Larry Law - Philosophy of Storytelling 4/12

I suspect that there are two major reasons as to why we tell stories the way we do: to entertain and to convey a message to the reader. Everybody loves a good story. We tell stories to seduce the audience, to enrich their lives. Storytellers paint pictures of far off lands, a damsel in distress, or a great battle. If you have ever been reading a book and could not put it down due to the anticipation of what may come on the next page, you know the feeling of being fully immersed in a story. The goal of a story is to deliver not only a literal sense of wonder, awe, and enjoyment, but also to leave your reader wanting more. I cannot imagine that there is a story that exists that does not try to convey some kind of message and I have always found that the most entertaining and captivating stories are the ones whose message is not spoon fed to me, but ones that allow for interpretation.

With the addition of visuals to story, the storyteller gives the audience direct visual queues. We, the storyteller, can create a connection with the audience, whether it’s something comedic, suspenseful, or gut wrenching, with the simple use of an image or video that corresponds with the words we are saying. It adds an extra element that a simply vocalizing or reading the words from a page cannot match.

The ability to use imagery to capture an atmosphere adds an extra dimension to storytelling. The making of a video story involves a much more complex thinking process. Everything in this story is meditated so the precision of images and videos is crucial. Things need to fall at exactly the right place in order to evoke what is intended.

Stories play with our emotions and senses, and outside of books, they tend to deal with our auditory and visual senses. The tools we use to attract ourselves and the audience to our story stem from how compelling and relatable we make it, and that entails the use of entertaining, whatever that may be, audio and visual cues.