GREG SCORZO
You get complete control over your world. With the other arts, the world you create is either too ambiguous to completely control (music), or the specificity of the world means you have to allow others to make creative decisions (film). But with writing, you are painting worlds with symbols and information of your choosing. You can't get more control of a narrative than that.
The process of spinning a narrative is a lot like delivering a bit of gossip. Unlike real life, you can make up the gossip to make it way more juicy than anything that would really happen. But if it's good gossip, it's still realistic enough to be believable, despite the juiciness. And in its believability, the fiction will contain a degree of truth. It will illuminating something about the world, by being a compulsively readable, hyper-real, highly focussed and completely imagined set of information about our world.
That's storytelling, in a nutshell. It's the midway point between lying and delivering a parable.
The process of spinning a narrative is a lot like delivering a bit of gossip. Unlike real life, you can make up the gossip to make it way more juicy than anything that would really happen. But if it's good gossip, it's still realistic enough to be believable, despite the juiciness. And in its believability, the fiction will contain a degree of truth. It will illuminating something about the world, by being a compulsively readable, hyper-real, highly focussed and completely imagined set of information about our world.
That's storytelling, in a nutshell. It's the midway point between lying and delivering a parable.
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