Another News Writing Tip of the Day (see previous post for context):
Let’s talk about what a “story” is. This applies to more than news writing. This is about media literacy.
Stories don’t exist in nature. They don’t grow on trees. They aren’t some geological artifact. They aren’t a physical reality.
Stories are mental models, heuristics, tools to help us understand the world.
Stories are 100% made by people. They’re like maps — it isn’t the real thing itself. It’s a representation of the real thing, meant to help people navigate reality.
No other animal uses them. Snakes don’t tell stories. Squirrels don’t gather around the campfire. This is a uniquely human method of making sense of an otherwise chaotic world. It’s our native language, before and above spoken language. If there’s any question about the importance of storytelling, realize that small children understand stories before they can recognize physical threats. They’ll understand a puppet show before they can speak. We naturally gravitate toward narrative — characters, relationships, motivated action and reaction. We human beings actively seek them out, because it’s our primary sense-making mechanism.
This may all sound very academic, like it only matters in a classroom, but that’s not true. This is critical to your ability to understand media, and produce media, whether that be in the form of a news article, a movie, TV shows, podcasts, or just random memes you see online. This is critical to your ability to navigate an increasingly complex and narratively conflicted and saturated world.
Here are lessons we understand as soon as we appreciate the nature of storytelling:
Nobody is objective. Every storyteller is doing so with a purpose.
We think of stories as “true” or “not true”. This isn’t really that constructive. People on opposite sides of a court case will tell very different stories with the same set of basic facts. Ask instead if your information is accurate and constructive.
If you’re introducing more questions than answers, the story isn’t doing its job. Don’t include information that unnecessarily complicates the story, even if it’s accurate.
A story is much more than a sequence of events. It has form and structure. If that’s not respected, the audience won’t understand the story, they definitely won’t like it, and they probably won’t finish it. The sequence and kind of information matter.
If we take stories at face value, if we fail to understand that they’re a human creation, then we can be very easily deceived, intentionally or unintentionally. Much of the turmoil we’ve seen in the country and the world in the past few years is because people are living in “alternate realities”. They uncritically believe stories presented to them, as though narratives were some objective fact. They aren’t. They’re tools. They’re maps. Some maps are useful. Some are overly simplistic, or overly complicated. Others are simply wrong. Still others are deliberately deceptive.
Remember this: the map is not the territory.