Tell Me A Story: A Conversation with Frank Rose

It’s the power of narrative that shapes every aspect of our lives. We rush to tell stories to our friends and family to validate our experiences. We buy products and brands because of the story they tell us. We vote, make friends, and even enemies, because of the stories that we believe.

Narrative has an emotional pull on us. Sometimes we take away joy, anger, laughter, or sadness. People don’t rush out in large numbers to see PowerPoints, policy discussions, or even most documentaries. But they will react to drama, comedy, or horror. They will like or dislike social media, based on the stories they have ingested.

It all sounds so simple, so logical, but it’s often lost in the cacophony of noise, data, and information that surrounds us.

Frank Rose writes about this in his new book The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World

The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

Every so often the media picks up the meme that books and readers are on the decline. That our short attention span, along with our Twitter and Facebook driven culture, has supplanted long form narrative. And it seems that every time those stories circulate, something happens to change or debunk the narrative. Even the national obsession with a book like Fire and Fury, proves something.

Joan Didion said that we tell each other stories in order to live. It’s also those stories, in literature, in popular fiction, or even nonfiction, that still, after all these centuries, shape how the world continues to unfold. That’s the journey that Martin Puchner takes us on in The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization.

My conversation with Martin Puchner: