Story telling and story listening are who we are. It is fundamentally human. You can talk about needs, pain, relationships but even penguins have life long relationships and feel bad when an egg rolls off their feet. Story telling is what makes us human. Every major religion is built around a story that is thousands of years old. Even young religions like Mormonism needed a story teller to get up and off the ground. We are humans and we need stories.
The thing is, what makes a good story?
The most important book written on the subject is "Story" by Robert Mckee, the famed Hollywood writing coach. Read it, love it, become better at telling stories.
The backbone of every story ever told is the inciting incident. Eve bites the apple. ET meets the boy. Grendel kills Beowulf's friends. Every story has an inciting incident. Sometimes they are quiet, more often they are loud, but they always exist.
The best inciting incidents are one that don't directly affect you, your just listening to a story, but that matter to you personally so you get pulled into the story. I feel like God is trying to control me sometimes too Eve.
In the world, day to day, we are rewarded internally by our emotions and externally by our peers for inciting incidents because they give us new stories to spend time on.
This is why saying something crazy on Facebook gets things moving. The issue is, are you just inciting a riot?
People too often get hooked on inciting and forget what they are inciting. Even the best stories warn us of this peril. You shouldn't have made Samson angry, he is going to tie foxes together and light them on fire in your grain fields. You shouldn't have made John McClane angry by taking a high rise hostage, he's going to lose his shoes and then kill all the bad guys.
Be very careful of people who just walk around inciting in their lives, there is literally not a single animal in all of nature that does that. Every story needs an inciting incident, but not every incident needs to be incited.
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