The first two pages of White Fang are more captivating and thought-provoking than anything I read on Twitter all day.
How is it that one or two pages from a story-teller, long-dead, can change you more profoundly than an endless scroll of the most profound thoughts of today’s most profound thinkers?
I’ve been obsessed with this question recently.
I sat down to record a video for work a few days ago. I was telling the story of a small company in Europe who started the world’s first carbon footprint credit card.
It was so hard.
I stumbled. I got side-tracked. Even the editors couldn’t save it. A total failure of storytelling.
The funny thing is, I used to be a great story-teller. It was like wood-working, or machining. I could feel a story’s angles and edges, knew how it fit together, sense the audience’s anticipation.
It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, and I remember the feeling of holding a group’s attention, wrapped, around a campfire or over drinks at a party.
I remember getting boring too.
All of a sudden, telling a story felt like treading water in a snow-suit. I pawed at the surface, trying harder and harder to keep my head up. Slipping further down into the darkness, flailing and thrashing, until finally all that was left was calm water as far as the eye could see.
I wish I could remember exactly what happened, that way I could change it back. I don’t know for sure, but I have a guess…
When I was 23, after a quarter-century of adventures, I suddenly found myself struggling with a case of soul-crushing anxiety. To survive, I learned to give up my expectations. Let go of my ideas about right and wrong. Embrace the messiness of life.
There’s a problem though…
At its core, story-telling is about exposing the gap between expectation and reality. If there’s no difference between what happened, and what the audience expects would happen, then there is no story.
For a story-teller, giving up expectations is like trimming the whiskers on a cat. All of a sudden, the world seems just a little out-of-reach. And that’s enough to ruin a great story.
So this blog is about exploring the craft of storytelling, and maybe, about learning to open myself back up to expectations after nearly a decade spent surviving.