To get the most out of this mini-lecture, I recommend you follow along with these video clips and texts (you can find PDFs of these with a little sleuthing online).
Watch:
1. Andy Warhol, Eating a Hamburger
Read:
Carmen Giménez, "Parts of an Autobiography"
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Addie Chapter)
AND THEN… AND THEN… AND THEN…
The manipulation of time is central to Narrative Storytelling because the basis of every story is a sequence of events, one after another. My shorthand for this is: “And then… and then… and then…” We think a story is more about what is being conveyed than the form of its delivery, but what differentiates narrative from association is precisely its illusion of linearity and ordering.
Storytelling: Dramatic information where something happens, hence involved with the productions of time. Colloquially, we might say stories have beginning, middles and ends, where the beginning setup and final closing event are the most important parts of information (for some).
“I was in the store wearing green shoes” might not yet feel like a story, whereas “I walked into the store with green shoes and a bomb went off” is already a story, albeit a slightly ridiculous one. Or, more calmly: “I walked into the store with green shoes and saw my ex.” Again, story. Something happens in those last two sentences.
But what does that really mean? Well, one famous 20th-century author had a nice way of putting it.