In the blog The Mythology of Humanity, “jessaslade” recently mused about the purpose of storytelling and listed:
- To achieve immortality, of deeds and for the storyteller
- To explain otherwise senseless phenomena
- To entertain/educate
- To moralize/terrify
- To beta test new versions of reality
- To exorcise* the imagination
- To land a movie deal
(*Is that really “exorcise,” or it it “exercise?”)
It would be easy to add many items to this list, but my tendency is to go the opposite way and reduce the purposes of storytelling to just three:
- Storytelling for change
- Storytelling for identity construction
- Storytelling for sensemaking and learning
I argue that it is possible to fit any kind of storytelling into one of these three categories. Coming soon is an essay in which I defend these as the definitive storytelling categories.