“Ideas come and go, stories stay”, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan. When the Oscars initiated the buzz around Natalie Portman in Black Swan, it reminded me of an unread book I possessed. The Black Swan is essentially an ideology that unravels the impact of the highly improbable. I was wrong to expect that there will be little probability that the book shall deal with narrative art. In a chapter dedicated to “The Narrative Fallacy” Taleb deconstructs our vulnerability to interpret stories as ‘raw truths’.
We like stories. They help to humanize, summarize and reduce the dimension of matters. Stories knit facts with a logical link that makes them easy to remember and retain. However, stories always tread a fine line of interpretation. They can go wrong when narratives can lead to a mistake in the assessment of odds.
The occurrence of an odd/ rare event, outside the realm of regular expectations is what Taleb calls a Black Swan. But aren’t stories, by definition and function, meant to be about the rare event or happening as that’s what makes them engaging? While the function of a story cannot be argued upon, I agree with Taleb that the impact of a story heavily rests upon the right context. Although the story is yours, even as a narrator you can only half control how your message is being received by your audience.
Research has proved this with studies on different neurobiological patterns in members of the audience listening to the same story. This is primarily because each one of them “receives” the story, in context to their personal life story. When I say “A big castle with beautiful gardens”, your mind uses past references from your life to compose the visual imagery based on what you’ve seen in books, television, heard from others, and each one varies from the other. Taleb reaffirms this by saying, “Abstract statistical information does not sway us as much as the anecdote- no matter how sophisticated the person.” Hence, the narrator carries great responsibility to deliver the story in the right context. In narratives, whether written or spoken, the context of your story is the winner. Be cautious when your story has a Black Swan paddling in it. Be sure to reiterate the right context by giving references, building on details such as “A big castle of stone with beautiful rose gardens”.
Such minor details and the correct word choices set the stage in which your story should be “received”. It’s these small details in the study of narratives which will continue to amuse us with the power it wields on our minds.
