Beginning with Coherence
Why is it called Embodied Storycraft?
Because screenbased stories are told through bodies. Whether animated or acted, every glance, gesture, silence, posture, movement and expression becomes part of how a character’s felt experience is communicated. Televisual stories, moreover, are crafted. They are extraordinarily collaborative human expressions of creativity, built by hundreds of people whose work slowly becomes a world.
When I was three years old, I loved Disney. It was one of the first things I knew was important to me. I had the main movie for Beauty and the Beast and I had a special edition separate Behind the Scenes VHS tape that talked all about the making of the movie. Even then, I was fascinated. I also had the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and made my dad play it in his car since he had a CD Player. The music took me back to the scenes from the movie.
It was the closest thing I had to magic. The ability to be transported into a world created by hundreds of people collaborating on a single project. This continued with so many other movies and TV shows across the decades. A story that gets greenlit to be told onscreen starts as nothing. And people share their ideas and then more people share their ideas for shaping it, then people build it. It’s a remarkable feat of human cooperation, compromise and creativity to build a story and share it with the world.
I thought I wanted to be an artist because of my knowledge of how animated films were made. Then later a screenwriter because of how much respect I had for the process. I even read scripts on the computer instead of SSR books with my class when I was twelve. But the scripts of Shrek and Runaway Bride told me nothing of the thoughts or feelings a character was experiencing. And I lamented that perhaps screenwriting was not the right medium for how I loved these stories.
As time went on, my attention was held captive in fear of focusing on the wrong thing. I did much less careful attention to visual media in my teenage years, believing I should be more focused on reading the Bible and building my life around Jesus. I was taught that every other interest was a distraction that could lead to sin and being cut off from God.
When I got out of ministry school, it was in great part because I began to pay this close attention to the things I was watching.
Surrounded by people scolding me for touching horror DVDs in a bin full of clearanced movies, because demons “can attach themselves to things”. By people who worried that watching something like Glee “glorified the wrong things”, I started to wonder if what I was really experiencing was freedom. If I had to avoid even touching a horror movie and had to judge every possible character, celebrity or story before I even learned them.
Once I left, I was free to spend my attention in ways I never felt allowed to before. And what I found in the things I watched was that characters can represent incredible expressions of humanity. I was not taught what it meant to be human. When I left ministry school, I found myself processing a world without the expectations and experiences I had always known. And a world where I felt newly human.
Newly aware of my own intrinsic ethics, my own loves, my own interests. Of course, it felt like blasphemy at first. Trusting in my own heart? I was always told that was evil. Dangerous. But, I soon learned that the most any of us can truly bring to anything is our heart. If we lived apart from it, then whatever we brought to the table would be insincere. This included loving God. If my heart wasn’t in it, then it wasn’t really love, was it?
So, for the next few years, I decided to be my own person, my own Christian and I let my attention be to whatever interested me. I launched a blog to grapple with these concepts and talk about the beauty of the world and in how it built its stories. And how much we lost by shutting it out before even considering it.
Have you ever stayed to watch the credits? I used to do this in theaters when I was a kid, to pass the time while waiting with my family for the after-credits scene if there was one. My brother and I giggled at some of the names, and some of the specific titles in terms of what people were in charge of for the film. I had this distinct realization for much of my life that the massive lists of names at the end of a story were hundreds of people, each with an intrinsic and particular life, who had collaborated to build the story I had just watched.
Of course, being evangelical, I tried to apply it to god calling me to be a missionary even to the names on the screen. But as I’ve gotten distance from that mindset, I am instead struck with the importance of taking these gifts of human creativity as built with sincerity and intention. As much as my practice builds from seeming minutiae, I believe that often, those minutiae are communicating something that brings coherence to a story that is missed on first watch. I believe that when something is carefully built, it invites careful attention.
Because we were taught to refuse and be wary in the face of so many of these remarkably collaborative gifts, we missed getting to know humans. We became distracted by expectations we built around a world that was not like us.
The assumption when you are born into the culmination of all truth is that everything that surrounds you is incoherent. I come from traditions that made fun of the very cultures and stories that I now experience as expansive and real.
We begin with coherence. Characters who are real people in a real life experience. Stories that don’t behold themselves to the whims of tropes and assumption. We listen and we look at what is happening and how it’s being conveyed. Keeping in mind that this is not our creative project. It is the idea of another person with many others. They’re presenting their collaboration not for critique. But for the hope of resonance.
This requires recognizing that you will be interacting with thoughts we have learned to distrust. Ways of making meaning by people you were taught to fear. Deeply. In your soul.
It’s hard work, but you are not alone.
It is my lived experience that society is filled with so many who approach life and creativity with sincerity. I want to meet them in that. And in so doing, I have finally allowed myself to meet myself as I am. And I hope that you’ll join me in allowing yourself to meet who you are when you don’t have things holding you back from recognizing the humanity of others who create stories for us to love.
Something to Notice
Has a story ever rewarded your careful attention? What did you discover?
What’s one detail that transformed the way you understood a story?
If you’d like to continue the conversation, I’d love to hear what you noticed.
#LetThemEatCrow #EmbodiedStorycraft #Storytelling #MediaAnalysis #VisualStorytelling #CharacterAnalysis #Attention #Creativity #Humanization #Disney #Evangelicalism #Exvangelical
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