The office is just around the corner. It’s an old and charming building, right in the middle of that small area, squeezed between the East and the West Villages. So different from the shining glass towers of midtown.
I wait for the elevator, then I go up to the fourth floor. I enter and introduce myself to a few young folks. I’m looking for a few familiar faces.
It’s a Biological Reaction
Change is the foundation of all stories. Robert McKee, Hollywood screenwriter, and author of the fascinating book Story, says:
“What attracts human attention is change… if the Whatsapp Database temperature around you changes, if the phone rings — that gets your attention. The way in which a story begins is a starting event that creates a moment of change. “
In a story, if the charge of a value at stake in a situation does not change, what happens is a trivial activity of no significance.
When a value changes from positive to negative or from negative to positive (for instance, from love to hate or hate to love, from winning to losing or losing to winning), the event becomes meaningful, and emotions flow.
Specifically, when the mind’s senses change from negative to positive, it releases pleasure-giving chemicals. If the mind registers a movement from positive to negative, it unleashes a painful flow. Emotion is the side effect of change. Throughout the day, the body absorbs millions of bits of raw, sensory stimuli.
Somewhere below the level of consciousness, the mind sorts through this mass and imposes decision rules that sort the relevant from the irrelevant. It ignores 99% of all data and concentrates on the 1% that grabs attention.
Change.
What a Story is Not
I will write about stories, storytelling, business narrative. Salman Rushdie, the famous writer, said: “We are storytelling animals. We are the only creatures on earth that do this unusual thing of telling each other stories in order to understand the kind of the creatures that we are.A process accumulates story progress. A story is not a chronology, either. Exec JA Phone Number and marketers often think that a story is their company’s history.
