This is a premium Spotlight article, exclusive to newsletter subscribers. If you’d like full access, please sign-up to our newsletter.
I’ve written a new book about storytelling. Named after Georges Melies’ silent masterwork – the first ever narrative film – Trip To The Moon is not so much a sequel to Into The Woods as a companion piece. This is how it begins:
“Stories can make a girl laugh, a boy cry, or send a child to sleep. They can make a man leave his wife, a woman join a cult or a boy wear a bomb. Stories can make a felon a president or an heiress rob a bank. Stories create religions and cause them to divide; they provoke civil wars, spark genocide too. Stories bring peace, bring love, bring pleasure; they deliver death, destruction, and despair. To command narrative is to control a frightening power. So what, exactly, are stories? How do they work, and what gives them that strength?”
My last book was about story structure. This book is about story power. Why write about that? Many reasons, but mostly because of an incident that has haunted me since I was five-years old, when my dad pummelled me with such anger it felt like he wanted to kill me.
Some context.
Want to read the rest of this article?
Sign-up to our newsletter to gain full access to all of our premium Spotlight articles.
