The Dr Seuss Approach To Storytelling

When we convey feelings to each other, we generally recount a story:?

Character had a feeling, this motivated action, this created a new feeling.?

We do this all day long, we share our experiences and our feelings with friends, family, colleagues and strangers online.?

We share our feelings, particularly our hard feelings, the ones related to challenge, struggle or pain, simply to feel heard.?

We do not need a solution to these feelings, but being seen and acknowledged by others is enough.?

This is the stuff of relationships.?

This is the stuff of art.?

What is the purpose of that still-life painting except to make us feel a little about a moment in time, a memory, an experience, an imagination.?

Of course stories become more complex and stray into the realm of morality and the feelings we evoke in others can result in action.?

Character had a feeling, this motivated action based on a moral dilemma, the character faced obstacles which confronted a moral dilemma,, this created a new state or circumstances, this created? feeling based on a new moral dilemma [and so forth].?

As listeners and audience members, we are now involved not in just experience sharing, but in indignation about a moral conundrum.?

We have opinions about how things SHOULD be.

We get angry, we might yearn for justice or retribution on behalf of a character.?

Now we are in the realm of Shakespeare’s tragedies and we are processing guilt, hubris, powerlust and self doubts.?

This is the realm of dialectic and stories take on a philosophical, theological, political or ideological nature.?

Here we shape whole communities, teams, companies, nations around stories, gaining or losing allies or enemies according to how they resonate with the story we tell.?

Then we have Dr Seuss.?

Dr Seuss famously wrote his book “Green Eggs And Ham '' after a wager, challenging him to write a book using only 50 words.?

Dr Seuss took up the challenge, seeking to tell a credible story of a character facing a dilemma and overcoming the dilemma using only 50 spare words.?

The result is a delightful tale, half nonsense and half delightful about a character who does not wish to eat green-eggs and ham.?

What Dr Seuss illustrates so powerfully is that story is not only about sharing emotion, or sharing moral dilemmas with others, but there is also an large element of delight in wordplay.

Just as painters use colors and photographers light, so do story-tellers use the sound and feeling of language.?

Music transcends logic and speaks directly to the emotions, as do images, and colors, so do words and language shared musically, colorfully and with delight, to charm a listener.?

As communicators, we must always remember that it is the deep roots of language, the meter and rhythm of words, conjugations, and syllables give our communication a feeling of its own.?

More Green Eggs and Ham, I say.