Telling stories

is not just the

oldest form
of entertainment,
it’s the highest
form of

BY PETER GUBER
THE INSIDE
• PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREGG SEGAL
STORY consciousness.
The need for
narrative is
embedded deep
in our brains.
Increasingly,
success in the
information age
demands that
we harness the
hidden power
of stories. Here’s
what you need
to know to tell
a killer tale.

March/April 2011 Psychology Today 79

 I
live in the storytelling
capital of the world. I tell stories for a living. You’re probably
familiar with many of my films, from Rain Man and Batman
to Midnight Express to Gorillas in the Mist to this year’s The Kids
Are All Right.
Butinfourdecadesinthemoviebusiness,I’vecometoseethat
stories are not only for the big screen, Shakespearean plays, and
JohnGrishamnovels.I’vecometoseethattheyarefarmorethan
entertainment. They are the most effective form of human com-
munication,morepowerfulthananyotherwayofpackaginginfor-
mation. And telling purposeful stories is certainly the most effi-
cientmeansofpersuasionineverydaylife,themosteffectiveway
of translating ideas into action, whether you’re green-lighting a
$90millionfilmproject,motivatingemployeestomeetanimpor-
tant deadline, or getting your kids through a crisis.
PowerPoint presentations may be powered by state-of-the-
art technology. But reams of data rarely engage people to move
them to action. Stories, on the other hand, are state-of-the-
heart technology—they connect us to others. They provide emo-
tional transportation, moving people to take action on your
cause because they can very quickly come to psychologically
identify with the characters in a narrative or share an experi-
ence—courtesy of the images evoked in the telling.
Equally important, they turn the audience/listeners into
viral advocates of the proposition, whether in life or in busi-
ness, by paying the story—not just the information—forward.
Stories, unlike straight-up information, can change our lives
becausetheydirectlyinvolveus,bringingusintotheinnerworld
oftheprotagonist.AsItellthestudentsinoneofmyUCLAgrad-
uate courses, Navigating a Narrative World, without stories not
only would we not likely have survived as a species, we couldn’t
understand ourselves. They provoke our memory and give us
theframeworkformuchofourunderstanding.Theyalsoreflect
thewaythebrainworks.Whilewethinkofstoriesasfluff,acces-
sories to information, something extraneous to real work, they
turn out to be the cornerstone of consciousness.
Much of what I know about narrative and its power I learned
80 Psychology Today March/April 2011
over the course of working in the entertainment industry. In
the early 1980s, I was chairman of PolyGram Filmed Entertain-
ment as well as a producer at that studio. I was pitched a movie
to finance and distribute based on a book then titled The Exe-
cution of Charles Horman. It told the true story of Ed Horman,
Charles’s father, a politically conservative American who goes
to South America in search of his missing journalist son. Ed
joins with his daughter-in-law Beth, who, like her husband, is
politically polarized from the father, in prying through bureau-
cracy and dangerous government intrigue in search of their
son and husband. Gradually, the father comes to realize his own
government is concealing the truth.
Although the project had enlisted a great filmmaker—Oscar
winner Costa Gavras (for the thriller Z)—I didn’t find it com-
pelling. A Latin American revolution was a tough sell for a com-
mercial American film, along with the story of a father who had
no relationship with his son and the fact that you already knew
the ending: The son is dead without the father ever finding him.
This story was dead on arrival as an investment.
Out of courtesy, I met with the father, who knew I was not
a fan. After a few polite introductions, he nodded to some pic-
tures of my then-teenage daughters on my bookcase. “Do you
Listening to stories is by
no means a passive exercise.
We thrust ourselves into
stories as active participants,
making ourselves
coproducers, as it were.
really know your children?” he asked. “Really know them?” He
went on to tell me a story—that the search for his son was more
a search for who he was than where he was, because he always
suspected he was dead. But the journey was a revelation, not
least about the many values father and son in fact shared. It was
a love story, not a death story.
His telling engaged me in a unique personal way, emotion-
ally transporting me into the search for his child, and it made
me wonder whether I really knew my daughters, their values
and beliefs, their hopes and dreams. If the writer could focus
the film as a love story/thriller and an actor could engage those
emotions and pique those questions, and the film could be exe-
cuted to get critical acclaim, it really might be worth backing.
His narrative migrated from my heart to my head to my wal-
let. I green-lit the movie, called Missing. Jack Lemmon took on
the role of Ed Horman. The same question asked of me was the
one that sold Lemmon on the movie, too—the Trojan horse that
got directly inside his psyche. He was, after all, a father. Miss-
ing won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. It also won the highest
honor at Cannes, along with the Best Actor award for Lemmon.
The first rule of telling stories is to give the audience—
whether it’s one business person or a theater full of moviego-

ers—an emotional experience. The heart is always the first tar-
get in telling purposeful stories. Stories must give listeners an
emotional experience if they are to ignite a call to action.
By far, the most effective and efficient way to do that is
through the use of metaphor and analogy. More than mere lin-
guistic artifacts, these devices are key components of the way
we think, building blocks of the very structure of knowledge.
In their swift economy, they evoke images and turn on mem-
ory, with all its rich sensory and emotional associations, bring-
ing the listener into the story, cognitively and emotionally, as
an active participant—you might say, as coproducer.
“We perceive and remember something based on how it fits
with other things. One way the brain sorts things is by
metaphors,” says psychologist Pamela Rutledge, director of the
Los Angeles-based Media Psychology Research Center. “When
82 Psychology Today March/April 2011
you’re describing things in a story, you are creating visual
imagery that engages you in multiple ways.” The brain does not
distinguish between a lived image and an imagined one. “You’re
bringing your own stuff to the story, which is reinforced through
the emotions associated with the experience,” says Rutledge.
The psychic lever that opens the brain to the power of sto-
ries is the ability to form mental representations of our expe-
rience. It is wired into the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Mental
representations allow us to simulate events, to enjoy the
experiences of others, and to learn from them, without having
to endure all experiences ourselves. “Storytelling is an integra-
tive process,” Daniel Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at
UCLA, told me. “It not only weaves together all the details of
an experience when it’s being encoded but enhances the net-
work of nodes through which all those details can be retrieved
had been winning surfing contests since the age of 8 and was on
herwaytobecomingaworldchampion.Practicingthatmorning,
shepausedforamomentwithherleftarmdanglinginthewater.
Inseconds,a14-foottigersharkrippedoffthearmjustbelowher
shoulder. Friends frantically paddled her, hemorrhaging pro-
fusely, to shore, crafted a tourniquet out of a surfboard leash,
andrushedhertothehospital.Afewweekslater,shewasbackon
herboard,teachingherselfhowtosurfwithonearm.Monthslat-
er, she was winning championships again and, aiming for the
grand prize, earned a spot on the U.S. National Surfing Team.
I thought the kid probably had a lot of grit. But that was the
last I thought of her until 2009, when producer David Tice came
knocking on my door to sell me on a small independent film to
be based on Hamilton’s autobiography, Soul Surfer. Tice talked
numbers and budgets. I was unmoved. Nobody says, “Hey, let’s
go down to the AMC theater, I hear there’s a film there that
came in on budget.” I passed on the project.
Then one afternoon, Hamilton herself showed up on my
doorstep in Kauai. Dressed in a sleeveless top, with no pros-
thetic arm, she seemed shockingly at ease. I asked where her
self-confidence came from. She said, “The shark may have
eaten my arm but I was determined it was not going to devour
The psychic lever
that opens us to the
power of stories is the
ability to form mental
representations of
our experience.
my dream.” She credited her faith for getting her through.
“And now I see the bigger purpose for my life,” she told me.
“To realize your dream to become a surfing champion?” I
asked.
“No, my purpose from God,” the girl explained. “To help oth-
ers know God’s love. I want my story to inspire others to never
giveup,nomatterwhat.That’swhyIhopethismoviegetsmade.”
and recalled. Research shows that we remember details of Bethany’s story was not only more compelling than the pro-
things much more effectively when they are embedded in a ducer’s budget figures, but I realized it would appeal to a wide
story. Telling and being moved to action by them is in our DNA.” audience—teens, surfers, Jaws fans, religious believers, and the
The brain may be prewired for stories, but you still have to business folks needed to bring the movie into the marketplace.
turniton.Mostcompellingstorieshaveasympathetichero.And “I’m in,” I told her. When I retold her tale to the president of
they are shaped by three critical elements—a challenge, strug- Sony Pictures, they were in, too. This spring, Soul Surfer will
gle, and some resolution. “There’s a huge cognitive comfort just be released nationwide. Stories not only move us, they motivate
in knowing you’re on a story arc,” says Rutledge. “We can toler- usbecausewecanseeinthemechoesofpossibilityforourselves.
ate the anxiety of the challenge because we know there will be Stories, it turns out, are not optional. They are essential. Our
resolution.”AspsychologistJeromeBrunerfamouslysaid,“Sto- need for them reflects the very nature of perceptual experi-
ries are about the vicissitudes of human intention. Trouble is ence, and storytelling is embedded in the brain itself.
what drives the drama.” While we all feel ourselves to be unified creatures, that is not
I thought I knew the trouble that Bethany Hamilton faced. I the reality of our experience or our brains. There is no central
had first heard of her on Halloween 2003, when I was in Kauai, command post in the brain, says neuroscientist Michael Gaz-
Hawaii.Thethen-13-year-old,thedaughterandsisterofsurfers, zaniga, professor of psychology at the University of California
Excerpted from Tell To Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story Copyright @ 2011 by Peter Guber. Reprinted by Permission of Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
at Santa Barbara. Rather, there are millions of highly special-
ized local processors—circuits forvision,forothersensory data,
for motor control, for specific emotions, for cognitive represen-
tations, just to name a few modules—distributed throughout
the brain carrying out the neural processes of experience.
What’s more, Washington University neuroscientist Jef-
frey Zacks told me, such modules monitor external experience
not continuously but in a kind of punctuated way, a process
he calls event sampling. “The mind/brain segments ongoing
activity into meaningful events,” he says.
How is it, then, that they function as an integrated whole
and we experience ourselves that way?
Because we tell ourselves stories, Gazzaniga says. There is
in fact a processor inourlefthemispherethatisdriventoexplain
events to make sense out of the scattered facts. The explana-
tions are all rationalizations based on the minuscule portion
of mental actions that make it into our consciousness.
Desperate to find order in the chaos and to infer cause and
effect, the left hemisphere—in a module Gazzaniga dubs “the
interpreter”—tries to fit everything into a coherent story as to
why a behavior was carried out. The brain takes information
spewed out from other areas of the brain, the body, and the envi-
Stories are a stand-in for
life, allowing us to expand
our knowledge beyond
what we could reasonably
squeeze into a lifetime
of direct experience.
ronment, and synthesizes it into a story. If there is not an obvi-
ous explanation, we fabricate one.
Gazzaniga knows this from decades of work with so-called
split-brainpatients,peopleinwhomtheconnectionbetweenright
and left hemisphere has been surgically severed. With no trans-
fer of information between hemispheres, such patients can’t
possiblyknowwhytheyare,say,raisingtheirlefthandafterGaz-
zaniga “sneaks into the right hemisphere” to give a command to
doso.Yet,whenaskedwhattheythoughttheirlefthandwasdoing,
they invent a story to explain why their left hand was moving.
“Consciousness,” says Gazzaniga, “does not constitute a sin-
gle,generalizedprocess.”Itinvolveswidelydistributedprocess-
es integrated by the interpreter module.” The psychological
unity we feel emerges from the specialized system of the inter-
preter,ourbuilt-instoryteller,generatingexplanationsaboutour
perceptions,memories,andactionsandtherelationshipsamong
them. What results is a personal narrative, the story that confers
the subjective experience of unity, that solid sense of self.
We literally create ourselves through narrative. Narrative
is more than a literary device—it’s a brain device. Small won-
der that stories can be so powerful.
Further, stories can be a stand-in for life, allowing us to
84 Psychology Today March/April 2011
expand our knowledge beyond what we could reasonably
squeeze into a lifetime of direct experience. Zacks has found
that vividly narrated stories activate the exact same brain areas
that process the various components of real-life experience.
“When we read a story and really understand it, we create a
mental simulation of the events described by the story,” says
Zacks. His studies, which use brain imaging technology, show
that readers borrow what they can from their own knowledge,
based on past experience, to mentally reproduce the sights and
sounds and tastes and movements described in a narrative.
The ability to construct such mental simulations may be the
tool that propelled human evolution. We can take in the stories
of others who escaped life-threatening situations without tak-
ing on the risk; the safety of the retelling gives us an opportu-
nity to try out solutions. Telling stories may also have enhanced
survival by promoting social cohesion among our ancestors.
Just as it is for everyone else, it is often essential for me to
use the emotional resonance of stories to persuade others to
actonmygoals.Intheearly1990s,IwaschairmanofSonyEnter-
tainment. Lots of Sony films (and music) were being plundered
by commercial pirates in Thailand, robbing the company (and
many others) of millions. Off I flew with the corporate head of
Sony and the Japan-based chairman to plead for help from the
king of Thailand. I spent the whole flight preparing my story in
a way that would move King Bhumibol to action. The clincher
would be an appeal to his heart—as a musician himself, surely
the king would understand that if musical artists couldn’t sup-
port themselves, they’d be forced to abandon their dreams.
As I was led into His Majesty’s enormous reception cham-
bers in the fabulously ornate palace, I half expected to see Yul
Brynner step into view. Instead, I came face to face with a tow-
ering figure in white, his pristine jacket covered with badges of
many colors. I immediately launched into my prepared story.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Sony’s chairman was
tweakinghisheadatsomethingacrosstheroom.Iplowedahead.
Then the chairman grabbed my sleeve. I said, “I’m almost fin-
ishedwiththeking.Ithinkhegetsit.”Thechairmanhissedunder
his breath, “Guber san, this man is not the king. That’s the king,
over there,” and nodded to a figure in a rumpled gray suit on
the other side of the room. “This man is the guard.”
Recovering my composure, I confessed my gaffe to the king
and told an abbreviated version of my story. The king responded
with his own story of his music being pirated. “If I can’t protect
myownmusicinmyowncountry,”heshrugged,“howcanIhelp
you?”Oops,maybemyperfectstorywasn’tsoperfectafterall.But
storiescan workin mysteriousways.Monthslater, KingBhumi-
bol issued an edict enforcing some of Thailand’s piracy laws.
Which brings me to my final point about telling purposeful
stories. Because they are so important, it’s wise to prepare your
stories in advance. But before you launch into your script, take
some time tolearnabout youraudience.What youdiscover will
determine how you tell your story. You want to make sure your
audience is with you. You can’t get anywhere without them. PT
PETER GUBER is Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment,
headquartered in Los Angeles, and author of Tell to Win.