26. Our favorite stories about telling stories
Creative works to check out for storytelling inspiration (or just for fun)
Pretty much every culture reveres its storytellers in one way or another. A lot of our most celebrated art is narrative, and some of the most famous people on the planet are actors, writers, and filmmakers—people who tell (or are instrumental in telling) stories. We have awards like the Oscars and Emmys and the Palme d’Or. We give out Pulitzers and Nobels and MacArthur “genius grants.” We bury our storytellers in cathedrals alongside royalty. We spend, collectively, billions of dollars each year on movies, theater, television, and books. And if you consider religious texts stories, then this opens up a whole other realm of how influential and important stories and storytellers are!
We humans really love stories. (Maybe we can go into the psychological and evolutionary reasons why in another post? Let us know…) At Bonfire, we take brand storytelling very seriously, and it’s one of our favorite things to do. There are a ton of books and other resources out there about the craft of storytelling and how to be a better storyteller. But just like there are many movies about Hollywood, plays and musicals about putting on plays and musicals, and books whose main characters are authors themselves, we thought we’d share some of our favorite stories about…telling stories.
So here are some of our favorite stories about telling stories, in no particular order, to watch, listen to, or read for inspiration or just for fun. If you have others you love, let us know in the comments!
1. The Princess Bride (the novel!), by William Goldman
You likely know the film version of The Princess Bride, a late-80s family classic that cuts back and forth between a grandfather reading the novel of the same name to his sick grandson and the imagined scenes from that book. The movie is great (Romance! Piracy! Magic! Revenge! Giant rodents!), the performances are especially great, and it is indeed a story that involves a storyteller telling a story.
But I’m here to recommend the novel the movie is based on, The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version, “abridged” by William Goldman, an award-winning screenwriter. This book was my comfort read when I was young; if I was ever really upset, I would open to a random page and just read through to the end.
The metafictional conceit of the book is that Goldman is editing and abridging a very long, ponderous old novel by someone called S. Morgenstern, preserving only the “good parts” for us modern readers. Goldman’s editorial comments are sprinkled through the text as he explains why he cut certain scenes (like dozens of pages about different kinds of hats), and generally makes fun of the original text and author while also revealing parts of himself, his professional woes, and his dysfunctional personal life to the reader. The result is deeply funny and surprisingly touching. Goldman becomes just as much a character as Buttercup, Westley, Inigo Montoya, and the rest of the fantasy crew.
Of course, the whole thing is Goldman’s own invention. There is no real S. Morgenstern...as a very credulous Little Me discovered when I went to my mall’s Walden Books and asked if they could please order me the unabridged version. By making the story about the best way to tell this other story, Goldman gives this fairytale a satirical edge with a lot of emotional resonance, as well as a quirky sense of humor that really hits the spot. (Warning: It was written in 1973 and is not a paragon of 2024 social values.)
This isn’t an affiliate link or anything like that (#notanad), but you can buy the book here on Kindle or a physical copy! (And you can skip the two anniversary edition introductions…trust me.)
2. The Fall (2006), a film by Tarsem
I’m not even going to try to play it cool: This is maybe my favorite movie. I will try not to sell it too hard, because it’s notoriously difficult to find and watch. (Though if you maybe perhaps turn on a VPN, you can rent it on Prime (UK) or watch it on YouTube (France). But you didn’t hear that from me…)
The Fall is an adaptation of a Bulgarian screenplay with a similar plot, but it takes place in 1915 Los Angeles, where a Hollywood stuntman has been paralyzed in a botched stunt after his girlfriend leaves him for the film’s leading man. In the hospital, he befriends a 6-year-old Romanian girl who’s broken her arm picking oranges with her family of itinerant workers. The stuntman begins telling the girl a fantastical story—with an ulterior motive!—and soon the film blooms into the girl’s rich imaginings of his tale, populated by characters from the hospital around them.
Masterfully and subtly told from the perspective of this child, you watch them begin to co-create the story, develop a deep connection to one another, and ultimately— inadvertently, achingly—find what they’re each looking for through telling the story together.
This movie will break your heart in the most lovely way, and it features some of the most visually stunning and otherworldly landscapes and places I’ve ever seen. (And it was shot without any “sets”—only existing real places in 28(!!!) countries!) Lee Pace’s performance as the stuntman is unimpeachable, but the real star is little Catinca Untaru, the most natural child actress I’ve ever seen.
3. The Rehearsal, a TV series by Nathan Fielder
If you thought the metafiction of The Princess Bride was a little too trippy for you, do not watch The Rehearsal.
Comedian Nathan Fielder has made a name for himself with reality-bending pranks and stunts in his show Nathan for You, as well as documentary and mockumentary projects with other satirical artists like Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Borat, aka Ali G.
In The Rehearsal, Fielder hosts a reality(?) TV show where he helps ordinary people “rehearse” for pivotal moments in their lives that they feel unprepared for, like confessing a major lie to a group of friends, having a baby, or confronting a family member about their inheritance. To do this, he attempts to recreate as accurately as possible the conditions surrounding the experience, hiring actors to research and play people in the participants' lives and building exact copies of their houses and hangouts so they can “practice” over and over how they want the interaction to go with different outcomes. But then Fieldler himself gets…over involved, and the show becomes a rehearsal within a rehearsal within a rehearsal until nothing is clear except the emotional stakes.
It would be nearly impossible to explain just how off the rails and meta-upon-meta-upon-meta this show gets, but it becomes a really brain-breaking exploration of what is real vs. fiction. Fieldler, in attempting to craft a coherent story into which he’s increasingly sinking as if in quicksand, destroys our expectations of reality TV and lands us somewhere both moving and disturbing. To this day, I have no idea how much of The Rehearsal was “real.” But the thing about stories is that it doesn’t always matter! What’s true isn’t always what’s real.
4. The Adventure Zone: Balance, a podcast by the McElroy Family
I’m calling this one my wildcard suggestion, because a) it’s audio storytelling, b) it’s a collective, improvised storytelling experience, and c) it’s three comedian brothers and their dad playing Dungeons & Dragons, the classic tabletop role playing game. It’s niche! It’s nerdy! I know! But hear me out…
The Adventure Zone has now run for many years and has had many different seasons, but my recommendation from a storytelling perspective is that season one, Balance, is where it’s at. The initial episodes feature the four players/storytellers learning the rules of the game they’re playing—essentially just a very complex system through which an interactive, collaborative story can be told. If you’re new to role-playing games, these initial episodes really help!
As the months pass and the episodes continue, they begin to realize that their story, which started out as a casual joke with lots of puns and potty humor and senseless killing of goblins, has taken on a life of its own. They and their audience are emotionally invested, and they feel they owe their characters a serious and thoughtful resolution. Interestingly, they periodically release episodes called The ‘The Adventure Zone’ Zone (lol) where they answer fan questions, analyze their narrative and character choices, and discuss the tension inherent in telling a story where some decisions are based on the random chance of a dice roll vs. what’s actually “good” for the structure of the story.
The Adventure Zone: Balance is not just a story where a lot of the inner workings of the narrative are visible for the audience to appreciate, but actually telling the tale of the characters to everyone within the world of the story becomes a key plot point in how they eventually save the world.
The end result hits more like an epic fantasy novel than a podcast about D&D. (And it’s now a series of graphic novels!) And I’m not embarrassed to say it’s one of the most narratively satisfying experiences of my life!
5. A couple of classics
If modern stories-within-stories aren’t your jam, there are a couple classics you can check out:
One Thousand and One Nights, by various authors
This title actually refers to many different collections of several hundred and sometimes actually up to 1,001 (or more!) fairy tales, stories, poems, and riddles primarily from the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age. These collections are all framed by the story of Scheherazade, the narrator. Scheherazade is married to King Shahryar, basically an Andrew-Tate-esque serial killer who marries a new wife each day and then kills her every night because he believes all women are inherently unfaithful and will betray him. In order to avoid being killed, Scheherazade begins telling the king a story on their first night together, and he’s so enraptured that he agrees to let her finish the story before murdering her—what a cool guy! Of course, Scheherazade is smart, and draws out the story for, supposedly, 1,001 nights, after which time the king is in love with her and decides to spare her. Couple goals? No. Word count goals? Hell yeah.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Raise your hand if you also had to read this in high school and didn’t understand why this book was interesting or important. (::raises hand::)
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written and/or compiled by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and it was published (apparently unfinished) at the time of his death in 1400. The framing device is that Chaucer encounters a bunch of Christian pilgrims from all different classes and walks of life on their way to Canterbury Cathedral, and they decide to have a storytelling contest. So, here are the stories!
The work is important for several reasons, but one of which is that it’s considered to be the first work written in “vulgar” (meaning conversational) Middle English, and it helped democratize literature and storytelling. Like, imagine if all great works of art had to be written in Latin to be considered legitimate—only very select people would be able to enjoy them!
That being said, The Canterbury Tales are a little inaccessible to modern readers because of said Middle English, but give it a go if you like your literature to feel a little like a puzzle.
Over to you
I’m sure there are hundreds of other examples of stories about storytelling, especially in non-Western cultures I’m less familiar with. Drop more of your favorites in the comments!
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