Welcome to the Blog

Welcome to the blog. "A Story Walks into a Bar..."  is a blog about stories. Not a blog full of stories, since I am not a fiction writer, nor a raconteur. No, this is a blog about how stories work, in movies, in books, in politics, in myths and in everyday life.

My day-job is writing and producing documentary films. You may well have seen some of them, as most of them have appeared on television for broadcasters like The Discovery Channel, History and National Geographic. ( Click here for some clips online: Aftermath, Museum Secrets, Season 2, Convoy), I specialize in documentaries that deal with historical events, or science subjects, often with a lot of special effects. 

The reason I like making documentaries is because I learn a lot and I get to share that information with millions of other people. But to do that, I have to take thousands of facts and turn them into a story worth watching. Many of the programs I have written have needed a lot of special effects, since they take place in the past ( dinosaurs), the future ( the sun turns into a red giant) , or feature elements of reality you can’t just point a camera at ( ie, molecules or cells). The story has to be compelling enough to attract a big audience so the broadcaster can justify the expense. So, it has been my job to find ways to tell really cool stories about stuff that would otherwise be left sitting inside university textbooks.

So how do you tell a good story? It is harder than it seems. All of us grow up hearing stories, and it is likely that no age has ever surrounded people with more stories than we have right now. But although all of us are born critics of stories ( “this show is boring”), few of us can write them. Like telling a joke well, it takes skill which many of us lack. Indeed, even in Hollywood, most new TV shows are flops, and it is usually because the story is poorly told. But good story telling isn’t a grand mystery. People have been telling compelling stories for thousands of years, and many of those old stories ( now known as myths) still work today. It seems to be one of the human universals: every culture has stories. The trick is to tell a good one.

So, in this blog, I am going to share what I know about stories by talking about the stories that appear in our lives. I will look at new and old movies, not to review them, but to show how they work, or fail to work, as stories. I’ll be dipping into the past to look at ancient myths, where I often find the best stories of all, since they wouldn’t still be around thousands of years later if they were no good. I’ll also look at how people try to use stories to craft how we think now, from politicians putting spin on their actions, to how stories influence us in our day to day lives as we raise our kids and go to work.

So, if you are curious about stories, or if you just love them, stick around. Hopefully you will find some of what’s written here interesting.