Science Fiction with Damien Walter | The Rhetoric of Story : 5th Foundation @DamienWalter | Uploaded January 2022 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
The Rhetoric of Story began with a simple question - what is a story? For over a decade I had been researching story and storytelling. In 2016 I created a series of seven lectures as I travelled through significant sites to the history of story in Britain, France, Sicily and Bali. These talks became the Rhetoric of Story, my first course, which as I write in early 2022 has over 35,000 students worldwide.

As my first video production these recordings have some poor quality audio at times, for which I apologise.

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Events – stories within stories

We continue the Rhetoric of Story with the fifth element – events! What are stories made of? Not words, not pictures, but events. And what are events made of? More events.

- stories are made of events.
- our mind pays close attention to events, times when reality does not meet expectation.
- events are linked by chains of cause and effect.
- once you know the events of a story, it can be told on any scale.
- stories are fractal, they contain other stories, and are part of bigger stories.
- events are described within stories as scenes.