The Oldest Profession
Storytelling is the oldest profession. It goes back through the mists of time to our beginnings, to the period when we were separating ourselves from the apes. Storytelling was the ladder by which we climbed into divinity-- that is, into intelligence.
Storytelling served a variety of needs and had several purposes. It instructed. It comforted. It posed examples. It celebrated such virtues as courage and loyalty. Stories were the school system of early mankind, long before there were schools. Storytelling was also the foundation of religion. That is why storytellers are shamans or priests or priestesses. When you examine the Bible, what do you see? Parables, which are stories told for instructive purposes.
I've been reading a lot about the death of storytelling, the demise of fiction. I don't believe storytelling is dying at all, though it is possible it is shifting more and more to visual stories seen on a screen. Written fiction may or may not be declining, but storytelling itself is not declining. Stories serve the same purposes now as they did from the dawn of mankind.
If fiction is in decline, that is largely the fault of the authors, or creators, of that fiction. I often see stories that are bereft of the underlying purpose embedded in fiction; stories that make no moral distinction between the protagonist and antagonists. In a way, these cease to be stories at all, because stories always contain some quality, or purpose, that wins the attention of readers. If there is nothing about a hero or heroine that compels a reader's loyalty or attention, then what the reader is seeing is not a story at all. Nor is it really fiction.
Bad writers make bad fiction. In one of my writing fields, western fiction, a lot of damage has been done by writers who do not distinguish protagonists from antagonists. I'll start reading a western story and suddenly stop: Who cares? If the world is indifferent to novelists now, there probably is good reason for it. But that is an opportunity for newcomers who know what lies at the heart of storytelling, to make their mark and bring us fresh stories.
Storytelling served a variety of needs and had several purposes. It instructed. It comforted. It posed examples. It celebrated such virtues as courage and loyalty. Stories were the school system of early mankind, long before there were schools. Storytelling was also the foundation of religion. That is why storytellers are shamans or priests or priestesses. When you examine the Bible, what do you see? Parables, which are stories told for instructive purposes.
I've been reading a lot about the death of storytelling, the demise of fiction. I don't believe storytelling is dying at all, though it is possible it is shifting more and more to visual stories seen on a screen. Written fiction may or may not be declining, but storytelling itself is not declining. Stories serve the same purposes now as they did from the dawn of mankind.
If fiction is in decline, that is largely the fault of the authors, or creators, of that fiction. I often see stories that are bereft of the underlying purpose embedded in fiction; stories that make no moral distinction between the protagonist and antagonists. In a way, these cease to be stories at all, because stories always contain some quality, or purpose, that wins the attention of readers. If there is nothing about a hero or heroine that compels a reader's loyalty or attention, then what the reader is seeing is not a story at all. Nor is it really fiction.
Bad writers make bad fiction. In one of my writing fields, western fiction, a lot of damage has been done by writers who do not distinguish protagonists from antagonists. I'll start reading a western story and suddenly stop: Who cares? If the world is indifferent to novelists now, there probably is good reason for it. But that is an opportunity for newcomers who know what lies at the heart of storytelling, to make their mark and bring us fresh stories.
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