I love a good story. I’m currently engrossed in a 900-page retelling of the Arthurian Saga. I’m halfway through an 8-week class on oral storytelling.

And yet… I sometimes feel that if I hear the term storytelling one more time, I will be flung into the vastness of space. I could never quite put my finger on why until I read The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han.

“Narratives create community,” Han writes. “Storytelling, by contrast, brings forth only fleeting community—the commodified form of community.”

Han believes we are living in a post-narrative age. He sees today’s excitement around narratives and storytelling as an attempt to return to a prior age, when the world made more sense. Conspiracy theories and tribal narratives offer some relief, however short-lived.

“No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories,” Han cautions. “That fire has long since burnt out.”

Han distinguishes between information and narrative as countervailing forces. Information includes facts and data. It is relevant in context, used up, and discarded. Information has the potential to be exhaustive, even limitless. It demonstrates correlation.

Narrative, on the other hand, includes story, theory, philosophy, religion. Narrative sustains a germinative potential that transcends time and place. It is selective and incomplete. It leaves things unsaid. It explains why. “Unlike big data, theory offers us the highest form of knowledge: comprehension,” Han writes.

Information is anathema to narrative: with too much information, narrative drowns. Han argues that today, people who were once narrative creatures have become information-seekers, with a diminished capacity for the contemplation required for both narration and careful listening.

This shift is problematic because “new narratives allow for new forms of perception,” Han writes. Even with all the data in the world, we will still need narrative to make sense of it.

As a writer, I often encounter arguments extolling the power of storytelling. Corporate America’s recent interest in hiring storytellers is but one example.

I get the appeal. In the information age, narrative withers, exacerbating tech-induced isolation and giving rise to the current clamoring for storytelling as a balm to return us to a more communal society. Certainly, it would mean more work for someone like me.

But I join Han in feeling skeptical. “It might seem that we have a renewed passion for telling each other stories,” he writes. “In fact, however, this storytelling is anything but the return of narration. Instead, it serves to instrumentalize and commercialize narration.”

Because storytelling plays on the emotions, companies have caught onto it as an effective way to sell stuff. Han has a cute term for this style of communication: storyselling. 

In our isolated, information-rich environment, we may be more susceptible to stories’ prerational, almost hypnotizing influence. But while storyselling may entertain, it lacks the ability to involve the audience; to connect them to the past and invite them to continue the story’s trajectory.

We can practice the art, style, and flair of storytelling all we want, but we are running low on the key ingredient: wisdom. And so this focus on storytelling may mask a much greater loss: that of narrative as a healing, community-building force.

When it comes to science communication, here are some strategies I see for crafting narratives with germinative force.

Lean into mystery. “A narrative often has something wondrous and mysterious around its edges,” Han writes. “It is incompatible with information, which represents the opposite of the secret.” 

Scientists, at their core, are explorers of the unknown. And yet when it comes time to communicate science, we expect them to cough up nothing but answers, leaving all that delicious mystery behind. Making space for ambiguity and nuance can convey both the passion and intellectual humility of the communicator.

Offer a vision for the future. Recently, I’ve been asking scientists to speculate about what future might be possible if their project succeeds. Most of them have dodged the question, so I need to work on my phrasing. I’m not asking because I want them to guarantee a particular outcome but to help me understand what they want—because people trust people who want similar things.

Connect to what lasts. The German polymath Novalis refers to poetry as “the most intimate communion of the finite and the infinite.” Information feels immediate because it’s only relevant today. Connecting the everyday to the eternal using the ladder of abstraction is a prime opportunity for narrative synthesis.

Indulge in incidental details. At first blush, details may seem like more information. But pure information is frank, literal, bare, while well chosen incidental details can heighten a narrative. When everything is abstract, details that are specific and concrete can cast a story into startling relief.

Formulate a theory. “In a world saturated with data and information, our narrative capacity withers,” Han writes. “Fewer theories are therefore formulated—no one wants to take the risk of putting forward a theory.” Sounds like a big opportunity for those who dare try.