Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Open Mic Wednesday - Welcome







The Art of Storytelling




Quotes for you to ponder...

















About storytelling...



Stories have power. They can hold human attention and even shape our thinking.  We live in a world bombarded with stories.  We live in them all day long and dream in stories all night long.  After a long, hard days work we come home tired and collapse into stories, either by radio, t.v., books or those around us.  Without personal life stories our life would be incoherent and meaningless.  Man is a storytelling creature.  

People are hungry for stories and rivet on every aspect of storytelling.  They almost supernaturally have the ability to mold our thinking and behaviour.  

"We can't blame our smart phones or other modern technologies for our short attention spans.  The human mind is a wanderer by nature.  The daydream is the mind's default state.  Whenever the mind doesn't have something really important to do, it gets bored and wanders off into la-la land.  Studies show that we spend about half of our waking hours - 1/3 of our lives on earth- spinning fantasies.  We have about two-thousand of these a day, with an average duration of fourteen seconds.  In other words, our minds are simply flitting all over the place all the time." 

-source Jonathan Gottschall


Stories even though presented to us are fake but it doesn't stop the unconscious parts of our brain from processing it like it is real.  That's why an audience in a horror film cringes, or screams, or balls up to protect vital organs.  That's why our heart races when the hero of the film is cornered or caught, and why we weep over the fate of a pretend dog named Old Yeller.  Stories powerfully hook and hold human attention because, at our brain level, whatever is happening in a story is happening to us and not just to them.  

The next time you are reading a story, watching a movie, listening to the radio, or music, or people around you...remember what you are internalizing is powerful, and can change your thinking, behaviour and your life.  Never underestimate the effectiveness of words.  




Read on and read always!

It's a wrap.



Contact me at storywrapsblog@gmail.com

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