Joseph Campbell famously said that there are only two stories in the whole world: Hero takes a journey and stranger comes to town. As an English teacher, I enjoy telling my students this nugget of wisdom and challenging them to defy it. They never can because, although stories are powerful, they are also simple. There are certain constructs, rhythms, and traits to a well-crafted story. Stories, at their heart, are either about heroes on a journey or strangers coming into a new setting. [...]
Explaining to someone, however accurately, that Donald Trump didn't help save 2,100 jobs with the Carrier deal, but rather 850, and that he may have actually had very little to do with it, or that the deal may have negative implications for the economy and job growth down the road, means virtually nothing to someone who has lost a job and gotten it back. To this person, there is a clear narrative that resonates: Trump is the hero. Telling someone whose only image and interaction ever with a woman wearing a hijab is through negative stereotypes on social media that five of the last 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners were Muslim means little to someone whose mind has generalized such a character as the villain.
Facts (or the lack thereof) mean very little to people caught up in storylines. The best way to teach true understanding is not by teaching students facts (although that is still a valuable lesson); it is to teach them to analyze, as one does with elements of narrative. [...]
Adults can teach students about unreliable narrators, about character motivation, about the need of any good storyteller to create conflicts and obstacles. Just as I explained recently to the students in my creative-writing class who are writing 10-minute plays, a good storyteller should plant minor obstacles in the beginning of the story that will indicate what the climax will be. So, as critics of stories, students might have noticed, as I did, that Donald Trump planted seeds of a treacherous media and rigged elections early on as minor obstacles in his story, so that as his story progressed those conflicts and the people who enacted them became more and more like the villains, while he became more and more the hero. Because I am a storyteller, I could see the plot unfolding. I want the same skills for my students because facts aren’t enough when it is time to understand the difference between a hero and a villain.
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