Hello World

What is this blog about?

Stories are some of the most potent reflections of ourselves and our cultures that exist. Like many, stories and storytelling has always been an integral part of my life. Our arts and culture contain stories. We use storytelling to motivate our work and to escape when life overwhelms us. Stories and the way we relate them reflect so much about ourselves, our cultures and our beliefs. And the art-form of telling a story is as fascinating as the tales themselves. Understanding how a story succeeds or fails, or whether these terms can even be applied, is an enlightening and unending journey.

Despite their importance, the world of stories contains many burning questions. We uphold many pieces of media as great works of storytelling while at the same time wondering if they are nothing but wastes of time (see public discourses on TV and games). Other stories cause us to wonder how they affect us. Can stories be dangerous? Can they be healing? Can they lead us down a path we’d rather not go down? Are there stories we can’t justify, or can’t justify looking away from?

On this blog, I’ll be focusing mainly on fantasy and science fiction. Not only do many of my favorite stories fall into these categories (as they do for many other people) but these genres have some interesting characteristics. First, they have historically been genres of ideas rather than of technique, meaning people have often used interesting concepts as an excuse for poor storytelling. Our sense of tradition and history as well as our hopes for the future are often wrapped up in these concepts. Secondly, they have developed overtime to be filled with interestingly narrow clichés. Finally, they are extremely popular in newer, more flexible forms of storytelling, such as games.

Of course, there will be the stray posts here and there for other genres and even other subjects entirely.

So this blog has a two-fold set of goals. The goal is to examine questions like those above. What’s the point of storytelling? How does it help/hurt us? What makes a story ‘good’? Of course, I cannot claim to answer these questions, merely to offer some ideas in the hopes they will be useful to others in creating their own answers and in asking their own questions. I can claim to be neither a teacher nor an expert on stories.

The second set of goals is in how to go about that examination. I want to avoid getting to abstract, in the sense of writing in a very philosophical/academic style. And the posts should encourage better stories and storytelling, and inspire others to take a deeper examination of their own thoughts on stories.

I hope this blog is helpful and meaningful to you and I’m looking forward to the journey.