Advice for Writing, Editing, Reading, and Life.
New posts on Mondays (for non-fiction) or Fridays (for fiction)
Anatomy of Storytelling: Do Stories Require Language?
Imagine that meaning is water. To know how much water you have, you need a system of measurement. To move the water from place to place, you need a bucket. Until you put your story into a language, it cannot be carried by someone else.
Anatomy of Storytelling: How Do You Tell a Story?
Anyone can tell a story. All of us do it daily. But not everyone can tell a story that will stick with the audience for years to come. If storytelling is the primary purpose of language (which, I’d argue it is), and language is the primary characteristic that separates us from animals (which, I’d argue it is) …
Isn’t it worthwhile to be good at it?
Anatomy of Storytelling: What Is a Story?
What even is a story? Lots of ideas came to mind. Perhaps a story is a series of events relayed by one person (or group) to another person (or group)? Or, perhaps a story is the communication of thoughts and feelings?
Ultimately I settled on this: a story is the base unit of meaning. To help me explain, I need to take a tangent into science.
A Case Study on Character: The Jungle Book (1967 vs. 2016)
With the recent release of Disney’s “live-action” Pinocchio remake, it would be too easy to simply point out all the issues with stripping a character of agency and regurgitating a colorful mess onto a streaming platform.
Instead, I want to look at what happens when you take a listless character and breathe life into them. That’s right, we’re finally tackling The Jungle Book, the only remake that I would argue wasn’t just good, but better than the animated classic it drew inspiration from.
A Case Study on Theme: Beauty and the Beast (1991 vs. 2017)
Obviously, any great work of fiction can have more than one theme, but there is usually one central theme that any other themes hang on; a trunk from which other themes can branch. The themes of 1991’s Beauty and the Beast deal with prejudice, freedom, love, and forgiveness. And the 2017 remake fumbles basically all of those. But none more egregiously than the “trunk” that made ‘91 so great.