He sells a storytelling course... perhaps this is meant to be a 'gotcha' where he reveals the con after the fact? My guess is there are people reading this who know something isn't quite right.
I can personally guarantee that this piece is 100% non-fiction.My course also focuses on narrative writing techniques.Does 'Storytelling' have to imply fiction?In Chinese "story(故事）" just things happened, it can be real or fiction .
There are a lot of subtleties about connotation here. I would say that "storytelling" traditionally primarily meant fiction, but some modern uses also include narrative technique generally, including nonfiction and also marketing. There may also be older traditions of nonfiction storytelling, but that has some connotation of a ritualized or formalized activity (e.g. children sitting in a circle listening to a recitation).
The term that has no connotations of fiction is probably "narrative".
I think many languages have closely related words for fictional narratives and nonfictional narratives.
I don't think that's true. Perhaps in your dialect of English, but if I was down the pub and someone started with, "Did I ever tell you the story of when I...", I certainly wouldn't assume it was fictional.
I think "tell you the story of" has a different connotation from "storytelling"!
E.g. if you said someone was good at "storytelling" as a skill, then I would expect it to be most likely fictional. I agree that "tell you the story of..." could easily be nonfictional.
His story recounts some of your paragraphs word for word, e.g. the execution of the murderer who hacked another man with an axe, right down to the judge uttering the exact same phrase, the same anecdote about using sorghum liquor for the smell, that "the whole Gobi desert smelled of liquor", etc. It's too much coincidence for the two of you to write the exact same things, word for word, all from memory, after so many years.
Did you write the exact same paragraphs by chance, were the two blog posts a collaborative effort, did you get together and pooled your recollections, or what?
It is no coincidence. In a secluded and tightly-knit community like Plant 404, an extreme event like this would immediately spread throughout the entire area.
The author you mentioned is Li Yang. We know each other, and our parents know each other as well. He published his piece before I did. Since the person involved was his classmate, he was able to provide more first-hand details, such as the part about riding a bicycle to see that boy.
When we had safety education at school, the teachers would still use examples from twenty years ago—like someone getting hit by a car. This is how it was in the plant: once something happened, people would keep talking about it for twenty years.
But right down to the same figures of speech, "the Gobi desert must have smelled of sorghum liquor", the exact same utterance by the judge, etc? Even the photos seem taken by the same person (in composition, style, etc).
