It all started when something changed, monumentally.
The statement above is likely too vague to elicit much emotion in you. But it’s a pretty good template for opening any story you could ever hope to tell:
It all started when Harry Potter got his letter to Wizard school.
It all started when Batman’s parents were killed.
It all started when Alice fell down a rabbit hole.
It all started when God said ‘Let there be light’.
It all started when Arthur Dent discovered his friend was an alien and Earth was about to be destroyed to make way for a bypass.
The strike of unexpected change is a well established opening to stories1.
But this rule doesn’t only apply to fiction. This rule applies to all stories, imagined and true. I’m talking about anything that fits into the following definition:
A story is:
An account of connected events
Either true or imagined
Presented to inform, teach, or entertain
Being true or imagined has no bearing on whether something is or isn’t a story. If you can connect events through facts as well as fictions, then many of the same rules that make great fiction, also hold for true stories. Take the following:
“The Diary of a Young Girl, commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.”2
This is factually correct, but not a very enticing story.
Compare it to:
‘It all started when Anne was gifted a diary for her thirteenth birthday.’
This example is both factually correct and a good beginning to a story.
If a story is an account of connected events, then it benefits the storyteller if the reader or listener cares about the catalyst of those events. This will engage someone regardless of whether you’re trying to entertain them with a story about a boy wizard, or teach them what happened in Nazi occupied Europe, or if you’re trying to inform them about progress.
Some of the best books on progress, technology and society start with a very strong ‘something changed, monumentally’ moment:
It all started when humans figured out how to manipulate the world (Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari).
It all started when I started being mistaken for a conspiracy theorist (Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein).
It all started around 2010, when children gained unfettered access to the internet, and lost access to real world play (The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt).
Good writing on progress always starts with a monumental change, just like good fiction.
And using the common definition above, I’d argue that ideas are stories. They are, after all, a way of accounting connected events. The Industrial Revolution is a story, climate change is a story, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a story3. In fact, you probably know the story of these better than the facts. Most people would struggle to tell you the date on which the Industrial Revolution began, or why Britain was at its forefront, or how burning coal is converted into usable energy. But they could describe the general story of the Industrial Revolution4: It all changed when some men in top hats figured out that you can turn coal into steam and steel and railways and factories.
The idea of progress is also a story.
It makes a narrative connection between past events like the enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the green revolution, and the sharp increase in global population and living standards of today, including quantities and qualities of food, medicine, and energy we currently enjoy that would have seemed like magic for 99.9% of human history. By organising these concepts into a cohesive account, we can more easily discuss and learn from them.
Proponents of progress connect these events into a story about a species that invents its way out of problems, breaks through impossible barriers, and repeatedly creates better futures than we can imagine from a given present.
Progress is not the only story about our world and its future.
The same events can be connected in a different way, resulting instead in a story about a species that takes more than it needs (and is available), that has already picked all the low hanging fruit, that has made all of the main discoveries, and is now destroying itself to create increasingly marginal gains in smartphone thinness and corn syrup concentration.
Many people find this different story more plausible.
Competing ideas, movements and beliefs do not compete entirely on the strength of their facts. They also compete on the strength of their stories, and their ability to connect the events of our world in a compelling way that is informative and entertaining. Stories need to be more than true; they need to be good.
What then is the story of progress and progress studies? How does it compare with the increasingly popular competing stories that the world is ending, technology is untrustworthy, innovation is not worth the trade-offs, and that the past was better than the future could hope to be?
In a world of increasing complexity, stories help make sense of complicated events by drawing together connections. How do we ensure stories about the future teach instead of mislead, inform instead of misinform, entertain without distracting?
There are a plethora of models for how stories work, used by storytellers from Disney5 to Kurt Vonnegut6. The five-act structure is one of the simplest and most widely applicable. For this reason, it is also one of the most universally accepted by writers.
The five acts can generally be described as following the same loose story beats7. I take the following outline from Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling8:
1. This is not working
2. Is there another way?
3. There is…
4. …But can I handle the pain of change?
5. Who am I going to be?
The beats can vary in scale, following the journey of a single person, or an entire galaxy. But generally, a good deal of fiction follows this structure, as well as many nonfiction texts on progress.
For instance, take Charles C. Mann’s ’The Wizard and The Prophet’, a history of two scientists and how their ideas have shaped approaches to solving some of the biggest problems of the 20th Century. This book follows the five part structure quite closely:
Section One - It looks like humanity is doomed to exceed its limits (This is not working).
Section Two - William Vogt and Norman Borlaug explore opposing ways of preventing this (Is there another way?).
Section Three - Mann outlines how these two approaches have been used in the 20th Century to address issues of food, freshwater, energy and climate (There is…).
Section Four - Mann outlines the problems that have resulted from the implementation of both of these approaches (…But can I handle the pain of change?).
Section Five - Mann suggests a potentially hopeful future. The section is literally titled ‘One Future’ (Who am I going to be?).
But if ideas, movements and beliefs are also stories, then surely they too will often follow the five-act structure.
How, for instance, does the story of progress and Progress Studies map onto this structure?
1. This is not working.
Progress Studies absolutely has reached this part of the story.
There is growing sentiment and evidence that our approach to countless aspects of life, including agriculture, energy, housing, infrastructure, scientific funding, and control over emerging tech, is not working. You’d struggle to find many people right now who would agree that the world is working for them.
2. Is there another way?
Progress Studies has also reached this part of the story.
Though everyone agrees things aren’t working, people differ enormously on the way out of this, often in completely polarised beliefs: We need to raise taxes/We need to lower taxes; We need to transition to green energy/We need to drill, baby, drill; We need to open up to the benefits of an increasingly globalised world/We need to close off against the dangers of an increasingly globalised world. One of the defining features of the progress movement is the belief that there is another way forward out of our broken world, instead of the two other popular beliefs: that we need to revert to a past period when things were working (where humanity used less energy, ate less meat, took fewer international flights, and so on); or that there is no solution to our broken world, and we are doomed.
3. There is…
The progress movement as a whole is working on answering story beat 3.
Academics, writers, thinkers, inventors and policymakers who believe in progress are exploring all the ways ‘another way’ can actually exist. How do we build green infrastructure to actually power the world through green energy? How do we improve crop yields on a finite amount of soil, nutrients and water? How do we better fund research to make the medical breakthroughs we need?
4. …But can I handle the pain of change?
5. Who am I going to be?
People are also thinking about how story beats 4 and 5 will play out: How do we re-train people in industries displaced by technological advancement, to avoid the pain of mass unemployment? How do we accelerate house construction without further damaging the environment? And ultimately if progress occurs, what sort of world are we going to be? What sort of world do we want to be?
These are perhaps the three most useful questions people who believe in progress can answer:
3. How can progress be ’another way’?
4. How can society handle the pain of change that will occur when progressing to the future?
5. What is this better world going to be?
For progress to occur, let alone accelerate, the public, decision makers, industry leaders, as many people as possible, need to be effectively convinced that progress is a viable option. This requires a clear story of progress that is as captivating as it is true.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling, pp. 11-13
Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl, 29th July 2026.
These are accounts of true events, accounts of false events (as opposed to fictional) into stories, such as ‘The US government faked the moon landing’ are generally considered to be conspiracy theories, which often make for very powerful stories.
Even if it is a blinkered, not entirely accurate version of the story.
There are many different ways to describe these, one of the most popular ways is through the rise and fall of action, sometimes known as Freytag’s pyramid.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling pp.194
It all started with this post. Good job!