Narrative truth seems to be about shortcuts for conveying emotions and other internal states of the author or of others that the author is trying to serve as a conduit for.
We find it easier to engage with a text or piece of media when we are presented with a narrative, instead of just having the raw data thrown at us such that we have to figure out the meaning ourselves.
Speaking for me personally: I’m usually super frustrated with anything that is framed as a narrative rather than giving me a table of data or something. In an alternative universe structured just for me and my peccadilloes, narrative truth like I think you’re talking about exists and is useful...and is used 90% less.
I think this is probably because I hardly ever care very much about the emotions or internal states of any subject of the non-fiction media. Maybe the problem is that most writers are bad at writing for the audience of me? Maybe 90% of them are going way overboard into the narrative side? Much of what a writer does is often the narrative. I bet very few writers start out saying “I want to be a researcher and collator of data”. Formatting tables isn’t sexy!
Really wish I could come up with some examples right now but nothing is coming to mind. Imagine an ostensibly good article with info about the Delta variant. It has anecdotes about people in the hospital and quotes from doctors and statisticians. It’s got paragraph after paragraph of the authors own narrative. I hate these goddamn things and yet everything is full of it.
I wish 90% of the non-fiction media I read were 90% shorter by leaving out narrative. And I don’t just mean random posts on the internet, I’m talking about ostensibly Good Stuff You Should Read. Think big features in The Atlantic or something like that.
There’s non-fiction stuff whose whole point is a narrative...think memoirs. Those do not bother me in the least, though I find myself usually not very interested in reading this type of stuff.
None of this is to say that I think it’s the wrong way to influence and be persuasive in the world as a whole.
That sounds like the experience of being unpersuaded by the narrative.
The experience of being persuaded (in the ideal case) is more like seeing a completely new way of seeing things that you’d previously missed. Maybe you’d already knew all the facts, but you never put them together.
For example, let’s suppose you’re an accountant and was committed fraud to steal from the firm. Maybe you’d previously noticed them being evasive on particular topics or that some of the expenses seemed slightly more than what you’d expect, but not enough that you’d given it more than a second’s thought. All of a sudden it all clicks and you realise what the signs are pointing to. Maybe you hadn’t even considered it as a possibility. I mean, sure you knew in the abstract that accounting fraud happened, but your colleagues seemed like nice people and trustworthy. You only ever saw it as a possibility in the abstract and never as something that could actually happen in the firm you work for.
Narrative truth seems to be about shortcuts for conveying emotions and other internal states of the author or of others that the author is trying to serve as a conduit for.
Speaking for me personally: I’m usually super frustrated with anything that is framed as a narrative rather than giving me a table of data or something. In an alternative universe structured just for me and my peccadilloes, narrative truth like I think you’re talking about exists and is useful...and is used 90% less.
I think this is probably because I hardly ever care very much about the emotions or internal states of any subject of the non-fiction media. Maybe the problem is that most writers are bad at writing for the audience of me? Maybe 90% of them are going way overboard into the narrative side? Much of what a writer does is often the narrative. I bet very few writers start out saying “I want to be a researcher and collator of data”. Formatting tables isn’t sexy!
Really wish I could come up with some examples right now but nothing is coming to mind. Imagine an ostensibly good article with info about the Delta variant. It has anecdotes about people in the hospital and quotes from doctors and statisticians. It’s got paragraph after paragraph of the authors own narrative. I hate these goddamn things and yet everything is full of it.
I wish 90% of the non-fiction media I read were 90% shorter by leaving out narrative. And I don’t just mean random posts on the internet, I’m talking about ostensibly Good Stuff You Should Read. Think big features in The Atlantic or something like that.
There’s non-fiction stuff whose whole point is a narrative...think memoirs. Those do not bother me in the least, though I find myself usually not very interested in reading this type of stuff.
None of this is to say that I think it’s the wrong way to influence and be persuasive in the world as a whole.
That sounds like the experience of being unpersuaded by the narrative.
The experience of being persuaded (in the ideal case) is more like seeing a completely new way of seeing things that you’d previously missed. Maybe you’d already knew all the facts, but you never put them together.
For example, let’s suppose you’re an accountant and was committed fraud to steal from the firm. Maybe you’d previously noticed them being evasive on particular topics or that some of the expenses seemed slightly more than what you’d expect, but not enough that you’d given it more than a second’s thought. All of a sudden it all clicks and you realise what the signs are pointing to. Maybe you hadn’t even considered it as a possibility. I mean, sure you knew in the abstract that accounting fraud happened, but your colleagues seemed like nice people and trustworthy. You only ever saw it as a possibility in the abstract and never as something that could actually happen in the firm you work for.