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Opening Your Story
I know the title makes it sound a lot like I’m only addressing novelists and fiction writers. Bear with me! It’s important to understand the word “story” has a broader context. Advertisers tell the story of their products. Biographers tell the story of their subjects. Plays tell stories, poetry tells stories, newspapers tell stories. And people love stories. It’s why marketers are coming back to telling stories-because they stick in people’s hearts and minds and souls.
From prehistoric times when our ancestors gathered around fires in caves, storytellers have been aware of how arranging events in a story-like way held the attention of an audience.
The first recorded story is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates from 2100 BCE. The first half of the story discusses Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to stop him oppressing the people of Uruk. After an initial fight, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become close friends. In the second half of the epic, Gilgamesh’s distress at Enkidu’s death causes him to undertake a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life.
So if you think about this, you can pull this iconic story apart into its different elements. There’s conflict. There’s friendship. There’s resolution of conflict. There’s death. There’s a search for higher meaning. These are the same elements present in stories up to…
