Stories change the world around us. Sometimes the changes are small, sometimes huge and powerful. This is currently known as the Sideways Effect, which is widely studied by academics.
The novel Sideways – and the subsequent film featuring Paul Giamatti – included a tirade against Merlot. It changed the wine industry forever, reducing Merlot’s market share from 20% to just 6% while boosting Pinot Noir and creating an entire tourist industry in the valley where the book was set.
Small: there was never an NYPD choir until a Christmas song had them singing Galway Bay. Now there is.
Storytelling is a meme generator. A creator’s dreaming seeps into the mind of a reader or viewer and changes the way they think as if they’d been infected by a virus. And when their thoughts change, their actions in the world change, and that changes the world itself.
Storytelling is hugely powerful. It shouldn’t be treated lightly.
Amen! Preach! Storytelling is how we developed these complex brains in the first place. Telling stories is how we have passed on knowledge for countless generations. I’m with those who call us Homo narrans or Homo fictus, as storytelling is so essential to our current evolutionary state. I think we’re still growing into Homo sapiens. Storytelling can be the tool through which our wisdom grows. But the good or ill of tools is all in how you use them.