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.
Passive Versus Active Learning
I know you have the power of Google at your fingertips, but very basically, passive learning is when a teacher gives information to a student who accepts and internalizes it. Lecturing is maybe the most traditional form of passive learning. A teacher stands at the front of a classroom and dictates knowledge to students who are then tested on their acceptance, retention, and ability to utilize that knowledge.
For the educators in the audience, I know that’s incredibly reductive, but that’s, basically, all there is to it. Sure, practice and targeted feedback are essential components, and ideally, you’ll have students reinforce their learning with reflective exercises (something too many curriculums neglect, IMHO). But that’s pretty much it. Open brain hatch, pour information in.
Active learning is when students participate in their own learning. A teacher guides students to conclusions based on a kind of loop of postulation, inquiry, discussion, feedback, practice, evaluation, reflection, and much more. With active learning, teachers aren’t telling students what to think but showing students how to arrive at conclusions on their own. I previously wrote about Aristotle. Let’s talk about another Greek: Socrates. The Socratic Method is still used today. It’s a two-way dialogic form of teaching that relies on asking and answering questions.
You may be familiar with this ancient proverb (often incorrectly attributed to Benjamin Franklin):
“Tell me and I forget; teach me and I remember; involve me and I learn.”
That is, essentially, what’s going on here. Active learning involves the student in their own learning process.
I’m kind of a fan, if you couldn’t tell. That isn’t to say passive learning doesn’t have its utility. It does. It belongs in the education process. It just shouldn’t be the whole learning process, and we too often (IMHO) lean too hard on passive learning while neglecting some crucial pedagogy because teachers are under immense pressure to stuff kids full of information so they regurgitate it on tests (and then promptly dump it from their brains).
But I digress.
The point here is active learning involves the student, allowing them to practice analytical and critical thinking to draw their own conclusions.
It’s natural. We do this every day. Most people gain wisdom with experience, and what is storytelling if not a kind of experience? It may be empathetic and vicarious, but it is still experience, isn’t it?
Experiencing Stories Is the Point
Here’s another proverb for you. This one’s more contemporary.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” —Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
I like that, but Twain missed something important. Travel, itself, isn’t some magic ignorance cure. It requires a kind of active participation from the traveler. If you fly to Cancun and spend a week on a resort without ever leaving the property, you’ve technically traveled to Mexico but haven’t really been there. Sorry. To do so requires a willingness to earnestly engage with a place, to interact with the people in their locales, to struggle with your own language while attempting theirs, to be adventurous with their food, to consume their culture and really try it out for yourself.
I don’t write this out of a sense of self-righteousness. It’s difficult and scary and uncomfortable, and I’ve gone to plenty of places that I haven’t truly experienced. I think there’s some solace in the idea that it isn’t a binary either-you’ve-been-there-or-you-haven’t thing. Travel is like wading into a body of water. You can dip your toe in or submerge as far as you’re willing until you’re under the surface. That’s up to you.
But the experience and how you actively engaged with it is the point. Reading a piece of writing written by another person from another place and time with completely different life experiences who is also telling a story about people in another place and time with completely different life experiences is the same thing. If you’re actively engaged with the story, you’re drawing your own conclusions, and it doesn’t really matter whether you’re reading so deeply as to stick neon colored flags on the pages and annotate in the margins or you’re simply reading carefully and thinking analytically and critically. Certainly, you might derive more from a story if you’re studying it, but as long as your mind is actively engaged with it, you’re drawing from it.
Involve Yourself
I think this isn’t only why storytelling works but also why people grow through their experiences. It’s a mindset and a practice. Being actively engaged in everything you do, not just writing, ensures you’re continuing to learn. Storytelling is one component of that aspect of the human experience. It’s one way we’ve found over the millenia to help each other and benefit future generations. It’s one way we’ve found to communicate wisdom, and we’ve found it’s effective because it lasts.
Storytelling works because that which we take from stories lasts. Stories are ancient, and stories are eternal. They contain in them truths that have always been true and always will be true. What’s more, when people actively engage with them, the way we see those stories over time evolves because we who are actively engaged with the stories give them meaning.
Storytelling isn’t passive consumption. It’s dialogic. You’re supposed to think about the questions a story poses, and you’re supposed to seek answers.
I, at least, think that’s pretty cool.