How stories are told
By: Samhita Arni
The publishing industry is struggling and has yet to take advantage of the infinite possibilities that technology and the digital realm offer us. One of the ideas that I’ve been wrestling with in recent times is whether or not the book is essential to the waystories will be told in the future. Can a story, confined to a book, turn viral or have quite the same spread as a meme?
It might be useful to explore how stories have been transmitted in the past, and this may give us insight into the how they will be transmitted in the future.
Epics – from the Iliad to the Valmiki Ramayana – use meter – and I suspect that this has much to do with the way these stories travel, recited before audiences or in the courts of kings. Having spent three years studying ancient Greek, I discovered something fundamental – meter is a fantastic mnemonic device.
I still can recite portions of the Iliad, thanks to a wonderful tip from my Ancient Greek professor – the meter of the Homeric epics, the dactylic hexameter, is fairly close to the rhythm of the ‘Darth Vader Death March’ from Star Wars. The technique – the very way the story is told or written – reflects the mode of transmission, and in the case of epic poetry, that the culture it arose in was primarily an oral one.
Stories travel. The Ramayana, it is suggested, is one of the inspirations of the great Chinese epic, Journey to the West. The Ramayana, like most Indian epics, is a frame story – a narrative innovation that, through the Panchatantra, some academics suggest travels westwards to influence the Arabian Nights, which in turn influences other great frame-narratives – Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Stories and techniques travel both ways. Centuries later the great Bengali poet Michael Madusudhan Dutt was influenced by European epic poetry in in his retelling of the Ramayana, Meghnad Bodh Kabya, and, inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, used blank verse, for the first time in Bengali literature.
A great story, I would like to suggest, is like a virus. It spreads, it recombines, it sparks off new variations, it inspires other stories in turn.
The mass-market book itself is a technology that is tied to the Renaissance and the age of Enlightenment, reflecting the spirit of the times that it was created in – the spread of knowledge, the questioning of religious authority, the changing social dynamics of the Renaissance and increasing levels of literacy. The invention of moveable type and the book is critical to the way our world and society has transformed over the last five centuries.
However, a book is perceived as something largely immutable – it could be adapted into a film or a movie, but the book itself is static. Copyright laws decree that a story belongs to the writer and his/her publisher – it is a writer’s intellectual property. Writers and publishers make money by selling copies – and so each buyer of a book, becomes, a patron. Yet, I’m increasingly beginning to wonder if this fixed, static model inhibits me, as storyteller, from realising the potential that social media and the digital realm hold for stories.
So, the question for next week – what is the future of storytelling and what could this mean for writers and books?
The publishing industry is struggling and has yet to take advantage of the infinite possibilities that technology and the digital realm offer us. One of the ideas that I’ve been wrestling with in recent times is whether or not the book is essential to the way
It might be useful to explore how stories have been transmitted in the past, and this may give us insight into the how they will be transmitted in the future.
Epics – from the Iliad to the Valmiki Ramayana – use meter – and I suspect that this has much to do with the way these stories travel, recited before audiences or in the courts of kings. Having spent three years studying ancient Greek, I discovered something fundamental – meter is a fantastic mnemonic device.
I still can recite portions of the Iliad, thanks to a wonderful tip from my Ancient Greek professor – the meter of the Homeric epics, the dactylic hexameter, is fairly close to the rhythm of the ‘Darth Vader Death March’ from Star Wars. The technique – the very way the story is told or written – reflects the mode of transmission, and in the case of epic poetry, that the culture it arose in was primarily an oral one.
Stories travel. The Ramayana, it is suggested, is one of the inspirations of the great Chinese epic, Journey to the West. The Ramayana, like most Indian epics, is a frame story – a narrative innovation that, through the Panchatantra, some academics suggest travels westwards to influence the Arabian Nights, which in turn influences other great frame-narratives – Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Stories and techniques travel both ways. Centuries later the great Bengali poet Michael Madusudhan Dutt was influenced by European epic poetry in in his retelling of the Ramayana, Meghnad Bodh Kabya, and, inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, used blank verse, for the first time in Bengali literature.
A great story, I would like to suggest, is like a virus. It spreads, it recombines, it sparks off new variations, it inspires other stories in turn.
The mass-market book itself is a technology that is tied to the Renaissance and the age of Enlightenment, reflecting the spirit of the times that it was created in – the spread of knowledge, the questioning of religious authority, the changing social dynamics of the Renaissance and increasing levels of literacy. The invention of moveable type and the book is critical to the way our world and society has transformed over the last five centuries.
However, a book is perceived as something largely immutable – it could be adapted into a film or a movie, but the book itself is static. Copyright laws decree that a story belongs to the writer and his/her publisher – it is a writer’s intellectual property. Writers and publishers make money by selling copies – and so each buyer of a book, becomes, a patron. Yet, I’m increasingly beginning to wonder if this fixed, static model inhibits me, as storyteller, from realising the potential that social media and the digital realm hold for stories.
So, the question for next week – what is the future of storytelling and what could this mean for writers and books?
