How to Do Things with Stories

A Guide to Transformative Storycraft

By: Mattias Martens

Narrated by: Mattias Martens

Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

A story is evidence of a transformation. We write of what has transformed us; what we write will transform others. Stories build the human collective world because they encode the two challenges each of us will face again and again: the challenge of facing the unknown and emerging anew; and the challenge of understanding each other.

To live is hard. To write is hard. The difficulty of writing is tied to the difficulty of living. The difficulty of remaining coherent while staying in motion. In stories, we face the unknown. But storytelling itself is not mysterious. There is a rhyme and a rhythm to the process of crafting an impactful story. Learn how to tell stories that stay with your listeners, by planting in them a question that will be the seed of their transformation.

©2021 Mattias Benjamin Martens (P)2023 Mattias Benjamin Martens

For anyone intent on changing worlds

Focusing anything on a specific external outcome is unreasonably effective.

This book outlines a way to write stories with an external outcome in mind. While this is aimed at the written word, it fires for effect on anyone who wants to make things happen with their stories.

The structure it proposes for this purpose is:
1. Make the reader care.
2. Ask a dramatic question.
3. Dramatic question exposes theme question.
4. Answer dramatic question.
5. Invite them to think about the theme question.

This is dense with useful information, much like the ambiguity (or double meanings to incite a feeling of uncertainty) that the author advocates for using.

What I took away from this is the importance of setting up choices for your audience, in the same way that one would when designing a game. To that end, I'm going to review Choose Your Own Adventure novels to see if there's anything more to be learned about doing this with captive prose (as opposed to say, a text-based game).