For thousands of years, "storytelling" was something done for collective benefit--emphasis on the word "collective." But then the term was, quite annoyingly, perverted in the 1990s. The navel-gazing variants morphed into intellectualized narcissism in psychoanalysts' offices, escaped into the cultural wild, found others of their kind, and bred into nuisance proportions. That's my surmise, anyway.
In this decade, the term has, more annoyingly, been co-opted into the marketing lexicon, which adds another layer of self-interest. Which is emphatically not the point of a pastime with such a venerable history. Scheherazade, after all, was merely trying to save her own neck and those of the one-day Queens whose fates would have followed her own.
Most annoyingly of all, our defenses don't seem to have evolved. We're just suckers for a story, as if we're still sitting around the fire, making shadow puppets on the cave walls and funny voices to go with them. So I really think that the marketing gurus need to issue a few caveats when they advise their flocks to "tell your story." Two reasons, one to do with "story" and one to do with "telling":
1.) Many folks trying to frame the "narrative" (another abused term) of their businesses are too apt to assume that they must say something still-in-the-plastic-clamshell-new. Particularly in this culture that fawns--yea, even slobbers--over innovation and novelty and shock. Patently silly, of course: Any English major will tell you that there are fewer than a dozen unique "stories" anyway. Commedia dell'arte being a case in point. Too literary? Try soap operas. Or the WWF. Or just consider Wile E. Coyote and the roadrunner. You know darned well that the roadrunner will never, EVER be the coyote's lunch. Admit it, you'd completely freak out if that happened. (I don't care how old you are: If you say you wouldn't, you lie, my friend.) But you keep watching anyway, don't you? Uh-huh. You see what I mean.
2.) Ultimately, you need to tell the listener a story that they think that they want to hear. It may or may not be the same story that is ultimately told--sometimes that disparity is the story. (And that, as they say, is another story entirely. We won't get there tonight.) But the process of bringing someone from where they are to where you are is one of guiding them to a place where they're ultimately happy to be. It is not a matter of hijacking them into your space. The difference comes from respecting the fact that attention is not free, and must be continually earned. Take your listeners for granted, and you'll lose it. Shout your story to gain a bigger audience, and you'll lose it. Be caught lying, and you'll lose it--probably for good.
So if we absolutely must live in a society where the notion of storytelling is just a fig-leaf for self-involved shilling, it's be nice if the fundamentals were at least respected. May Joseph Campbell rest in peace.
