Narrativemancy 101: Why Paper Beats Rock

Duncan A Sabien
Map and Territory
Published in
6 min readDec 17, 2016

The first in (hopefully) a series of posts about using the power of narrative to teach, persuade, inspire, and explain. This entry attempts to provide a model for why narratives are so powerful, relative to personal experience and impersonal evidence.

Narratives are strong.

I mean really strong. Narratives are like David and Goliath, only Goliath doesn’t even bother to show up to the fight because he doesn’t want to be the seventeenth giant to get taken out by David’s sling. They routinely overwhelm our attempts to be objective and rational and occasionally even trump our own long-held beliefs, displacing learned-evolved behavior that would otherwise dominate. They’re perhaps the number-one tool for influencing other people, from Aesop’s fables to Biblical parables to eye-catching headlines to clinical case studies to political propaganda—more robustly reliable than dry data, and easier to curate than direct experience.

Why?

I did a bit of Googling on the question “why are stories so powerful,” and what I found mostly made sense—that stories are more streamlined and memorable than actual memory, that they scour away complexity and highlight causality, that they draw on the power of social networks and common knowledge and experiences. But none of that seemed sufficient. I’ve used narrative to get groups of eleven-year-old traceurs to commando-crawl with me across courtyards until our forearms bled, and at the end they didn’t get up merely placated—they were stoked. The story had left them with excitement and motivation to spare.

And then that became its own story (remember that time when…?), full of triumph and epic awesomeness, and the whole thing snowballed, completely overwhelming the immediate and pervasive unpleasantness of the exercise.

And yeah, framing has a lot to do with that particular example—if you can convince someone that their scabbed elbows are evidence of awesomeness, then even the immediate pain can become sort of a badge of honor—but saying “framing effects” feels like it’s just bumping the question back one level, in the same way that “well, stories are cheap and memorable” isn’t really an explanation. What I want to know is why and how a few words were able to turn the usual pain-avoidant feedback loop on its head.

My current theory is that stories Do The Thing They Do because they tap into the same basic principle that makes guerilla warfare work: force concentration.

A guerilla force chips away at a larger force by outnumbering the larger force in each individual encounter, despite being outnumbered overall. Similarly, I think that stories draw on greater resources than reason and rationality in the moment, and thereby achieve local superiority.

Every story evokes and manipulates emotion to some extent, whether it’s a fable drawing out shame and empathy, or a headline feeding off anxiety and fear, or a superhero movie fetishizing honor and justice and indomitability.

Most of the time, though, the story doesn’t produce a brand-new emotion (or if it does, that new emotion is the result of the story rather than one of its building blocks). Instead, it references your feelings, relying on resonance with your individual, past experience. It draws out your own personal sense of what-it-feels-like to be guilty or mistreated or loved or triumphant or angry or elated or whatever.

And it does so—I posit—by going into your library of memories and experiences and opening up the most vivid example of the relevant feeling. If a story gives you a rush of determination, that rush will be flavored by (and roughly the same magnitude as) the time in your past when you were as determined as you’ve ever been. If it fills you with righteous indignation, it’s drawing on the same indignation you felt at the wrongest wrong that ever wronged you. If it’s trying to evoke transcendental joy, it’s going to work by reminding you (consciously or not) of your most divine and jubilant ecstasy, and it will succeed or fail based on whether you’ve got good-enough examples filed away.

What this means is that a story drawing on past experience is overwhelmingly likely to produce a stronger emotional response than current circumstances, even if it’s reproducing nothing more than a mere echo of that past experience. If I were to try to track any really powerful emotion (love, hate, terror, dripping yellow madness), then on an hour-by-hour basis, the graph would almost always look like this:

And on a day-by-day basis (say, over the course of a normal month):

And even on a month-by-month basis, it’s usually going to look like:

In fact, it’s not until we start looking at years and decades that we start to see the real peaks and troughs—the vivid memories that are going to stick with me forever, that are unlikely to be surpassed as my responses mellow:

And if you tell a story that can effectively connect with and evoke the way this person felt at the trough around year 14, or the peak around year 22, that’s going to have a powerful shaping effect on their current mood, perspective, and decision-making processes.

Therefore, to the extent that people rely on emotion for motivation and insight, stories are going to blow things like [carefully reasoned positions] and [large aggregated data sets] out of the water. In the moment, I’m usually feeling close to zero of anything, so a moving narrative is going to—well—move me. It’s almost certainly going to be the biggest thing I’m feeling, in the moment. And even if I am in the grips of some powerful emotion, being reminded of pain or empathy or shame or injustice can often shift the needle anyway.

One salient example that I’m taking as moderate confirmation of this theory is the way that news stories of injured or kidnapped children profoundly distort the behaviors of millions of parents, even those who previously scoffed at overprotective parents.* When they weren’t parents yet, they didn’t have a strong referent for the feeling of [frantic anxiety + grim determination] that such news stories (often deliberately) try to produce. But after that first time hearing an unexpected shriek of pain and fear, or that first time turning around at the park and not seeing her, where did she go—

Well, now that news story has something to work with.

There’s not much here in the way of next actions; this first post was more about pointing-out-a-thing than about providing a particular spell in the Book of Narrativemancy. And there are definitely holes in the model (for instance, if you’re a kid, probably your only referents for existential terror and worldsaving heroism are stories, with no real-world emotion to rely on, but that doesn’t stop them from being pretty strong). But I think it’s true to a first approximation at least, and there are a few small takeaways I’d underline, among them:

  • Don’t let the shadow of the past overwhelm you in the present, and recognize that it’ll try to (because that’s how guerillas work).
  • When attempting to move others with narrative, remember that (if I’m right) you can only reliably get the types and intensities of feeling that they’ve previously experienced.
  • Given that most people continuously accrue experience as they go, the potential impact of storytelling can only increase (though people’s emotional stability and general ennui tend to go up with time as well).

Most importantly (for this series of posts and for Stuff In General), let this be a reminder that stories work for reasons (even if I’m wrong about this particular model), and that the better we understand those reasons, the more they change from mystery to tool (and that’s a good thing).

*Personal experience; citation needed to confirm larger trends

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Written by Duncan A Sabien

Duncan Sabien is a writer, teacher, and maker of things. He loves parkour, LEGOs, and MTG, and is easily manipulated by people quoting Ender’s Game.