National Storytelling Week: Truth and lies in storytelling and life

To mark National Storytelling Week (30 January – 6 February), Professor Joseph Sobol, Director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at USW, explores truth and lies in storytelling and life.

It seems that the label of “Storyteller” has become increasingly coveted in contemporary culture. Everyone seems to want a piece of the mantle: pop songwriters, actors and film directors, photographers, bloggers, vloggers, advertisers and their corporate clients, doctors, lawyers—and especially politicians.

This is a mixed blessing for us long haulers in the storytelling field. Good because our work is suddenly “hot,” or at least hotter than it was when no one knew it was an actual thing. Not so good because the concepts of storyteller and story have been diluted down to homeopathic trace elements by filtering through innumerable competing agendas. It has been used to cover anything from Instagram photos to TikToks, Nike ads, Brexit buses, and adorable cat videos.

So what exactly makes something “storytelling?” Is there away to identify it beyond the generalities of contemporary folk-speech? Ultimately, perhaps, no—a word is defined by its usage, after all, and its usage is often more metaphoric and aspirational than literal. But just as a provocation, let me suggest some things that distinguish the real deal from the marketing ploy.

My current working definition of Storytelling goes like this: Storytelling is the representation and evaluation of consequential actions by sentient agents in imagined worlds.

This is a simple enough formula on the face of it. But it contains some important clues to how real storytelling operates.

First, representation: everyday life is too unwieldy for story. Life has to be trimmed and shaped by the craftsman’s tools of language, expression, and audience involvement—it must be RE-presented, not as daily life but as a story, extracted from life and transmuted into art.

Second, evaluation: true storytelling has within it some guiding sense of meaning, of discrimination, of moral stakes and the struggle for wisdom. Even if the storyteller’s evaluation seems to suggest that there is no way of reaching ultimate judgement, that suspension of judgement after evident moral struggle still sheds light.

Third, consequential actions: a story draws the connections between actions and their consequences. This flow runs in both, or more accurately, in many directions—our actions are the flowering of causes that may lie deep in the ground of our ancestral being, and it’s the storyteller’s job to uncover them.  Stories reveal hidden causes and deliver us the catharsis of revealed effects.

Fourth, sentient agents: characters in stories FEEL. This is what carries them beneath our skins. We suffer the gift (or the curse) of empathy. Sometimes it’s too intense--we have to repress it just to keep ourselves from being overwhelmed. But stories allow us to exercise our empathic muscles in safe gymnastic settings, to experience the fellowship of human feeling in medicinal doses. Too much and we may tire or recoil--too little, and we drift away. The storyteller’s job is to measure the dosages, through the capsules of a story’s characters.

Fifth, imagined worlds: all story worlds, by definition, are imagined. We know that the worlds that emerge from the phrase, “Once upon a time…” are imaginary—horses talk, pigs fly, sorcerers lay spells, and princesses live happily ever after. But also, every time we start a story, “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me today…” we are calling forth a world out of imaginary substance, bringing it to life, setting it in motion in our own and in our listeners’ heads.

Finally, real stories (not “true stories,” but REAL STORIES, are woven out of compelling ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological concerns. What is good and what is evil? What is beautiful and what is physically, emotionally, or spiritually ugly? And critically, what is real in our outer or inner worlds and what is false, and how in the world can we tell the difference?

By telling. Telling stories.

So even when we tell the story as a representation of real events, the STORY itself is an imagined event—a sequence of consequential actions tied up in sensibility and rendered with ethical, aesthetic, or epistemological evaluations.

Why are journalistic stories so unsatisfactory on the day of an event? They are merely recitals of factual fragments with no clear sense of cause and effect. Since moving here to Wales I’ve been struck by how local news platforms cover judicial and coroners’ inquests for events that may have taken place years before. In impatient American terms these hardly qualify as news—but here they clearly perform a social storytelling function. They take the prior jumble of factual fragments and rearrange them into real stories, with tangible beginnings, middles, and endings, with judges and juries as impartial ethical and epistemic evaluators, and with sentient figures whose moral struggles, failings, or victim status can register as something recognizably human. Forgivable or unforgivable, the ordeals of these characters in inquest narratives instruct us in the trials and tragedies of being alive, and often, of the bleak silences that follow.

Joseph’s recent book, Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers: Essays on Traditional and Contemporary Storytelling, has received a Storytelling World Award for Outstanding Storytelling Resource 2020-21.