… a story

Regular readers of this blog will be left in no doubt concerning my beliefs on the power of story to communicate. Story can access the deep places of the human soul, and bypass those critical defences which we sometimes erect to protect us from new ideas.  This means that preachers and communicators must constantly hone their storytelling skills, even when ‘off duty’. Last night I was making my way home from the Royal Brompton Hospital, when I ‘snapped’ this picture just outside South Kensington tube station where a statue of Hungarian Composer Bela Bartok stands. Take a look at the image below, and you will see how many narrative possibilities suggest themselves.

• Is the woman on the plinth a Bartok fan, or was that just somewhere to rest weary feet?
• Where is the bus going?
• Who is the man on the right – artist, musician, computer programmer?
• There is a bike abandoned ‘unofficially’ against the lamp-post in the centre of the image. Has it only just been left there, or did someone chain it there long ago on a journey from which they never returned?
• What about the stories of the other people you can see?

The list could go on. In the end, it is all about observing the world more closely in order to describe it more vividly. In my book, Stale Bread, I devoted a whole chapter (‘Encouraging the storyteller within’)  to exercises of this kind  precisely because such skills can be leant.

For further inspiration you might like to take a look at the 1000words project, with its clever combination of word and image.