“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations”—Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Penguin Group, 2013), 16.
Traditionally, stories have been organized around universal dramatic principles first identified by Aristotle in Poetics, later codified by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and most recently customized for screenwriters in programs like Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! But in recent decades, narrativity has taken on a new, shapeless, very possibly endless permutation: the transmedia “mega-franchise”—that is, the intertextual and ever-expanding storyworlds of Marvel, Star Wars, The Conjuring, Harry Potter’s Wizarding World, et al.
In this month’s guest post, friend of the blog Dave Lerner returns to delineate the five creative objectives of storytelling—and how those have mutated, along with narrativity itself, in this era of branded-IP entertainment.
From the first cave paintings to the Homeric epics to the Globe Theatre to the multicamera sitcom, storytellers across the ages have told stories for reasons so obvious they often go unstated and unacknowledged.
Let’s take a look at the five creative goals that guide storytellers in any medium, whether it be a movie, novel, TV episode, comic book, or otherwise. Commercial considerations such as “profit” and “being hired to do so” are omitted here, as these are not creative goals.
Storytelling Goal #1: Entertainment
Elementary! The storyteller intends for their audience to have fun, to relax, to take their minds off their problems, to experience another world, another life, for a while. Pure escapism. While some may decry “mindless entertainment,” I would argue that it has a necessary place in life—and I’m not the only one who sees the virtues of escapist stories:
Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.” I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, “What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?” and gave the obvious answer: jailers.
C. S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
Storytelling Goal #2: Artistic Expression
Although the definition of “Art” has been and will be debated endlessly, for the purpose of this category I will use the second definition from Wiktionary:
The creative and emotional expression of mental imagery, such as visual, auditory, social, etc.
To further specify, art is more about the feelings the artist is expressing and the statement the artist is making than the emotions they are attempting to evoke in their audience.
Arguments about whether or not a given piece is “art,” or a given medium is “capable of creating art,” though valid in other contexts, will be disregarded here. I’ll assume if you say your piece is art, then it’s art. I am also ignoring the quality of the piece, the term “a work of art.” By my definition, a movie can be as much a piece of art as a painting, sculpture, symphony, literary novel, etc., though when it is, it’s usually called a “film” and not a “movie.”
Storytelling Goal #3: Education
The storyteller aspires to teach their audience something they did not know before. While documentaries and lectures are obvious examples, many read historical novels or hard science fiction for much the same purpose. When I was a child, I first learned that water expands when it freezes from a Shazam! comic book. Of course, a person may forget most of what they’d learned almost immediately afterwards, but the learning experience itself was enjoyable.
Even if the “facts” presented are deliberately inaccurate, as long the intent is for people to believe them, this category applies.
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