{"id":6737,"date":"2022-03-04T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-04T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/the-power-of-narrative\/"},"modified":"2022-03-04T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T14:00:00","slug":"the-power-of-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-power-of-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"The power of narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

That phrase \u2018the pen is mightier than the sword\u2019 is mostly horse-dung, right? Right now, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, isn\u2019t asking the west for pencils. He\u2019s definitely asking for drones and anti-tank weapons.<\/p>\n

And yet, and yet.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help noticing that events in the Ukraine right now are proving the invincible power of story.<\/p>\n

Putin\u2019s (crazed) story about the conflict is that Ukraine isn\u2019t really a real country; its soul belongs to Mother Russia, and always has. Hence sending 190,000 heavily armoured troops into a neighbouring country isn\u2019t really an invasion, it\u2019s a liberation.<\/p>\n

Pretty obviously, you can refute this nonsense with facts. (Ukrainian democracy is vastly more real than anything in Russia. Large majorities of even Russian-speaking Ukrainians wanted to maintain independence. And so on.)<\/p>\n

But Putin\u2019s view of the world never depended on facts in the first place. It was all about the emotional rewards his narrative offered: a return to past glories, the country\u2019s suffering and courage during the \u2018Great Patriotic War\u2019, the long line of Russian power that expresses itself through Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, and so on.<\/p>\n

So, as well as a battle by air and ground, there\u2019s also a battle of narratives.<\/p>\n

On that score, and by a thousand Russian verst<\/em>s, the Ukrainian narrative is winning.<\/p>\n

It turns out that Ukraine is a real country. Its soul does not belong to anyone else. The Ukrainian government is nobody\u2019s puppet. It\u2019s amply capable of managing its own affairs \u2013 and with remarkable courage and dignity. And so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s really interesting, I think, to those of us who write fiction and any more creative flavour of non-fiction, is that the clinching elements of that Ukrainian narrative victory lie less in presidential addresses and more in the humble details. For example:<\/p>\n