Telling stories

If your only contribution to this life has been writing a document, then your contribution to this life is close to zero. If your contribution was criticizing a document, your contribution tends to zero from the left.

To write documents you only have to follow an algorithm, and the fun part of algorithms is inventing them, discovering them and implementing them. There’s a reason we leave running them to automata: executing them is boring.

It is better to write a story, an epic, if you want to bring about real change.

We humans are addicted to stories. They fascinate us, seduce us and motivate us.

Look at Joel Spolsky’s proposal on how to write a functional specification. Use cases should be told as stories.

Telling stories is hard, because it is a higher art, but it is more effective than writing a document that only ends up gathering dust.

That is why you have to read stories, like that of Gilgamesh, to learn how stories are told. You have to read every kind of story, not just the ones you like. You have to read everything, because it enriches you.

The best part is that there is no algorithm for writing stories. Joseph Campbell, in all his work, barely sketched out a few heuristics, which great storytellers have applied. But the only thing that really works is listening to or reading stories, and telling them with passion.

Stories are better than a committee’s reports and achieve more change, because stories reach us more deeply. As JC Baroux says:

Gilgamesh, the greatest king on Earth, two-thirds god and one-third human, discovers that he too is going to die, despite all his efforts and all his power, and that makes him human.

For me, that is the most interesting thing about this tale. More than four thousand years later, the story reaches us. It is a deeply human story, with concerns that resonate the same way today.

We are as human as they were, and that is comforting somewhere. I don’t know where, but somewhere…

Stories comfort us because we know they pass on to us something of the humanity of their characters and their authors.

Telling stories may be one of the noblest trades there is; I, at least, have great respect for those who have that gift. Believe it or not, for an engineer this may be one of the skills worth developing.