The Longing for a (Good) Ending

 

For more than 40,000 years, humanity has been telling stories. Most of them follow Aristotle’s classic structure of “beginning, middle, and end.” And although serialized storytelling has become increasingly popular in recent years — fueled by Netflix and countless streaming platforms — the format itself is far from new. Serialized novels have existed since the nineteenth century, and even collections such as One Thousand and One Nights could be considered an early form of episodic storytelling.

More importantly, series still rely on endings. In the world’s longest-running television series, The Simpsons, every episode comes to a close. Every narrative arc is eventually resolved, and one day even the series itself will end — if only when it stops generating revenue.

As human beings, we long for endings: for closure, resolution, and ultimately redemption. And hopefully, the same holds true for humanity’s great meta-narratives.

These narratives may flare up again and again, constantly being retold in new ways. Yet every generation seeks to bring the issue to its own conclusion. Today, Fridays for Future and other climate activists are working tirelessly to steer the climate crisis toward a positive ending — alongside countless engineers, biologists, chemists, and scientists of this generation.

If we follow Gustav Freytag’s five-act structure, we have already passed Act Three — the climax or turning point — and entered Act Four, the falling action. Let us hope that Act Five, the ending, may still deliver a happy one.

Story versus Report: What’s the Difference?

Comparing the discussion of meta-narratives to storytelling offers one final opportunity to highlight the distinction between two forms of writing — a distinction that may help anyone struggling to define what “storytelling” actually means.

What is the difference between a report and a story?

The answer does not come from me but from a true scholar in the field: Dr. Annika Schach, Professor of Applied Public Relations at Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts. In her excellent book Storytelling und Narration, she illustrates this distinction with remarkable clarity.

The defining characteristic, she argues, is this: reports are outcome-oriented, whereas stories are event-oriented texts. Stories usually specify the place and time in which they unfold, and they introduce a character who experiences something. Reports, by contrast, function neutrally and are largely independent of time and place.

Reports are factual, observational, and neutral accounts. Stories are subjective narratives told from the perspective of a narrator. Reports strive for objectivity and avoid judgment whenever possible, while stories are inherently subjective, evaluative, and emotional in their presentation.

What I find particularly important, however, is Schach’s insistence that the truthfulness of a text cannot be determined by its genre — whether report or story. Both can be fictional or even fake news. Both can also be entirely truthful and real. Genre alone tells us nothing about the validity of the content; it merely reflects the perspective from which events or circumstances are conveyed.

A story may be profoundly true, while a fabricated report misleads its audience — and vice versa.

What we can expect from both, however, is that they lead us toward an ending — whether good, bad, or somewhere in between.


More about Storytelling - in Marketing, PR and Corporate Communication: 
Between the Lines: How Smart Brands Use Story to Win Markets and Build Trust - by Petra Sammer. E-book, softcopy, and hardcopy are available now on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0ij5sMty

This text was written by a human; AI tools were used for translation, spelling, and grammar review. Photo by Oksana Manych on Unsplash