Story resists reinvention. As the example of Finnegan’s Wake shows, storytelling is not something that can be endlessly rejiggered and reengineered. Story is like a circle. A circle is a circle. The minute you start fussing with the line you create a non-circle. Similarly, story only works inside narrow bounds of possibility. Imagine narrative transportation as this powerful brain capacity that is protected by a lock. The lock can only be opened with a specific combination. For as long as there have been humans, the ways of undoing the lock have been passed down through generations of storytellers. Going back to the earliest forms of oral folktales and moving forward through stage plays, to printed novels, and modern YouTube shorts, the fundamentals of successful storytelling have not changed at all. Over the last 15 years, perhaps the most spectacularly successful “new” thing in story has been very old. I’m speaking here of the rise of great cable dramas like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. But there’s nothing new about these shows. They are just very good novels transferred to the screen. (The much ballyhooed anti-hero trend may be new to TV drama, but it’s nothing new to literature.) When it comes to the fundamentals of story, there is not now--and never will be--anything new under the sun.
Steve Jobs, back in the day