As you know, we are switching our reading from John Medina’s Brain Rules to Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal. We will alternate our readings between Brain Rules and The Storytelling Animal according to the schedule on the syllabus.
During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of your reading from Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, The Witchery of Story. Consider these things in your response: How does Gottschall’s writing style compare to O’Shea, Marcus, and Medina? How is story important to the way we think and the way we communicate with others?
Before our next meeting, type up your response and post it as a comment to this blog post.
Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, The Witchery of Story allow us to enjoy fictional stories. He convey the idea that stories are all around us and today we read more because of the social media. I really like that this chapter was first introduce with the quotation of Christopher Morley. As a very poetic way we feel we’re there listening the storytelling. Similar to John Medina, Gottschall’s writing style confuse us going back and forward in order to maintain us alert and we enjoy he make us navigate throughout the text. In my mind, all our attention is taken at the middle of the chapter when he talk about being lost in Neverland. In addition, story is important to the way we think and the way we communicate to others because it reinforce the values that we want our audience to demonstrate or think about. These stories can be positive or negative. Therefore, Gottschall reached his audience with a very good manner of communication.
The witchery of story talks about how we humans are creatures of stories. When we read a story we instantly imagine what the setting is like, what the people look like, and what’s going to happen next. As kids we live in dreamland, most of our waking time as kids we are imagining stories, we try to live those stores. A example how we are creatures from stories is the fact that if we are not concentrated on a task we are most likely thinking about a story and what’s surprising it’s that we don’t have to be sleeping to dream, we dream when we walk, while we eat, and even when we are reading or watching tv if we not paying much attention. Gottschall’s writing style is a lot different from medinas. I feel like both writers have the same concept of giving live examples on the topic they talking about but I fell like medina is a lot more clear than Gottschall.
From reading The Witchery of Story, it tells us that humans are creatures of stories. Human imperative to make and consume stories runs even more deeply. We’re entertained while we learn. When we read stories, the massive creative effort is going on all the time, chugging away beneath our awareness. Story’s role in human life extends far beyond conventional novels, it dominates human life. From the reading, I learned that we spend a lot of times in daydreaming. In order words, we spend about half of our waking hours spinning fantasies which I believe Jonathan Gottschall called it “Lost In Neverland”. In my opinion, I think John Medina and Jonathan Gottschall both have a similar writing style because both of them gives a lot of examples to help us understand better.
Ashley Perez
After reading the first chapter of the story telling animal I felt more informed actually. I enjoyed the fun facts about daydreaming and fantasizing. I liked it also because I related to it a lot. Usually when I watch something I will give it my own ending if I didn’t like there version, and the same thing with books. I will rewrite the entire story in my head and say this is how it should’ve ended, if it had a sappy emotional ending that was just to obvious ill do the complete opposite and give it more of a fun realistic ending. In my opinion I think the witchery of the story is basically saying all humans have some sort of imagination and we all like to pretend whether you are the most boring or exciting person. I also enjoyed the part about peter pan and I think we all have that in us where we never want to grow up.
Summary of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, The Witchery of Story
While I was reading The Witchery of Story by Jonathan Gottschall, I discovered that Gottschall’s writing style was different in contrast to O’Shea, Marcus, and Medina. Why? Gottschall writes mostly about stories, fictions, and the great impact they have on human. He declares that the human life so bound up in stories that we are thoroughly desensitized to their weird and witchy power. Also, that human minds yield helpless to suction of story. In addition, he believes that no matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just cannot resist the gravity of alternate worlds. For example, every time I am communicating with either my family or friends, during our conversations we would always have some kind of story to share with each other.
According to Gottschall, storytelling has been around for many many years and everyone does it in one form or another. Whether we have considered fictions created by artists (some kind of music that tells a story), the stories we tell ourselves at nights (when we sleep, the untired brain dreams richly, wildly, and at great length), the daydreams we may have when driving, when, cooking, when getting dressed in the morning, and when staring off into space at work. Moreover, whether it is the storytelling in sports, as an example, when people found that Tiger Woods was having an affair they became more interested in whether his wife was going to divorced him or not – rather than to see him play golf. Also, Gottschall explains that small children are creatures of story and that they start shaping their own pretend worlds as toddlers. He argues that even though we might leave the nursery with its toys trucks and dress-up cloths, we never stop pretending. Similarly, just like Peter Pan who stayed in Neverland, but the only thing is, we just change how we do it: whether in novels, dreams, films, and fantasies.
Sum, Gottschall believes that human are creatures of story, so story touches nearly every aspect of our lives, regardless of our ages and who we are.
Reading Jonathan Gottschall’s story The Witchery of Story, Gottschall explains how us as humans are storyteller creatures. When humans read stories we get tangled and interested, we start to imagine the scenery, what’s going to happen next, what the characters look like. As kids we start to storytell, with our daydreams and we try to live in these dreams. If we aren’t focused on a task presented to us we are most likely dreaming, the cool part is that humans almost everywhere and anywhere, while sleeping, eating, walking, and I am a witness to that since I do it all the time. Gottschall and the other writers like Medina have different styles, Gottschall’s writing just seems to be more clearer to me, and interesting.
In Gottschall’s “The Witchery of Story”, he spoke about how people are creatures of stories. We live life based on a lot of imagination. For example, day and night dreaming we use a lot of our imagination to see the setting, we could read a story and imagine everything as if we are there or like if it’s a movie. He speaks on the suspension of disbeliefs. We can assume the way a story will end and imagine peoples reactions without being there. Also, people are more interested in things such as sports when they hear stories about the players. For example, more people started watching golf after the story was leaked about Tiger Woods cheating on his wife. In conclusion, no matter our age, we all naturally imagine our own stories.
Justin Echevarria
Jonathan Gottchal’s style of writing is.. I don’t mean to say odd, but it has a different vibe. In the first chapter of “The Story Telling Animal” he spoke about numerous things, which made me a bit confused, not allowing to grasp to what he was talking about. What stood out to me and gave me a slight understanding is when he explain the imagination; he claimed although children have a broader imagination and express it more freely adults never really lose their creative imagery, they are just expressed a lot more differently.
It is very easy to lose focus while reading something you are not so engaged in. The smallest distractions become big distractions quickly and we don’t even notice it. Even if we try hard to concentrate we cannot resist but to get distracted from stories. The other part of story telling that I did not realize was the fact that writer’s need readers with their own imagination. “The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it.” (Pg 5) I guess it is the reason why some people understand certain topics or stories differently because of their imagination and how they perceive it. In order for a story to be a story, the writer needs to readers imagination in order for the book to be successful. In fact, all though we may think we have grown out of imagination and fantasizing we actually never do. We just do it a bit differently than when we were younger. We are also able to tell the difference between a reality and a imagination as opposed to a child believing in the imagination.
Jonathan Gottschall’s «The story telling animal, the witchery of story» chapter tells us how important stories are to us humans. Though we spend less time per day reading books now then we used to do, the time we spend watching TV, sitting on our computers, and listening to music makes us read/ hear more stories than ever before. We have simply swapped out the books with computers and televisions. According to Gottschall, storytelling has been around for many many years, and everyone does it in one form or another. We started storytelling when we were kids, we let ourselves get consumed by our daydreams, which felt as real as life itself. Our minds is daydreaming by default and we do it whenever we are not occupied with tasks that require our full attention.
The Storytelling Animal
The Witchery of Story
Summary
In the first chapter of book The Storytelling Animal, Gottshall explains that stories is part of human cultural in general and people since the beginning of time have been telling stories about everything that surround us or something fictional. Also, the author analyzes and describes the mysteries behind stories itself and the “magic” that characterizes stories such as our imagination can fly whenever the author describes an emotional scene in a book, and how our mind fills out some moments in the stories with a lot detail with the help of the imagination. Also, he mentions that people acts like child sometimes because there are some stories that are fascinating that that child inside us. In addition, he mentions about daydreaming and night dreaming which basically is when our mind creates stories when we lose concentration about something, and night dreaming is when people are sleeping are make stories through their dreams. In summary, stories are part of the human’s life and have been since the beginning of them which brought us many emotion and the capability of imagine them.
When first reading Gottschall’s “The Storytelling Animal”, I was a tad confused. I was confused on whether who was telling the story and if it was a story within a story! Pretty confusing! but i read on soon to realize that Gottschall is simply narrating and just giving us some tips and inside scoop about reading. What really stood out to me within this first chapter is when we got to the topic of “Imagination”. It stuck out to me the most because no matter what with reading or watching something, our imagination takes control and keeps us engaged. He mentioned that usually the small cues in where a story describes a character as in facial features or appearance. Our imagination has us think up what the character would look like and i’m pretty sure everyone has different pictures even if the description is right in front of you! I feel as though we do read a lot more now but not a lot in book form!
Reading the first chapter of The Storytelling animal was very exciting because Jonathan Gottschall keep us concentrated on his stories. The quote that begins the chapter was very interested, is the first time I read it but I liked it a lot because that is the reality behind the books: Lord! When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, in a real book I mean.” Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels.
This author tries to explain us many things about the way we see stories and is funny that we have experimented those things but never stopped to analyze them. When I was reading this chapter, every time he was talking about these things I was thinking and analyzing them and creating a graphic image in my mind. Gottschall says that stories are everywhere around us, I totally agree with this because it does not matter what I am doing, I create my own story with everything I see or with my everyday experiences. I am the kind of person that analyzes everything around me and the best way to describe them is by using stories.
I think that Medina’s have a clear way to express his ideas, it is easy to read his book because he found some strategies to keep his audience reading without getting distracted, but Gottschall is totally different, even though he’s an amazing author because is fascinating to read his book, is very hard to keep on track all the ideas he wants to express, you have to concentrate very well.
Jonathan GOttschall’s The story telling, the witchery of story says there are several surprises on story. The first is that we spend a great deal of time in fictional worlds. He further says that when we read stories we meet a character who is handsome with fierce eyes and cheekbones like blades. And from these small cues we build a human being who has all of those characteristics. I remember when I read the alchemist I tried to build that boy from what coleno described. Also Gottschall says “Neverland is our evolutionary niche, our special habitat.” We all create our own stories, we are in a class or in a subway we are thinking of our own imaginary land where we are happy, actually happier then in real life. He also says that there are two kinds of people practical people and story people. All story people do is work, hunt, gather and seek out mates and they fill their leisure time with rest, gossip and stories while practical people work, fill their bellies, win mates and raise children and they don’t waste time with stories rather they rest. In the end story people prevail, we are the story people.
I think Gottschall writes more difficult if to compare his writing with “Brain Rules” by John Medina. At least it was for me. As a reader you need to be much focused while reading so you will not miss the main idea.
The first chapter of the book was about storytelling, how reader should use his/her imagination. Even when we think we just read a book, our brain works what we are reading at the moment. Stories are helping to hold the attention and bring the interest.
People create stories since they are little kids.
People don’t stop storytelling while they day or night dreaming.
Story, and a variety of this stories are taking huge place in human life. We spend half of our lives living in fantasy world.
In the storytelling animal the witchery story, The author writes in a creative matter. He uses us the reader as an example while we reads what he wrote which I found very creative and as he said catching the readers attention and he definitely cough mines, he uses this crazy way to describe scenes in the book or Scenarios. One thing that Oshea, Marcus, and Medinas have income with Gottschalls way of writing is that they find creative ways to catch readers like ourselves attention and about the mind they all have a different but unique way to talk about it but they all also have similar connection about too. Also something that disconnects Gattschall’s way of writing from john Medina’s, Oshea, and Marcus is that he actually anyway shows the readers a vivid description in his writing meaning he adds very clear detailed for example he says and quote “bloodstain foam sloshing in the bilge” which made his detail very outstanding.