About A Story ...

My friend and ex-colleague, Nirmala, has written a nice post about The Story of a Story ... Interesting, the part she writes about what makes a story useful to people listening to it. She does have a point there. We all love to discover the meaning hidden in a story. Which is why, stories with a meaning, or a moral hidden in the story is worth so much more than just a drab statement which just tells you what the story is. This is somewhat reflected in the fact that a lot of folks dont learn from other people's mistakes ... what could be called experiential learning.

Having said that, another aspect which we might need to focus upon, is that the basic idea of the story is to appeal to the thinking processes of the listener ... it is only by doing this, that a story can actually get the listeners to gather value from it ... and the fact that the story must successfully create a context which the listeners can identify with. It is this context which creates an intersection between what the listeners already know, and what the story is trying to convey. This is something i have written about earlier ... that new knowledge is created at the intersection of two fields of knowledge. And, the most important aspect of the story is that it builds up this intersection in a way which can be identified and understood by the listener, so they can build a connect between the existing, and the new.