A tale is a simple linear path that the author promotes as being either a good or bad one, depending on the outcome.

There’s a certain amount of power in that.  Still, it wouldn’t take our early author long to realize that if he didn’t have to limit himself to relating events that actually happened he might wield even more power over his audience.

Rather, he might carry things a step farther and create a fictional tale to illustrate his belief in the benefits or dangers of following a particular course.  That is the concept behind Fairy Tales and Cautionary Tales – to encourage certain behaviors and inhibit other behaviors based on the author’s belief as to the most efficacious courses of action in life.

But what kind of power might you garner if you went beyond merely stating, “This conclusion is true for this particular case,” but rather boldly stated “This conclusion is true for all cases?”

In other words, you tell your audience, “If you begin here, then no matter what path you might take from that given starting point, it wouldn’t be as good (or as bad) as the one I’m promoting.”

Rather than saying that the approach you have described to your audience is simply good or bad in and of itself, you are now inferring that of all the approaches that might have been taken, yours is the best (or worst) way to go.

Clearly that has a lot more power to it because you are telling everyone, “If you find yourself in this situation, exclude any other paths; take only this one,” or, “If you find yourself in this situation, no matter what you do, don’t do this!”

Still, because you’ve only shown the one path, even though you are saying it is better than any others, you have not illustrated the others.  Therefore, you are making a blanket statement.

Now, an audience simply won’t sit still for a blanket statement. They’ll cry, “Foul!” They will be thinking of the other paths they might personally have taken and will at least question you.

So, if our early author sitting around a fire says, “Hey, this is the best of all possible paths,” his audience is going to say , “What about this other case? What if we tried this, this or this?”

If the author had a sound case he would respond to all the solutions the audience might suggest, compare them to the one he was touting and conclusively show that the promoted path was, indeed, the best (or worst). But if a solution suggested by the audience proves better than the author’s, his blanket statement loses all credibility.

In a nutshell, for every rebuttal the audience voices, the author can attempt to counter the rebuttal until he has proven his case or at least exhausted their interest in arguing with him.  Since he is there in person, he won’t necessarily have to argue every conceivable alternative solution – just the ones the audience brings up. And if he is successful, he’ll eventually satisfy everyone’s concerns or simply tire them out to the point they are willing to accept his conclusions.

But what happens if the author isn’t there when the story is related?  The moment a story is recorded and replayed as a poem, a song ballad, a stage play, or a motion picture (for example), then the original author is no longer present to counter any rebuttals the audience might have to his blanket statement.

So if someone in the audience thinks of a method of resolving the problem and it hasn’t been addressed it in the blanket statement, they will feel there is a hole in the argument and that the author hasn’t made his case.

Therefore, in a recorded art form, a successful communicator needs to include all the other reasonable approaches that might be suggested in order to “sell” his approach as the best or the worst.

He needs to show how each alternative is not as good (or as bad) as the one he is promoting thereby proving that his blanket statement is correct.

A narrative, then, becomes a far more complex proposition than a simple tale.  Now the author must anticipate all the other ways the audience might consider solving the problem in question. In effect, he has to include all the ways anyone might reasonably think of solving that problem.

Essentially, he has to include all the ways any human mind might go about solving that problem. In so doing, as an accidental by-product, generations of communicators have arrived at our modern conventions of narrative structure: a model of the mind’s problem-solving process encoded in the framework itself.

Excerpted from the book, A Few Words About Communication

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When an animal screams in pain, others notice, yet this is not communication as there was no intention involved. But when an animal calls out in alarm at an approaching predator it is more likely to be an intended communication.

Meaning may come from patterns recognized from previous experience or by translating the actions or sounds produced by others into what they would mean if one did those things oneself. But communication requires the intentional accurate transmission of information and/or passion from the author to the audience.

Communication likely emerged through raising an alarm, then quickly evolved to pointing at items to get the attention of others and direct it in particular direction or at a particular place.

Following these lines, continued progress would likely center on making sounds or movements to indicate issues about oneself, such as rubbing one’s stomach and pointing at one’s mouth to indicate hunger.

Success in achieving communication would illustrate its value and drive a fairly quick expansion of conventions of symbolic language that would be taught to the young and sustained (with gradual morphing) from generation to generation.

Once a sufficient collection of symbols had been developed, it would be natural that the more inspired communicators would come up with the notion of stringing two or more symbols together in linear form to communicate a succession of events or concepts.

In this manner, the foundational form of sentence structure and grammar would coalesce while simultaneously the beginnings of narrative structure would emerge as a byproduct.

For example, an early communicator might relate how to get to a place where there are berries or how to avoid a place where there are bears. He would use sign language to outline his journey and to depict the things and events he encountered along the way.

When our communicator became able to string together a series of events and experiences he has created a tale. Simply put, the definition of a tale is an unbroken linear progression of symbols that communicates meaning through sequence.

We call this kind of tale a “head-line” because it focuses on a chain of logical connections without emotive content. But you can also have a “heart-line” – an unbroken progression of feelings. For example, our communicator might have related a series of emotions he had experienced in a flow of feelings not connected to of any logistic progression.

Tales can be just a head-line or a heart-line, or can be more complex by combining both. In such a case, the tale might begin with a particular situation in which the communicator (henceforth author) relates his feelings at the time. Then, the author might proceed to the next step, which made him feel differently, and so on until he arrives at a final destination as well as a concluding emotional state.

In a more complex form, emotions and logic drive each other, fully intertwining both the head-line and hear-line. So, starting from a particular place in a particular mood, driven by that mood, the author acted to arrive at a second point, which then made him feel differently.

The tale might be driven by logic with feelings passively responded to each step, or it might be driven completely by feelings in which each logic progression is a result of one’s mood.

And, in the most complex form of all, logic and feelings take turns in driving the other, so that feelings may cause the journey to start, then a logical event causes a feeling to change and also the next step to occur. Then, feelings change again and alter the course of the journey to a completely illogical step.

In this way, our early author can “break” logic with a bridge of feeling, or violate a natural progression of feelings with a logical event that alters the mood. Very powerful techniques wrapped up in a very simple form of communication!

We know that the human heart cannot just jump from one emotion to another without going through essential emotional states in between. However, if you start with any given emotion, you might be able to jump to any one of a number of emotions next, and from any of those jump to others. But you can’t jump to all of them. If you could, then we all just be bobbing about from one feeling to another. There would be no growth and no emotional development.

As an analogy, look at the stages of grief. You have to go through them in a particular order. You can’t skip over any. If you do, there’s an emotional mis-step. It has an untrue feeling to the heart.

A narrative that has a character that skips an emotional step or jumps to a step he couldn’t really get to from his previous mood, it will feel uncomfortable to the audience. It will feel as if the character started developing in a manner the audience members cannot follow with their own hearts. It will pop your audience right out of the story and cause it to see the character as someone with whom it simply can’t identify.

So in tales the idea is to create linearity. But doesn’t that linearity create a formula as well? Well it would if you could only go from a given emotion to just one particular emotion next. But, from any given emotion there are several you might jump to – not all, but several. And from whichever one you select as storyteller, there are several more you might go to next.

Similarly with logic, from any given situation there might be any one of a number of things that would make sense if they happened next. But you couldn’t have anything happen next because some things would simply be impossible to occur if the initial situation had happened first.

Now you can start from any place and eventually get to anywhere else, but you have to go through the in-betweens. So as long as you have a head-line and/or a heart-line and it is an unbroken chain that doesn’t skip any steps, that constitutes a complete tale.

Excerpted from the book, A Few Words About Communication

Write your novel or screenplay step by step…

The process of communication requires at least two parties: the originator and the recipient. In addition, for communication to take place, the originator must be aware of the information or feelings he wishes to transmit, and the recipient must be able to determine that meaning.

Similarly, storytelling requires an author and an audience. And, to tell a story, one must have a story to tell. Only when an author is aware of the message he wishes to impart can he determine how to couch that message so it will be accurately received.

It should be noted that an audience is more than a passive participant in the storytelling process. When we write the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night,” we have communicated a message, albeit a nebulous one.

In addition to the words, another force is at work creating meaning in the reader’s mind. The readers themselves may have conjured up memories of the fragrance of fresh rain on dry straw, the trembling fear of blinding explosions of lightning, or a feeling of contentment that recalls a soft fur rug in front of a raging fire. But all we wrote was, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

We mentioned nothing in that phrase of straw or lightning or fireside memories. In fact, once the mood is set, the less said, the more the audience can imagine. Did the audience imagine what we, the authors, had in mind? Not likely. Did we communicate? Some. We communicated the idea of a dark and stormy night. The audience, however, did a lot of creating on its own.

While some authors write specifically to communicate to an audience, many others write because they wish to follow their personal Muses. Sometimes writing is a catharsis, or an exploration of self. Sometimes authoring is a sharing of experiences, fragmented images, or just of a point of view. Sometimes authoring is marking a path for an audience to follow, or perhaps just presenting emotional resources the audience can construct into its own vision.

Interactive communications question the validity of a linear story itself, and justifiably so. There are many ways to communicate, and each has just as much value as the next depending upon how one wishes to affect one’s audience.

It has been argued that perhaps the symbols we use are what create concepts, and therefore no common understanding between cultures, races, or times is possible.

On the contrary, there are common concepts: morality, for example. Morality, a common concept? Yes. While not everyone shares the same definition of morality, every culture and individual understands some concept that means “morality” to them.

In other words, the concept of “morality” may have many different meanings — depending on culture or experience — but they all qualify as different meanings of “morality.”

Thus there can be universally shared essential concepts even though they drift apart through various interpretations. It is through this framework of essential concepts that communication is possible.

To communicate a concept, an author must symbolize it, either in words, actions, juxtapositions, interactions — in some form or another. As soon as the concept is symbolized, however, it becomes culturally specific and therefore inaccessible to much of the rest of the world.

Even within a specific culture, the different experiences of each member of an audience will lead to a slightly different interpretation of the complex patterns represented by intricate symbols.

On the other hand, it is the acceptance of common symbols of communication that defines a culture. For example, when we see a child fall and cry, we do not need to know what language he speaks or what culture he comes from in order to understand logistically what has happened.

If we observe the same event in a narrative, however, it may be that in the author’s culture a child who succumbs to tears is held in low esteem. In that case, then the emotions of sadness we may feel in our culture are not at all those intended by the author.

The accuracy with which an author is able to successfully convey both concept and context defines the success of any communication. And so, communication requires both a sound narrative and an effective translation of that narrative into symbolic language.

These requirements create an immensely rich and complex form which (though often practiced intuitively) can be deconstructed, understood, and manipulated with purpose and skill.

To begin such a deconstruction, let us next examine the origins of communication and the narrative form.

Excerpted from the book, A Few Words About Communication

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Excerpt from the book, A Few Words About Communication

Communication requires the transfer of understanding and/or passion from one person to another.  The process of communication involves both transmission and reception across a medium.  Whether intentional or not, this process self-organizes into a narrative form which is the framework upon which the information, be it logic or feeling, is conveyed.

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