Welcome to the third installment of my series on how stories work, and how people use them in their lives. I’m writing these pieces in preparation to put them all into a book. I’ve found that diagramming out the concepts and then describing them has been a big help for me to better understand and explain the ideas I’m working with.
To get a better sense of what I’m talking about, you may like to check out the posts which precede this before getting started:
- Part 1: Anatomy of a Story-System
- Part 2: How People Relate to Stories
Okay, let’s get started. Here’s my most recent diagram. Basically, what I am trying to talk about here is that the act of telling a story necessarily modifies it.
1 - STORY AS TOLD: First, when a person tells a story, they must put it into some kind of structure or format in order to deliver it to another person (transmission). The structure which they put it into will inevitably emphasize certain elements over others, as well as put things into a particular sequence. Also, the story will draw on implicit pre-existing cultural context & language, which are outside of the story itself.
2 - STORY AS PERCEIVED: The person who hears or sees the story will unwittingly modify it further. Each person has a slightly different cultural background, and personal experiences to draw on; this is their context. The more differences in the cultural context between the teller and the receiver, the greater chances for misunderstanding. The receiver most likely won’t realize the misunderstanding though, and they will just automatically substitute in whatever they know that most closely matches. In the diagram above, this is indicated by shapes which are substituted & inverted. Beyond that, there is also the potential for the receiver to misinterpret small cues and subtle relationships within the story - subtexts. This is represented in the diagram by the slight color differences between the shapes in the first two sets.
3 - STORY AS IT IMPACTS RECEIVER: Beyond even the level of modification described above, the story will be modified once more by the receiver (usually this happens simultaneously with step 2, though). People naturally will identify with certain elements in a story more than others, based on their own personal experiences, viewpoint and feelings. These elements will be emphasized over others. Sequence may be re-arranged to support this emphasis. Perhaps too, items which they didn’t quite grasp or which were too dissonant with their existing views will even be dropped altogether.
In my next post, I will look at the importance that this natural inescapable process of modification has on different kinds of stories. Also, I will examine systems by which people try to institute version control, to maintain their stories against modification.
For further info, also check out these two posts:
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