I was excited to see the current issue of Scientific America has an article on storytelling called The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn. Perhaps a whole new audience for story work will emerge among the world’s scientists.

But it got me thinking. When people first encounter storytelling they often are directed to storytelling with a capital ‘S’. You know, the storytelling of epics, sagas, legends, myths and storybooks. They are told stories are everywhere and due to their theatrical introduction they believe its these big stories that constitute our omnipresent narratives. Sadly, they are mistaken. The vast majority of stories we tell and hear are small ‘s’ stories: the anecdotes, recounts, gossip, story fragments, war stories and one about the fish that got away.

If the Scientific America article is your introduction to storytelling you could be forgiven for thinking that storytelling is important and you should start reading more literature, going to more plays and watching more epic movies. I would have preferred readers to conclude from the article that they should be more mindful of all the stories being told around them and to wonder about how the stories they tell impact others.

The article is a hotchpotch of tangentially related research that jumped around leaving the reader feeling dizzy and disoriented. It’s interesting, however, that one of the quotes is this:

“Indeed, to this day people spend most of their conversations telling personal stories and gossiping. A 1997 study by anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar, then at the University of Liverpool in England, found that social topics accounted for 65 percent of speaking time among people in public places, regardless of age or gender.”

Yet these conversational narratives only receive a sentence or two in the four page article.

I’m in two minds about this article. One the one hand a new audience might be left with the residual thought that storytelling is important. That’s a good thing for our discipline. But it also might give storytelling a bad name among scientists and leave them with the wrong impression of where story is really having the greatest impact: among the billions of tiny story moments happening everywhere, all the time.

Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for the pointer to this article.