walk.txt
This is the contents of a file called “walk.txt” that I wrote a long time ago.
Weaved through all storytelling, in some way, is this universal thing that we all get a tiny chunk of. It’s something that everything has in common.
“Once upon a time…”
Ah yes.
Imagine storytelling as going for a walk… travelling gradually from place to place, noticing the scenery, taking it all in. You don’t go everywhere, and there are other ways to go from wherever you are to where you’re going. You might not go as the crow flies. You follow paths, or go off the path and follow your nose. Or you follow a map… an OS Landranger, or something sketched on a beermat. It’s a walk. One foot in front of the other. “Through leaves, over bridges…”
Storytelling is like walking, except you can jump from anywhere to anywhere, do a bit of walking and looking, and then jump somewhere else.
At the moment, all this storytelling we do is like walking in a world without maps. There is no Ordnance Survey for storytelling. No http://www.openstreetmap.org/. You can’t walk somewhere, then get out a map and decide to go somewhere else.
There are walks, and there are places to go for walks… and even some local maps, perhaps. But there’s no Google Maps, where there’s one large definitive representation of the world. Plug in your GPS, it’ll draw a line of where you walked onto that universal map. It’s universal because if you’d walked from Hyde Park to Oslo to Sydney, it would still be the same map.
We need OpenStreetMap for the universal timeline. I was born here, was alive until here. That line between there and there. It’s a walk. You’ll catch up with me just over there.
It’s not just dots on the map, it’s the lines between the dots. The journeys. The stories. If you have a map, they’re pretty much infinite.
Everyone shares something fundamental: they were born on a day, and will go for a walk.