17 March 2025
Rosemary Kay
Maybe it’s because the world seems so much like a dystopian novel at the moment, that I’ve been thinking that Story is more important today than ever before.
Making sense of what’s happening
Most mornings, I get up and think – I really need someone to make sense of the world and what’s happening. I need a storyteller of great skill and insight and wisdom for this chaotic reality!
Storytelling puts things into some sort of context, helps us to examine issues and people and behaviour, in a safe way. When reality feels chaotic and uncertain, with worries about climate crises, political upheaval and technological anxieties, making stories can be a way to process it. Maybe even give us hope, resolve it, or even somehow reimagine our future. To say, hey, I think there might be something on the other side of this mess….
Story is useful, of course, not just as a source of entertainment, but in other walks of life – I was talking to Jason Purvor, the story guru at Google the other day, and he completely gets the force of story as a superpower to help succeed in the business world. In any world really…
Understanding
A good reason to harness the power of story right now, is that stories help us to understand each other, to get inside other people’s lives, to walk in someone else’s shoes.
It’s hard to behave like a monster towards your fellow humans, when you’ve been drawn into their story and find yourself caring about what happens in the next episode of their lives. It might not stop the worst dictator from invading another country, but it can give us all a bit of perspective. There’s a powerful moment in the C4 TV series “Go Back to Where you Came From”, in which six people opposed to immigration, experience refugee life up-close. Before this experience, they thought they knew who and what an immigrant was, and why they didn’t want them living in their town. But listening to a refugee recounting her harrowing experiences, the most vocal anti-immigrationista couldn’t help but reach out and clasp the other woman’s hand, offering support and understanding. Whatever you think of the programme – and yes, this issue requires nuance and sensitivity and doesn’t easily fit into “entertainment” – that moment, when two people held hands, serves as a reminder that reaching out and holding hands, is a powerful for both partners.
Understanding other people makes us stronger. Caring about the world and our fellow humans is a strength. It’s largely through story that most of us have a basic knowledge of the Holocaust. Imagine if we had no way to understand that human calamity, no way to avoid it happening again…..
Hidden Truths
Maybe the reason I include Augmented Reality in my collection of storytelling tools, is because stories reveal hidden truths; and Augmented Reality, which overlays the fictional on the real world, is very powerful at revealing what may be hidden. It might be a historical character emerging from the walls, someone from the future to lead the way, or the wolf emerging from what you thought was a rather charming sheep. AR has the capacity to uncover deeper layers of reality. It can remind us what lies beneath the surface, both literally and metaphorically.
Shared experience
Why are stories more powerful than a list of facts and figures? Why do so many people (maybe most people?) love being drawn into a story? Well, it’s surely written into our DNA? A throwback to our ancestors, sitting round a camp fire, learning about what happened on the latest hunt.
Stories have consistently given us shared meaning, narratives which help us connect the dots between events and emotions.
They bring people together. They remind us of our collective humanity.
Conclusion (you always have to have a conclusion, my English teacher taught me…)
At a time when the world feels fractured, in conflict, we need really good storytellers (and I don’t mean the peddlers of fake news, or gaslighting liars) to stitch us back together.
Sharing stories – maybe that’s what will survive, the indestructible remnant after the crisis.
