What if Our Stories are Dividing Our World
What if our stories shape the way we see our world?
What if we are shaping our world into us versus them with the stories we tell?
What if I told you we are being taught the us versus them story format right now and it is often claimed to be the most natural way to tell stories, based on thousands of years of storytelling?
And what if I told you there is another way, one that is being used in TED Talks, books, magazines and narrative journalism, it feels just as natural when we see, hear, read it but it goes unnamed or misnamed as the story that is dividing us?
THE 1950S
The story structure based on us versus them didn’t exist until the 1950s. The man who named this structure was Joseph Campbell and he named this structure in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Today we know it as the Hero’s Journey.
In 1950s America the US was steeped in heroism after the win of World War II. The American Dream was unfolding for many white, working-class men who returned from the war to the GI Bill. Women had been emancipated and given jobs they formerly hadn’t had before the men were deployed but now they were back in their houses, taking care of their children while the newly upwardly mobile men went to work.
These were heroic times for some.
Then came the 1960s. The American way of life was brought into question by those not benefiting from the boom in the 1950s, black Americans and women fought for their rights, they fought against Jim Crow laws, they fought for equality. Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem and hundreds and thousands of individual men and women of all colors and genders took to the streets and the church pews, sat in university buildings and the halls of government.
Our national narrative became more complicated as the stories that compelled these movements, the realities that were outside of the American white picket fence American dream narrative, were presented, discussed, revealed. These were hidden histories for some but lived experiences for many. The new narratives outlined restrictions that intentionally prevented possibilities for these many.
Us versus them stories reduce the world into good and evil, heroes and villains. The world becomes less complicated, things feel simple.
The complicated stories expanded our vision beyond this simple storyline. The people telling them were giving context to their own lived but untold experiences. Reporters looking at these lives were telling stories from eye level not from above. They were bringing people along on the journey through what I like to call the WeStory.
This was not a hero’s journey. Only later would these same leaders be talked about using the Hero’s Journey framework when their stories hit movie theaters and made for TV specials.
THE NATURE OF THE STORIES WE TELL
The story that was deemed natural in the early 1950s was, of course, one story of many. But in the 1970s it was explicitly employed by two filmmakers whose films became historical successes, and for good reason. These were Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and George Lucas’s original Star Wars series.
At this same time, New Wave cinema was sweeping the Art Houses telling new stories using new forms. But the Hero’s Journey was dominating the box offices.
Money was the driving motivator in Hollywood so stories that sold more tickets were the stories that became produced. More and more money was poured into screenplays that were based on stories that were told using this ‘proven’ story structure.
On the page, an alternative story form was coming into its own that borrowed filmic language by placing readers into a scene. This is now known as narrative nonfiction or experimental narrative.
One of the first published stories in this genre was The Atomic Bomb Survivors by John Hersee printed in the New York Magazine in 1946. The story depicted the lives of six survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, immersing readers into the lives of these survivors from the moment they woke up, to the moment of the explosion all the way to the repercussions they experience months later.
John Hersee, The Atomic Bomb Survivors, Aug 31, 1946, New York Magazine
WE LOVE HUMAN STORIES
Fast forward to the 2010s. As both a creator and observer of media, it seemed that a seismic shift took place from the early 2010s. There was a rise in the popularity of human stories.
The wildly popular Humans of New York Instagram feed started in 2010 by Brandon Stanton who in order to practice his photography skills took up a practice of meeting people on the street, taking their photos and asking about their lives. He posted these photos of everyday people along with an excerpt of their story.
We also saw the rise in popularity of stories of everyday humans as they were told on This American Life, The Moth and Snap Judgment. These stories were being told for decades (This American Life since 1995, The Moth started in 1997) but to hear them you would have to go to the events or find the radio broadcast and listen when it was aired. With the advent of podcasts, more people could find and hear these stories and the genre expanded.
Add to that the popularity of TED Talks which became available on YouTube in 2006. Before that to see these talks one would have to attend a conference. The fee to attend the main four-day TED Conference starts at $12,000.
During this time television shows were breaking from simple storytelling structures, narratives were becoming more complicated and nuanced, The Sopranos. Our heroes were less heroic. Our contexts were less black and white, The Wire.
Narrative nonfiction books were reaching new heights, topping the New York Times bestseller lists and making lists of their own.
Today, everywhere around us, in our ears, on our screens, in our social feeds we are exposed to
stories, powerful stories, stories about everyday humans, very few of which fit the Hero’s Journey.
ANCIENT HUMAN STORIES
That got me thinking. Were there human stories in ancient times or were we just bathed in Hero’s Journeys from our myths to the statues in our public squares?
On an evening of the full moon in Berlin friends sat around a table reciting poems inspired by the moon. A neighbor read a poem by the Ancient Greek poet, Sappho. She lived from 630–570 BC and was known by some as the “Tenth Muse.” According to Wikipedia her poetry was well-known and admired at the time. Her poems spoke of love and family, the stuff of everyday humans, and of relations between women.
Campbell references the great myths of Western society as the source of the story that is embedded in all of humanity. Even during those times when Greek mythology was part of the everyday culture there were other ways of thinking and telling stories.
In addition to poetry, there was the question. Rather than telling a story, this is a way of looking inside one’s mind to uncover biases and to widen one’s point of view. Many of us are familiar with this way of teaching called the Koan. In China, these stories were called Gongans and originated in the time of the Tang Dynasty, 618–907.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Today, I’m hard-pressed to find recommendations about stories aimed at entrepreneurs or social change agents that do not reference the Hero’s Journey.
The story structure feels like the magic door for gaining entry into financial funds for documentary storytellers. It feels like the measure of success is impact and the assumption is that if you have a ‘character-driven story’ you will create more impact, therefore to get funds you need to follow a story structure like the Hero’s Journey.
I remember writing grant proposals for my film trying to fit my idea into the Hero’s Journey. This was not the type of story I wanted to tell.
I wanted to create an essay film in the vein of Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I. An Essay is not a structure, it is a category. And this category didn’t seem to have much of an outlet to be seen or an audience to watch it back in 2003 when I began work on Beard Club, a film about the social politics of facial hair, and really a look into the masculine identity and power politics. It was a look at male body power structures told through stories of men and women from across a large spectrum of religious, economic, and cultural backgrounds.
There were so many structural story options I was seeing and came to see from the 2010s, but I didn’t have a name for what I saw and wanted to express.
Moreover, I feel it is impossible to tell either a story the takes a look at human structures or a story that looks at humans themselves when using the structure imposed by the Hero’s Journey.
We are living in a universe of multiple stories. We are living in a time that craves multiplicity and nuance.
Earlier this week I watched a new series on Netflix, Worn. The series is a complex set of individual stories that touch on both human and structural narratives, told beautifully with the aid of beautiful animations, an interweaving of stories aided by the graphic and audio of a piece of clothing being moved on a rack, and spanning the spectrum of humanity by the people they include and the themes each episode addresses.
More and more I’m seeing these types of human and structural films being produced, using structures that are compelling and human and that I wish to give a name to so that others can more easily take that tact and tell more of these stories.
THE WESTORY
Being a story detective I wanted to find another way to talk about the stories we tell.
The WeStory is a framework that helps storytellers bring empathy and compassion to the characters they choose to bring to life, by taking a 360-degree look at the influences that impacted a human's decisions, influences the viewers, readers listeners may not have access to, enhancing your understanding as a storyteller.
This framework helps to identify the gaps in understanding between the storyteller and the audience that make for the foundation of a good journalistic story, a story that has the intention of informing and entertaining. These informative stories give context to a reality the reader or viewer hasn’t thought about before.
It can be just as interesting to learn about the small things in life that we haven’t noticed, and maybe even more interesting than learning about the lives of hero’s battling their foes, real or imagined.
The WeStory is a Framework that includes a Practice for uncovering points of common ground and common goals as well as gaps in understanding; and the Empowered Journey framework that puts the writer at the same level as the reader.
As Jill Abramson stated in her Harvard Lecture with Steven Pinker on Mastering Style: The Learning and Teaching of Style, back in 2014, “Good journalism literally takes the reader by the hand and in a helpful way takes him or her on a walk. A walk of revelation.”
EVERY STORY HAS A WORLD VIEW
Writers spend a lot of time explicitly defining the world view of their characters. They look at the world view of both their protagonist and antagonist. They know where their views clash and where they overlap.
When we are making a case, arguing a point, in a WeStory world we would take the time to understand the different points of views of the characters in the scene.
The Hero’s Journey rushes to name a foe or label a situation as good or bad.
The Empowered Journey works to understand someone’s context and see the nuances in a situation.
Both have their place in our story canon and culture. I’m happy to see that the storytellers using what I call Empowered Journey story structures are growing in number and that those story structures are gaining more spaces to be aired, viewed and read.
Just because a story has a main character, doesn’t mean that character is a hero.
Just because a story is an essay, doesn’t mean it is dry and without the excitement of a story that unfolds with a sense of mystery or growing tension.
How do we change the world?
We change the stories we tell about the world.
We need to take on the mindset of an artist and get curious about our surroundings and ask ourselves, does this narrative make sense? Who would be impacted by this story? How might others think of this reality?
We need to look beneath the surface of well-trod assumptions and help others to be curious. As storytellers, we have the ability to put out our hands and share our journey of discovery so that we bring people along and open up their eyes to a world beyond their current view of the world.
I believe we want to do better for humans, species and our planet. I believe this is innate in us as humans. Our cultural narratives were constructed to protect us from a perceived danger as we saw it with the information we had at hand. Our understanding of our world has grown. We need to examine these understandings and find new narratives for a new age.
Together, we can build a more beautiful world one story at a time.
MORE IN THE SERIES
Winning Attention: Dale vs The Hero
Why the Hero’s Journey Isn’t for Everyone