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Somdev Chatterjee teaches Direction & Producing at Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, Kolkata, which is one of the two national film schools of India. He has written scripts for hundreds of hours of television drama and directed documentaries that have been shown on various international television channels. He is interested in the relationship between stories and other aspects of human behaviour.
Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers' Favorite
“Why do I have to rewrite my script just because it has no structure? After all, it is only a story. Can’t I do what I want?” If a student told you that, how would you challenge them? Somdev Chatterjee has faced this question in many different ways in the course of teaching script writing for many years. In Why Stories Work: The Evolutionary and Cognitive Roots of the Power of Narrative, the author takes a look at storytelling from a historical perspective as well as a cognitive look at the importance of stories in human evolution. Evicted from the treetops by stronger apes, the human ancestors “learned to tell stories as a survival skill and gradually harnessed this superpower to become the most powerful species on the planet. The imagined realities of these stories today have far greater casual power than most features of the physical environment.” So true.
Why Stories Work by Somdev Chatterjee explores the history and the power of the story. The author leads readers through the history of stories to the art of telling them and writing them down. For it is an art, a very refined art. The author begins by sharing personal experiences of teaching storytelling to young would-be writers who just want to do their own thing without paying attention to detail and structure. Following the introduction, the author leads the reader through four chapters: Tell It Like Your Life Depends on It, Learning to Inhabit Unreal Worlds, Maps of Experienced Reality, and How Stories Work. The presentation is engaging, entertaining, and educational for writers at any stage of their careers, as well as those interested in the foundations of a good story.
