THE ART OF STORYTELLING

by Priyanka S

Stories have existed since long before recorded history, but the desire to hear stories hasn’t changed, nor has the longing to tell them. Today, there are so many stories to tell; however, the challenge is standing out from the clutter and effectively communicating a narrative. Uma Mahesh, a Communication Professional with 30 years of experience, taught us just that.

A strong believer of Shakespeare’s philosophy – ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’ Uma acknowledges that anything and everything can make a good story. Expressing her thoughts on the art of storytelling, she says, “Great tales can be shaped from the reminiscences of old people, conversations with friends, or stories remembered from childhood. In fact, I’ll often take a brief anecdote that I’ve heard or experienced and expand on it to make a full-fledged story.”

And stories need not just be narratives. Expressing that the single most important factor in the current storytelling renaissance may well be the fact that anyone can be a storyteller, she believes that a story can be said through images, a series of codes, or even the clicking sound of your mouse. Elucidating her point, Uma says, “As a digital ad agency, all of you are aware that one team cannot function without the other. To design a website, first you have to conceptualize, design the idea and code it/develop it. If one team is taken out of the loop, a website cannot be created.”

Towards the end of the session, we at Influx, understood that the art of storytelling is an exciting act of conceptualization and creation, both for the teller who spins out a story and for the listener who re-creates the tale in his or her mind, in the digital space or otherwise