Stories and Human Connection: Quotes from Brad Pitt and Beeban Kidron

A couple of quotes from the news recently:

"I just had this profound love for storytelling. I think it's just an amazing thing we get to do. We're so complex; we're mysteries to ourselves; we're difficult to each other. And then here's this storytelling that reminds us we're all the same. I consider it such a privilege." -Brad Pitt, speaking with Backstage (Read the full interview here.)

"I think that stories, and the telling of stories, are the foundations of human communication and understanding.  If children all over the country are watching films, asking questions and telling their stories, then the world will eventually be a better place."  -Beeban Kidron, co-founder and directory of Filmclub (Quoted here on The Guardian's Teacher Network Blog.)

Remembering the Gift

"Einstein's thinking somehow presaged this thing about the structure of the brain. He said, 'The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.' We have created a society that honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift." -Iain McGilchrist

You Are What You Eat (A Blog Action Day Post)

Mundane details ground a story, making it feel real and vivid.  Food is one of the most versatile and fun of these mundane details to include.  Here are a few things that descriptions of food can accomplish in your story:

• Pleasure:  Just reading about good food can be mouthwateringly entertaining.  When I was a kid, I thought the author of Heidi made goat's milk and cheese sound like the best food in the world.  I still get hungry just at the mention of these foods!
• Health:  What your character eats can indicate how healthy they are - or even foreshadow a medical emergency later in the story.
• Values:  Vegetarian? Localvore? Survivalist? Organic or conventional?  In contemporary stories, what your character chooses to eat reflects his values as well as his palate.
• Aesthetics:  What's her style?  Does she chow down straight from the garden, or prepare an artful plate before digging in?
• Bonding:  Sharing a meal is as much a social function as a physical one.  Do your characters share their sustenance willingly?
• Status:  Maybe your characters don't share their food at all, or one grants it as a reward to another.  Perhaps the mayor visits and your character feels self-conscious because she only has some broth to offer.
• Meta-meals:  What does your character think about food?  What does she think about what others eat?

I recently came across a passage in Suzanne Collins' dystopian novel The Hunger Games that accomplishes a lot of these things all at once.  Katniss, a girl who's fed her family by hunting and gathering since she was twelve, has just gotten to the wealthy Capital where she will be forced to take part in a reality tv show where the teenage contestants must kill each other until only one is left standing.  At her first meeting with her costume designer, Cinna:

He pushes a button on the side of the table.  The top splits and from below rises a second table that holds our lunch.  Chicken and chunks of oranges cooked in a creamy sauce laid on a bed of pearly white grain, tiny green peas and onions, rolls shaped like flowers, and for dessert, a pudding the color of honey.

I try to imagine assembling this meal myself back home.  Chickens are too expensive, but I could make due with wild turkey.  I'd need to shoot a second turkey to trade for an orange.  Goat's milk would have to substitute for cream.  We can grow peas in the garden.  I'd have to get wild onions from the woods.  I don't recognize the grain, our own...cooks down to an unattractive brown mush.  Fancy rolls would mean another trade with the baker, perhaps for two or three squirrels.  As for the pudding, I can't even guess what's in it.  Days of hunting and gathering for this one meal and even then it would be a poor substitution for the Capitol version.

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button?  How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?

I look up and find Cinna's eyes trained on mine.  "How despicable we must seem to you," he says.

In just this page, the author tells you that Katniss is capable, resourceful, and, while possibly underfed, must be physically tough.  She's also observant and not at all taken in by the Capital's show of riches.  While Katniss understands exactly where her food comes from, the people of the Capital prefer to have it rise clean, pretty, and fully-made from the table itself.  By serving her such a fine meal, the Capital is indicating that Katniss has achieved a certain status (for now, anyway), but is also lording its wealth over her.  Since Cinna is the one who presses the button, he is the one in control of this meal and this meeting.  But we also see that Cinna has been observing Katniss, and that he reaches out to her over this meal that both of them understand is the result of, essentially, slave labor.  For the people of the Capital, food is just another form of lavish entertainment, but for Katniss it has meant (and will mean) the difference between life and death.

If you have a story going, collect all of your major characters around a meal.  Who cooks?  Where does the food come from?  How do the other characters like the food, or feel about its origins?  Who goes back for seconds and thirds?  Do the characters share freely or hoard?  What does food mean to them: survival, entertainment, comfort, fellowship?  Has anyone come to the table really hungry?

The Relevance of Storytelling in Your Job Search

This article proposes that job seekers can make themselves more memorable and compelling by forming a (true-to-life) story out of their experiences.

I suspect this holds true, but I would add that it's crucial to make the company you're applying for integral to the story, as in:  I've studied and gained experience and it's all leading up to this position.  Or maybe: I've worked hard to feed my family; I'm dependable and my work is important to me, so if you hire me I'll be grateful to have the job and I'll do my best. 

If I were job-hunting at the moment, I'd try to show the prospective employer that, if she hires me, the story will come to a positive close and everyone will live happily (and successfully) ever after.

What do you think?  Have you found that good storytelling (on purpose or just by habit) has helped you get jobs?

"We Are a Storytelling Species"

In this article on poynter.org, Roy Peter Clark discusses 9/11/2001 as the inciting incident in the story America is currently acting out.

Backstage Sabbaths

“This is your church,” the director said, gesturing to the stage. I was working as a stage manager at the now-defunct Bar Harbor Theater in Maine. We were on break, and the subject of religion had come up. My friend and coworker had asked whether I attended church, and I had said no. “This is your church,” was his response. That was the first of many times I’d think of theater, and of storytelling, in those terms.

Story provides ritual. I would liken reading before bed to an evening prayer. I would liken getting dressed up for the theater, taking your seat, and watching a play unfold to going to church. There are many rituals involved with preparing for a show: mopping the stage, donning costumes, the countdown from half an hour before curtain, and so on.

Story provides insight. I have always been as likely to learn ethical and social lessons from fictional texts as from philosophical and psychological ones. Early on, from the picture book Be Nice to Spiders, I developed a nascent sense of ecological awareness. From the film International Velvet, I learned that adults often get angry when they get scared. From Man of la Mancha, I learned that I prefer wholehearted attempt to halfhearted accomplishment.

Story provides awe. I confess I feel more awe at the sight of a blank stage than in the presence of an alter. I’ve felt more moments of transcendence backstage, as an audience member, and between the pages of books than at religious services. I adore the quiet that descends as the lights dim before a play: In that momentary hush exists the potential for miracles: We might find actors transformed into kings. We might witness battles long past. We might see, in these characters, the small moments of courage that we fail to recognize in our friends and family.

If witnessing and telling stories are my spiritual duties, than one might inquire about the creed of storytelling. In the C.S. Lewis biopic Shadowlands, a student says to Lewis that “we read to know we’re not alone.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Waiting For Godot depict very different worlds. The former might communicate the feeling of being caught up in apparent chaos while the latter centers on an interminable wait. But to anyone who has experienced those states, both of these plays let us know that others have felt the same. That assurance, that we are not alone, is something I have always understood to be a major appeal of religion. It is, perhaps, the primary purpose of storytelling.

Ultimately, though, storytelling is not a religion but a practice. A story may draw on any religion or mythology, and all religions that I know of draw on stories. No matter how our belief systems evolve, I suspect that storytelling will always exist - vital, if sometimes under recognized - alongside such practices as meditation, charity, and prayer.

Fear and Passion

A story, to be a story, must have some sort of tension, conflict, and ultimately fear. Beauty fears the Beast. We fear Cinderella will live out her life in servitude. Juliet and Romeo fear their families' reactions, but also fear being torn apart. In The King's Speech, Bertie fears stuttering in public, but also fears letting his people down.  Fear provides tension, and dramatic tension guides a plot.

Fear can also be used to draw the audience into identifying with a character.  Does the character fear poverty?  Great!  Lots of readers/audience members fear poverty too.  To give a shape to that fear, make it specific:  Maybe she fears the creeping feeling of cold up her fingertips and down her spine, cold that would make her curl into herself and makes her muscles shiver and lock up - so she turns the heat up extra high, even as she racks up late fees on her other bills.

But love, and passion, are also ways to draw your audience in.  Maybe, as much as this character fears and hates the cold, she loves sunlight.  Maybe she gets up just at sunrise to catch those first long rays and visits greenhouses even in the winter, because they're warm enough to walk around in in a t-shirt, with the sunlight playing over her skin, and the smell of plants gobbling up that sunlight all around her.

In each of these cases, the general fear/passion (cold/sunlight) is something universal.  The specifics of our character's fear/passion must be vivid and idiosyncratic:  details that make the audience feel that fear anew, and remember that passion long past the closing scene.