Welcome

This is a blog about stories, and storytelling, and how they work or don’t.

That’s the plan. Nothing more nor less, ultimately.

In part, it will be about how particular types of stories work better or worse during particular periods of time. Consider popular movies made at the start of the New Hollywood period, for example:

• Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
• Rosemary's Baby (1968)
• M*A*S*H* (1970)
• The Godfather (and The Godfather Part II, of course) (1972/74)
• Chinatown (1974)

With those that started being made only a couple of years later

• Jaws (1975)
• Rocky (1976)
• Star Wars (1977)
• Airplane! (1980)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

They are different in tone, in outlook, in what happens to protagonists and how antagonists are handled. What changed? Was it that Spielberg and Lucas showed up, or is something more fundamental behind it? Had the audience changed, and if so, how?

It should not be unreasonable to expect audiences to change over time. If, as here, the change is rather sudden, one would expect a reason for it, some shared experience that caused everyone to view the world in a different way. And while that can happen, one might expect such shared experiences to be obvious. Best Picture winner The Best Years of Our Lives, for example, was released in 1946, as troops returned home from World War II. Husbands and fathers and boyfriends coming back to their former lives, changed by their wartime experiences, was common to people across the country. Was something like that happening in the middle of New Hollywood? And can we use these observations to understand why the stories started to change so much when they did?

Assuming this all pulls together as expected, it should result in additional ways to understand how stories connect. If it really works well, it should yield tools that can be used to adjust what is happening in a story, so that it 

• Matches with how our minds handle story structure
• Fits with personality types we appear to expect, and the places they are expected
• Works as well as possible with the target audience for the story.

A primary tool for all of this will be generational analysis, in particular the model set up by Neil Howe and William Strauss.  Its view of  repeating historical patterns helps to identify broad social experiences that may show why the sort of story people expect today are notably different from what was expected in the 1960s or the '80s or the '40s. 

A basic summary of how this generational model works will be necessary. While one could pick up a copy of the original Generations or The Fourth Turning, having a summary focused on the goal at hand has its advantages. After a few days of setting that up, we’ll be able to examine stories that work within that framework. 

Before that, though, I’ll put some skin in the game by giving an analysis of a film that was popular, made a lot of money, but isn’t considered a “great” movie - that is, it didn't quite work.