Until the Storytelling Boom of the last 20 years, the production of narrative texts — at least in the industrial sense — was mostly for entertainment purposes: a “storyteller” was most likely a novelist, screenwriter or playwright — and studied creative writing.

But the internet — and website, video-sharing and social media platforms — changed that when it reduced the barriers to publishing stories, and digital media led to an insatiable demand for storytelling in all kinds of communication. Today, the internet is flooded with narrative texts produced by professionals writing for businesses and organizations — not book publishers or movie studios — to communicate, rather than entertain.

As scholars of narrative turned their attention toward this new use of narrative texts, the professionals producing them turned their attention to the study of narrative. It’s an awkward meeting: there is a shared interest — narrative texts — but for scholars, the text is the product whereas for communicators the product is the effect on the audience. In some ways it feels like narrative has been hijacked by communicators, leading to a story-critical narrative theory. In other ways, it feels like narrative scholars aren’t seeing that communicators don’t have much choice in the matter, as audience demand tends to drive forms of communication.

The Narrative Home is a place to create some visibility into the ecosystem that emerged around the Storytelling Boom — from both the study and the production of strategic narrative texts — in the hopes of greater future collaboration.

The Narrative Home is a project of No Lip Service.