Brian McDonald begins chapter 4, Why Humans Tell Stories, in his book “The Golden Theme” with this quote from Ursula K. LeGuin: “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

I’m reading his book online at Booktrope.com,a new concept called “team publishing” where books are available to read for free online, including books they’ve published and many from other publishers.

McDonald opines that “stories are a way to get the benefit of someone else’s experience without having to have the experience oneself. . . . Because stories contain valuable survival information, we are ravenous consumers of stories and seek them out daily.”  He goes on to say that stories teach us the proper attitude to get along in life, like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” or the Zen parable “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”

He gets the name of his theory of storytelling from the ancient mathematical concept of the Golden Mean.  Every artist is trained in its use to produce a pleasing composition.  He goes on to say that the Golden Theme is a Universal Law and connects it to The Golden Rule (that is a thread through all religions).  This is where I kinda got uninterested in the book.

But he does a good job of employing storytelling to make his points thus illustrating how “showing” is more useful and meaningful than “telling.”

Amazon says, “Brian McDonald is an award-winning director/writer who has written for comic books, A&E’s HOARDERS and directed spots for VISA. His film WHITE FACE has run on HBO and CINEMAX and is used in corporations nation-wide as a diversity-training tool.”