Truth In Storytelling: Embellishment vs. Actual Truth - Essay Example

In other words, some facts are presented to the audience with the help of some decorations or colors in storytelling whereas in the lying process, entirely wrong information presented to the audience. This paper analyses embellishment and actual truth in storytelling. A storyteller has the power to shape his or her listeners’ experiences and opinions, much in the same way that the war distorts the soldier’s perceptions of right and wrong” Furthermore, the process of storytelling shifts back and forth along a kind of continuum, a continuum from "factuality," whatever that really is, to "imagination," whatever that really is (O'Brien, The Things They Carried) Sometimes it is difficult to convince the audience with the help of facts alone.

A careful blend of facts and fictions will help the storyteller to convince his audience strongly. For example, suppose an orator is explaining a car accident. He would have heard about this incident from some of his friends. He can explain this incident in two ways; as an actual witness of this incident and also as an orator who heard about this incident from another person. . In short, narration of actual truths with the help of embellishment will help the orator in communicating his ideas more strongly to the audience.

While narrating an incident with the help of storytelling method, the storyteller will get continuity. Such continuity will never be observed if a person simply explains something he has observed or understood. “In every story the continuum keeps shifting between fatter and thinner. Furthermore, the factuality/imagination continuum is constantly on the move. It moves as the story moves, and it moves in our minds as we read or watch the story unfold” (O'Brien, The Things They Carried) “The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination.

To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer”(O'Brien, Telling Tails). It is a fact that many of the stories spread in our society are short lived. This is because of the failure of the storyteller in attaching enough imaginative elements to the stories they created. It should be noted that the stories written by the writers like Tolstoy, Dickens, Victor Hugo etc are still catch our attention even after hundreds of years.

At the same time, modern writers are struggling to convince their readers even for a shorter period. This is because of the lack of imaginative elements in the stories developed by the current writers. Big Fish is a 2003 American fantasy adventure film, directed by Tim Burton, based on a 1998 novel by Daniel Wallace. The film's theme was reconciliation between a dying father (Edward)and his son (Will). The story of