The Future of Storytelling

Once upon a time yet to come…

Once upon a time yet to come…

The ability to craft and tell stories diffused through world populations, faster than ever.

Both the knowledge of how to construct and tell stories and the tools for building your experience at storytelling became cheaper, easier, faster and more convenient.

So more people told more stories to more people than ever in history.

That trend continued.

So Phil made nine predictions...

1. Storytelling knowledge and skills previously reserved for expensive and exclusive film schools and writer workshops will become standard K-12 curricula.

Everyone tells stories well

Why can't third-graders take apart and reconstruct a short story?

Draft your first sitcom in grade six?

Write your first novella for your year 9 language class?

If nothing else, competitive pressure to write college admission essays will drive home the importance of story skills to students and parents.

2. Literacy will raise expectations.

Storytelling quality soars

In the US, at least, we each see hundreds of adverts daily, so we develop ad blindness, ignoring the bland and generic. It takes something special for an ad to break through.

The same will happen as stories bombard you.

We'll expect more from stories even as we better understand the art and craft of the storyteller.

The movies of 1920 were magic and you could easily suspend disbelief. Now it takes great art to achieve the same captivation and immersion.

3. Professional education will advance the art.

From Art to Engineering

Fifty years' ago media criticism focused on understanding stories.

We're now ready to engineer and manufacture stories, able to teach creators how to architect and construct tales to meet specific goals, specifications, and constraints.

Storytelling will also become interdisciplinary.

We'll see Storytelling for [INSERT DISCIPLINE HERE] become standard for every university major.

4. Other information will become wrapped in storytelling.

Stories for every occasion

An annual report becomes a collection of short stories about projects and their heroic employees.

Your monthly phone bill recounts the story of your month, with the people you talked to, the places you went, the games you played, revealing life themes.

5. More storytelling will be automated.

Machines spin tales

We already have bots that generate news stories from sports stats and scores.

We are awash in opportunities to continue this trend.

Natural language processing technologies and deeper understanding of story structure patterns hold the promise to broaden the range of stories machines can tell without human assistance.

6. More storytelling will start with mobile products.

Wherever you go, there you author stories

Smartphones outnumber computers.

So expect more

microblogged literature (one tweet at a time)

dictation apps (speak your story,

the service transcribes it, you stitch the pieces

together and edit into a whole)

mobile storycraft communities

(critique my script)

story planning apps (character generators,

plot frameworks)

mobile story markets (bid for this on the spot

coverage of #OccupyOakland)

mobile moviemaking tools (I love Cinemek Storyboard aka Hitchcock)

7. More authoring will be massively collaborative.

We Author Together

Imagine a Dune universe where everyone collaborates

on writing stories, fanfiction style,

populating planets with rich settings and cultural artifacts (production value),

characters with well-told backstories,

music of local cultures, &subplots supporting grand

themes.

There may be value in artistic credit, but we'll also see wiki culture where a hundred people chip in to make the best version of a given element. Community will emerge around the crafting and the consumption of these stories.

8. Spielers (oral storytellers) and tummlers (people who urge an audience to participate) will become professions outside of the arts.

Storytelling gets things done

Scientists will want a spieler to tell the story of their research proposal.

Urban developers will want tummlers to facilitate town hall meetings.

Right now we hope to find people gifted in these arts...

In the future credentialed storytellers will have certifications, licenses and metrics that attest to their professional ability to present stories in ways that achieve goals.

9. New storytelling media will evolve to build on old media.

Theater and play at its roots

I personally can't wait to be in the first MMORPG augmented reality murder mystery and dance flashmob in the London underground.

Ender’s Party

This won’t be easy

My grandmother Annie grew up with

horses and carriages; never

adjusted to owning and driving cars.

Whole categories of storytellers face job loss as their services become commodities, as they fail to adjust

When everyone tells stories,

when things tell stories, you must be exceptionally talented and skilled to prosper as an author, a spieler, or a tummler

How will you tell this story?

What roles will you play?

What will this future mean for the people and causes that matter to you?

Happily Ever After, your protagonist,

Phil Wolffnarrative engineerhttp://twitter.com/evanwolfhttp://facebook.com/philwolffhttp://linkedin.com/in/philwolff http://quora.com/Phil-Wolff pwolff@dijest.com +15104448234 skype:evanwolf