Invisible Threads Part 1: Casting On

The start of a series on Story

Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” I have come to notice that this is the case with some of the most important things in life: you only notice them when they are missing.

A familiar example for me is grammar and punctuation. On the correct usage of the apostrophe (fascinating topic, I know), I was once given the practical advice: “If in doubt, leave it out”. The lesson was not that you shouldn’t learn how to use the apostrophe, but rather that in those instances where you are uncertain (nobody’s perfect, even editors), a reader is more likely to notice something you have mistakenly added than something you have mistakenly omitted. The same goes for the rest of those writing technicalities that many consider fussy and pedantic: you get them right so that the reader doesn’t notice them. Instead of being distracted by misplaced commas or verbs and nouns that don’t agree, they can focus entirely on your message.

I would go so far as to say that the goal in writing is to make the reader forget they’re reading something altogether. As I like to say in business writing skills workshops, good writing is invisible.  

The most important things in life are invisible. They form the foundation, the bassline of our daily lives. People skills, good hygiene, mental health, the regularity of a beat in any music you can dance to, the presence of our loved ones – all these are examples of things we rely on as being there in the background while we get on with other business, and don’t notice until something goes wrong with them. There is, of course, an element of taken-for-grantedness that arises out of dependability. Reliance can lead to several downsides, such as burnout in the case of that person in the office who words hardest and therefore gets given more and more work (hence the saying “If you want something done, give it to a busy person”). 

But things that happen in the background, both those that work and those that might not serve us so well, can be surfaced and examined once we make ourselves aware of them. The ability to notice and investigate our “interior” background processes, and to reflect on how they affect the way we operate, can broadly be called meta-cognition. You may know it simply as “thinking about thinking”. And one extremely effective and prevalent “meta process” is story.   

Story is everywhere. It shapes not just our written and verbal communications but also our interpretations of history (what is history but a story about the past?) and our predictions of how events will play out.

Story forms the shape of a piece of content; it is what makes any content take a recognisable and coherent form. If there is no story – which at the very least consists of a beginning, a middle, and an end – the reader or listener sees disembodied pieces of information. Worse, they are forced to pick each one up, turn it over, and try to figure out how they all fit together. Story threads the pieces together in the intended sequence – hence, a storyline.

When an argument doesn’t follow a clear line of logic, we stop reading. Likewise, when you’ve lost the line of a story – “lost the plot”, as it were – you stop listening. Whereas if the message does follow a clear storyline, you don’t have to follow – it takes you along. Story, then, is invisible because it is so effective; it is so effective because it is so effortless.

In a sense, I think story manages to be invisible because historically, it had to be invisible – specifically, unwritten. Stories predate written communication: they enabled our ancestors to verbally pass down information intact for generations upon generations – stories about where they came from, where it was safe to go and what was dangerous in the environment, what to eat, whom to marry etc.

It has often been written that humans are wired for story. In her book Rising Strong, Brené Brown highlights research by neuroeconomist Paul Zak showing that when people hear a story in its classic three-part shape, their brains release the chemicals associated with connection, empathy and meaning making. If our brains evolved to favour stories, I like to think of stories themselves as having co-evolved with our species, having survived a millennia-long process of natural selection. I’m no evolutionary scientist, but since effective storytelling was clearly so vital for transferring life lessons, I hypothesise that those of our ancestors who told crap stories probably wouldn’t have had offspring who survived to tell the tale.

In the series of articles to follow, I explore the pervasiveness of story, how to use it effectively on purpose, the potential pitfalls of story, and how we can use it to make sense of our lives and the way we think and behave. I surface and examine the aspects of story that can either derail us if we don’t notice them, or can be used to our advantage in various ways.

While we may think of story only as a tool for communication and persuasion, these are some examples of other ways that it can be used:   

1. As a learning tool – By helping us simplify and sense-make, and as a memory aid.
2. As a leadership and strategy tool – By helping leaders simplify and translate strategy, as well as illustrate and socialise behaviour.
3. As a design or problem-solving tool – By helping us tap into the narratives, needs and pain-points of our customers (and perhaps more simply, by reminding us to focus on the “audience” in the first place!).
4. As a dialogue tool – By helping us relate to and empathise with others’ stories.
5. As a critical thinking tool – By providing us with a framework for understanding how we and others tend to see the world.
6. As a tool for personal growth and development – By helping us own, interrogate, and in some instances retell our own stories.

For now, I will finish with the observation that story is essential because we suck at data. Our attention spans, by some accounts, are now shorter than that of a goldfish. At the same time, we are generating data exponentially faster than our brains can process or figure out what to do with it. Of course, this is why we have invented AI. There is something, however, that we seem to beat the robots at, at least for now: pattern recognition. Humans are known to pick up patterns; even if none is present and we are presented with truly random data, we will make something up about it. Story is about patterns, about the superstructures that help guide us through the detail, even if the signposts are hard to see or even misleading. It is, in short, how we help each other see the wood for the trees.