Storytelling Is Hard
By Donald Tombia
In 2011, right after my Security Architecture & Systems exams…I think it was named that…I got together with my boys to discuss the questions and our answers. We had studied together, so our exam experiences were similar save for the last question where we were to select one of two questions. A or B.
Of my clique, I was the only one who selected B. What travesty! How dare I betray the group and answer B? I was flummoxed. My guys were flummoxed. We were all flummoxed. ‘Why did you answer B’, I was asked. ‘It was simple’ I replied. ‘This one has started again. How was the question simple? They said you should write a full Social Engineering attack from beginning to end. How is that simple?’
Now, I was the only one flummoxed. They had morphed to being flabbergasted. I had to speak up and defend myself. ‘Is it not to just tell a story of how hackers will scam somebody and take their money? Ordinary to tell story? Storytelling that is easy’. Cue bombastic side-eyes from my friends to me.
I left the conversation feeling out of sorts. Surely, telling the story of how a male hacker becomes an usher in a prestigious church, while a female hacker poses as a devout member who eventually becomes the church accountant, after the de facto accountant fell ‘sick’, and together they collate church members card details which are given during offering and tithe periods, forge fake debit and credit cards with said captured details, and gradually milk the congregation dry, is easy. No?
Au contraire Younger Me. Storytelling isn’t easy. Storytelling is hard. Like harrrrrrrrrrrddddddddddddddd!
Recently, I made a tweet that expressed this sentiment and while a lot of people agreed with me, one Twitter user disagreed, suggesting my tweet ought to read ‘Great storytelling is hard’. To his credit, I understand the points he raised in defense where he stratified storytelling and mapped to skill levels. At a point in the conversation, I suspected we had different contexts to our idea of storytelling.
As a professional working in the entertainment industry, I define storytelling as the art of swaying emotions with words or pictures. Humans are emotional beings. The ability to sway, influence or control these emotions is a powerful one. Storytelling is powerful. Storytelling is power.
In his 2022 article ‘Storytelling is a crucial factor for winning a war’, Peter Burns talks about the ghost of Kyiv, a Ukrainian fighter pilot who shot down 6 enemy planes expertly maneuvering his Mig-29 fighter jet, helping deny the Russians control over the Ukrainian sky. This was a story of heroism which gave many a fighter a rise in adrenaline and a thrust in valor. Whilst this story may or may not be based on a real battle, it served to sway the heart of the Ukrainians and rekindle their hope.
When Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke of ‘The danger of a single story’ in her 2009 TEDGlobal Talk, she equated stories to power. She said “It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power.
There is a word, an Igbo word that I think about whenever I think about the power structure of the world, and it is ‘nkali’. It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another”.
Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Robert Winder, the author of Soft Power: The New Great Game, talks about how victories in today’s world are won on the strength of the told stories.
Storytelling is a powerful medium for influencing, convincing, coercing, intimidating, brainwashing, or simply put, swaying emotions. Wielding this power, the power of storytelling, effectively, expertly, and with responsibility, is hard.
Defining the concept of storytelling further, there is the need to break it into two halves: the skill of storytelling and the responsibility of storytelling.
In my earlier days of writing, I wrote God Bless The Day I Met You where the protagonist was a lady in her mid-30s. Never shy of criticism, I put up my story on a popular fiction blog whose readers were notorious for their unfiltered candor. One particular comment read: Stop telling stories about women. Stop telling stories all together. I would like to say I’m a well-adjusted mature man who forgives, forgets, and moves on but, I dey find the person way type that thing, make I follow am word one or two. That said, I realize now there were two faux pas I was been accused of.
First, that my skill was subpar. Every story is a promise. It makes a promise, then strives to keep that promise. On God Bless The Day I Met You, I made the promise that I would pluck the reader from their reality and immerse them in my creation, holding them captive, until Stockholm Syndrome kicked in and they fell in love with said creation. I made the promise, but failed to keep it, not due to a lack of integrity on my part, but due to skills not sharpened to the degree I postulated.
Growing up, I was regaled with moral tales of the exploits of the tortoise, the greatest being of the race between the tortoise and the hare. It goes like this, the hare was fast and pompous. The tortoise, slow and wise, decided to teach the hare a lesson and made a bet that it could best the hare over a long distance. The hare took the bet and dashed off running. But then the hare took a nap, because it believed the tortoise too slow to catch up. Alas, when it woke and ran towards the finish line, the tortoise had crossed and won the race. The moral of the story? Don’t be pompous. The promise of the story? A story so simple, you will remember the moral of it. I wonder if one needs sharpened storytelling skills to tell this story because of the numerous retelling. But should you decide to tell the story of the 130 Episode Telenovela, Masquerades of Aniedo, where a young disrespected man in the community of Ofuobodo who decides to become the Great Masquerade of Aniedo in order to gain respect;
…or the story of the 10 Episode Crime Series, Slum King, where a young sheltered boy who is yanked from his lush suburban life and thrust into the unforgiving slums of Oro Lede where he has to become the Slum King in order to survive, then you need sophisticated storytelling skills.
Storytelling is driven by skill. This skill is both innate and acquired. The skill is honed to the point of sophistication. Storytelling is driven by innate and acquired skill, honed to the point of sophistication. This is half of what makes storytelling hard.
The second half of storytelling is responsibility. The issues in the story, the drama inherent, the lives been dealt with have to be treated with gravitas. Storytelling is a mirror. The creation is a reflection of the creator. The emotions of the creator, the storyteller must be translated in the story. If the audience, the readers, the hearers feel pained and you the creator don’t, then it’s gratuitous. When the storyteller, creator, when the God feels what the audience feels, then the responsibility of the story is being borne.
The responsibility of storytelling is the lesser known of the two halves of storytelling. It makes storytelling hard. It increases the barrier of entry.
I, the storyteller who just wants to tell the simple but gripping story of two children who while playing, one pushes the other who falls and bashes her head on a stone and dies after a protracted period, needs to bear the responsibility of treating the injured child as a human being with feelings and emotions and possibly a mother who will be grief stricken as one who has lost a child, and probably an older brother who would want to defend his sister’s honor. The onus is on the storyteller to not throw human problems, calamity, and trauma in the name of drama, like mud hoping that one pile would stick. The storyteller must bear the responsibility of understanding that lives are at stake. The storytelling must bear the responsibility of the powerful.
Storytelling is powerful, the storyteller is powerful. This responsibility is heavy and it makes storytelling hard.
Skill and responsibility, when placed together, makes the art of telling tories a hard one. And while I may be accused of romanticizing the arduous process of storytelling, I will by no means, be accused of not informing you, the storyteller, be you aspiring or part timer or professional, that the confluence of honed sophisticated skill and the bearing of the burden of responsibility that produces storytelling, is hard.
Donald Tombia is the Head Writer of Masquerades of Aniedo and Slum King, both showing on Africa Magic. He is also Co-Writer of the Netflix series, Shanty Town. He is an award winning writer, winning an AMVCA for best writer for the film Introducing the Kujus in 2022.
