Storytelling is a Fine Perfume

The fragrance of it helps you enter the realm of the evocative

A good story, like good perfume, is evocative. Listening to it calls forth a response that moves a person from one state of mind to another, not just for the moment, but for all time because a story well-told is long-remembered. Simply put, what moves inside us is less about the plot, characters, or moral, but the space of discovery that the story evokes.

Music is a perfect example. A good piece of music is composed of pauses and dynamics, not just notes and chords. Indeed, it is the spaces in between the notes and the ways in which the music is played that evokes the feeling of the music— a feeling that allows the listener to not only hear the piece, but experience it.

Amateur composers do too much. They clutter their compositions with themselves, making the music more about their own proficiency than the depth of what’s possible to evoke in their listeners — a phenomenon that led jazz-great, Dizzy Gillespie, to confess, “It took me my entire life to learn what not to play.”

The same holds true with story. Skillful storytellers don’t tell too much. They don’t clutter the tale with their telling. Instead, they provide just enough space for the listener to enter into the story and participate. That’s the goal of any work of art — to create the potential for something meaningful to be explored.

Ultimately, the storyteller’s task is a simple one: to create a stage upon which the heart can dance — what hearing a cello in the distance evokes for you at dusk or how you feel just before opening a love letter.

Storytelling for the Revolution
Storytelling at Work
MitchDitkoff.com