I do because I get to create pieces of art that, with any luck, could become a reference point for someone to make sense of our world. Cultural touchstones in art are important because they reinforce or illuminate our cultural and social values, and we can use them for growth, to chart a path forward, or to find it again when we’ve lost our way.

    One of the things I love about stories is we can look at a protagonist, acknowledge their flaws, and root for them to use their strengths to defeat the antagonist. More than that, the heroes we cast in our stories reveal the ideals we hold for our own values. We recognize them as the good guys not because we’re told they’re the good guys but because we see the good in them. We can examine the aspects that make them protagonists or heroes, and we can see in them a kind of reflection of that which we hold to be good. 

    We can look to President Whitmore played by Bill Pullman in Independence Day to give us hope in the darkest of times when all seems hopeless and lost. We can look to President Beck played by Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact to help us face the worst fate imaginable and to do it all with that voice that makes us feel wise and like everything is going to be okay. We can look to Dave Kovic played by Kevin Kline in Dave to cut through the bullshit, make us laugh, and remind us what’s most important: love. We can look to President Bartlett played by Martin Sheen in West Wing to demonstrate that prime patriotic quality of putting duty and country above all else, even politics. (I’m aware there aren’t really any great woman presidents in popular American culture to cite here, and I think that’s kind of a point worth making, so I’m leaving this list as is.)

    In reality, our presidents aren’t like our idealized heroes. I know that. As many idealized presidents as we have in our storytelling, we seem to have more examples of presidents who represent our resentment of politics, and that points to a reality, too. Regardless, I think we should hold our real presidents to those ideals and values, because those ideals and values? They’re real. They’re the truth in the fiction.

    The neat thing about storytelling in any culture is the audience has to mostly agree for the magic to work. The audience has to feel the hero is the hero, so we can look to stories to understand what a culture values.

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  • My Big Think on Generative AI and Human Artistry’s Death

    In a parody of Michelangelo’s "Creation of Adam," a human hand reaches out to touch fingertips with a robotic hand.
    Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

    For maybe as long as I’ve been published (a decade this fall!), I’ve used the line, “Timothy Johnson fears nothing more than the future, so he writes about it and hopes he’s wrong.”

    I think that’s important contextualization for who I am as a futurist and precog (admittedly, I don’t think I’m a very good one), but I think it’s good to frame all of this with the sentiment that I hope I’m wrong about generative AI, or large-language models (LLMs), which is a less-sexy name but probably a more accurate and responsible one we should be using (and I will use for the rest of this post).

    I struggled with this post because not only is it a very complex issue (one I’m betting the non-artist techbros will challenge), but I think I had illusions it would be my definitive take on LLMs and its position in art. I’d write about it once, and that would be that. But, I know these can’t be my last words on the subject because, well doggonit, I’m a human being, but more to the point, LLMs are still so new and changing so rapidly that my takes on it are evolving, too.

    Suffice to say this post may exhaust you (it exhausted me to write it), but it won’t be exhaustive.

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  • How to Develop Your Characters on the Page

    A doctor shows a patient a chest x-ray and points approximately to where the heart is located.
    “You see, your character’s heart should be right about here.” (Photo by Skintone Studio from Freerange Stock)

    My last craft post covered how to develop characters for your understanding as the writer. I’ve split this crash course in character development into two parts because characters develop in two main spaces. Well, three, actually: the writer’s head, the page, and the reader’s head. Your perception of your character is inevitably different than the one that exists on the page and is further invariably different from the one that the reader comes to know. I won’t be going into readers’ heads because that would be presumptive and rude.

    In my previous post, I made another critical separation. I split you planners and pantsers into your respective groups, and I gave the former a whole heap of questions to consider in your logic-centric minds. For the latter, I gave you some tips that almost resemble exercises, and they are focused on helping you get the feel of your characters. For both groups, it all was work for you to do for yourself, work intended to pour the foundations for your characters so you could write from a place of intentionality instead of wandering and wondering what the heck you’re writing about (an affliction that plagues us all, I promise).

    Now, let’s look at developing your characters on the page for the reader’s understanding. How does character development actually work on the page anyway?

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  • How to Develop Your Characters off the Page

    A black cat reaches out to touch a human finger in a reference to the Creation of Adam painting
    Photo by Humberto Arellano on Unsplash

    Last time I wrote about craft, I directed you to the starting line. In that post, I wrote superficially about getting to know your characters, kicking off the plot, building your world, and the search for information. Someone asked me about developing that stuff, and I realized I’d glossed over it. I’d told you it was important work but took for granted you’d already done it.

    Oops!

    So let’s talk about character development. When we talk about character development in a story, we typically refer to the ways in which that story develops its characters on the page. How do the characters develop for the reader? What does the reader come to learn and understand about the characters, and how do the characters change through their arc? What story does that arc tell, and what significance can the reader derive from it? Those are questions I won’t be addressing in this post but will in a later one. This time, I focus on developing your characters off the page for your understanding. How do you create a character so that you understand and know them well enough to then insert them into a story for the reader to meet and follow?

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  • Everything Ends: The State of Apocalyptic Fiction

    In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh lays out the case for climate change and charges contemporary fiction writers with the responsibility of writing about it. But why, Ghosh wonders, aren’t our fiction writers writing about it? Ghosh condemns contemporary fiction writers for a failure to address climate change. 

    I found it an interesting accusation because, in my experience, fiction writers were, in fact, writing about climate change and had been for years. Ghosh proposed the idea that writers in the literary mainstream would tend to be relegated to science fiction when writing about climate change, and considering the realities of western literary culture—where we tend to draw lines of artistic merit between literary traditions—I think he had a point. To me, though, a good story is a good story.

    Regardless, in the eight years since Ghosh’s book hit shelves, I think we’ve seen a more widespread willingness of writers to go there.

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  • Finding Your Story’s Starting Line

    Track athlete in a light blue track suit crouching at a starting line and preparing to run
    Photo by Gratisography / Ryan McGuire from Freerange

    I was on a panel once that was taking questions from the audience, and a guy raised his hand and asked how to know when to start a new chapter. He said he’d written hundreds of pages, and it was only chapter one. A silence fell over the room as the audience waited with rapt attention and those of us on the panel had no idea how to respond to that. Without seeing that guy’s manuscript, I was certain his problem was he hadn’t found the beginning of his story yet.

    To the guy’s credit, he’d started writing his novel, and that’s admirable. Moreover, he’d started doing the work, and that’s progress.

    I don’t remember how we, the panel, responded to him, but the point here is, again, without seeing that manuscript, I would expect to find pages and pages and pages of world building and information about characters, places, customs, traditions, etc. That stuff is important, but it’s not the story.

    Finding the starting line is a very common problem for us writers because we are (and this is true—unless you’re using generative AI, which is bad and I’m going to get to someday) human beings, and it’s natural for human beings, when beginning any creative process, to search for information. Even legal cases start with a discovery process. As storytellers, we begin by asking questions like, Who is this person? What is this place? We build a foundation.

    I’m here to tell you, while that stuff is incredibly important and you need to work on it because everything rests on it, the story starts elsewhere.

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  • Walking the D.C. Trail of 2020

    An image of 10,000 small American flags surrounding the Washington Monument with a sign that reads, "200,000 dead, they deserved better"

    Washington, D.C. is known for being the center of politics and power in the United States, but there is a sense of disassociation among the American people. It is a sense that Americans have lost control of their capital and perhaps even that it is hostile territory. This sense sometimes manifests in the city’s streets.

    America continues to grapple with racial injustice and police brutality, which remains unaddressed by national leadership. With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the relative balance of the Supreme Court is at risk. And always in the background of 2020 like a crackling static, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to kill more people in America than in any other country in the world despite a relatively low population density.

    On the final day of summer 2020, the 200,000th American died from Covid-19. The next day, I decided to take a walk.

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