CHAPTER 2
CRACKING THE STORY CODE

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

— RUDYARD KIPLING

Before we wrote things down, we told stories. Aboriginal and indigenous people have elaborate and detailed stories about everything in their world, and those stories code information both for the things and for the culture.

The classic model of a story builds emotional impact in five stages around the story’s core message:

Typically, a story starts out with a character having his or her world thrown out of balance.

Then there’s a series of progressive complications as she struggles to get her life back into balance.

Next she’s confronted with a crisis—a choice she must make that will forever change her world.

This is followed by the climax of the story—making the choice and experiencing the result—and this is where both the moral/message of the story as well as its maximum emotional impact are coded.

Then the story resolves, with loose ends being tied up and everybody living “happily ever after.”

This five-part story structure is so hardwired into humanity that you find it in 50,000-year-old Australian Aboriginal stories, 40,000-year-old stories from the San Bushmen of the Kalahari, and 20,000-year-old stories from American Indian communities. You find it everywhere—from the works of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Steinbeck to Spielberg.

Because storytelling is so powerful and so memorable and can pack such an emotional punch, if you want people to learn something, wrap it up in a story and it’ll last years longer in their minds than if you simply gave them information.

Consider, for example, a story I first learned from a talk I heard about a decade ago in Vermont by an Abenaki American Indian storyteller named Jesse Bruchac. His telling of the story was far richer and more complex than the version I’m sharing here with you from an old memory, but hopefully mine will serve to illustrate the point of this section.

A little boy was walking through the woods one day and found a magic stick. He picked it up and thought, I can do anything now! I can change the world! He continued to walk, and when he looked up next he wasn’t sure where he was.

Getting lost in the woods is a very big problem, thought the boy. If I always knew which direction north was, whether it was cloudy or sunny, light or dark, I could always find my way home—and so could all the other little boys wandering through the forest. As he had these thoughts, he saw some squirrels. He waved the stick and said, “Let all the squirrels’ tails point north.” And they did!

That’s good, thought the boy. Now I and all the other little boys who need to walk in the woods will never get lost. And he walked along, whistling, quite satisfied with himself.

But the squirrels were not very happy. As they chattered with each other over what to do next, in the squirrel way, a skunk walked by and asked, “What happened to your tails?”

The squirrels replied, “A little boy waved his magic stick and now all our tails are pointed to the north.”

“That wasn’t very polite,” said the skunk.

So the skunk took a shortcut and got ahead of the boy on his way through the forest. The boy saw him and, knowing about skunks, knew that you have nothing to fear if you don’t try to hurt them. “Hello, Mr. Skunk,” the boy said. “How are you this fine day?”

The skunk said, “Are you the boy who made the tails of the squirrels point north?”

“Yes,” said the boy, swelling his chest out with pride. “And now no little boy will ever get lost!”

“Well,” said the skunk, “I don’t think that was very considerate or wise. Perhaps you would like me to point my tail to the north, too.” And with that, he turned around, lifted his tail, and sprayed the boy from head to toe.

In those days American Indians well knew that only an idiot gets squirted by a skunk. The boy knew that when he got home, all of his friends would laugh at him. He’d have to roll in mud and sleep outside the village for three days until the smell went away, and that’s both uncomfortable and humiliating.

At first, as the boy continued walking down the trail, his nose and eyes stinging and his skin tingling, he felt sorry for himself and angry at the skunk. Why did he do that? the boy thought. I didn’t threaten or harm him! But as he kept walking, he considered the skunk’s words and realized that he really had no right to change the tails of the squirrels just to make life easier for him and other little boys.

As this realization struck him, he looked at his magic stick with a newfound concern, and then waved it and said, “All the squirrels’ tails will go back to normal.” Then he dug a deep hole and buried the stick so thoroughly and carefully that even he would never find it again, and he went off to roll in the mud.

The obvious moral of the story is that the means do not justify the ends. But the story also contains a number of culturally important pieces of information for the Abenaki.

One is about Mother Nature and how we interfere with nature at our own peril, particularly with the “magic stick” of our large brains. We live in an interconnected world in which making even one seemingly small change will ultimately have an impact on everything else.

Another is about how and how not to interact with a skunk and other animals.

Another is about the vital importance of knowing which way north is. In the original telling, there were far more details about squirrels, about some of the trees, and about the history of magic. All were ways of passing culture down from generation to generation—always embedded in story so it would be accurately remembered.

Even literate societies do this. Consider the story of the boy who cried wolf, which uses the traditional five-part story structure to embed the message about the importance of alarming people only when there’s a genuine reason to do so. Or consider the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and the child who had the courage to point out that the king was naked—carrying the cultural story of the importance of speaking truth to power. Even some of our dysfunctional stories persist—like Cinderella, which tells women that their place is to be maids and their salvation is to find a rich man with a foot fetish.

Stories are powerful. If you want people to understand your point, and to remember it for a long time, embed the information in a story.