Story

There is a moment, before a story exists, when everything is noise. Not the annoying noise, but the primordial one: images arriving without knocking, broken phrases, intuitions that don’t yet know what language to speak. It’s magma. Those who don’t know it mistake it for sterile chaos. Those who have worked with it know it is a living material, and it must be treated with respect, because if you force it too soon, it dies, and if you let it go completely, it overwhelms you.

I have always thought that storytelling is not a creative act in the romantic sense of the term. It is an act of responsibility. To tell means to choose what to show and what to leave out of the frame. It means saying: this matters, this does not. Every story is a political gesture, even when it pretends to be just entertainment. Because it directs the gaze. And directing the gaze is an enormous power, often exercised without realizing it.

I come from cinema, from that dark craft of editing, where you quickly learn an uncomfortable truth: meaning does not lie in the individual images, but in the space between one image and another. That’s where everything is born. You can have magnificent shots, extraordinary actors, memorable dialogues, and still tell nothing if you don’t know where to cut. Editing is the art of removing. Of giving up. Of admitting that not everything you love serves the story.

This lesson has never left me. I have carried it into the way I write, into the way I design, even into the way I think about technological products. Because even a system tells something. It tells what it considers important. It tells how much it trusts the people who use it. It tells whether it was designed to last or just to impress for five minutes. The difference between a product that endures and one that evaporates is often a narrative issue before it is a technical one.

We live in an era that produces stories continuously. Feeds, pitches, presentations, demos. Everything is storytelling, and that’s exactly why very few things truly tell a story. Most repeat dead structures, emptied archetypes, words that once had weight and are now just shells. “Vision,” “disruption,” “community”: terms that need silence to mean something again. I distrust stories that explain too much and those that promise everything. The former do not trust the reader. The latter do not trust reality.

For me, a good story does not convince. It accompanies. It does not take you by the hand to lead you where it wants, but walks alongside you, allowing you to be part of the journey. It is a subtle but decisive difference. It is the difference between propaganda and storytelling. Between a presentation and a film. Between a manual and a well-written technical novel, those that teach you something without making you feel stupid.

Writing, for me, is a process of drying out. Cutting the emphasis. Eliminating the adjective that feels excessive. Letting a sentence breathe. Not because I want to be minimalist, but because I know that an intelligent reader loves to fill in the gaps. Overwriting is a form of distrust. Silence, on the other hand, is an invitation.

When I build narrative worlds, whether for a game, a project, or a text, I always start from a simple and fierce question: what is this really about? Not on the surface. Deep down. What is its obsession? What is its wound? What is the conflict it cannot avoid? Without this answer, everything else is scenery. Beautiful, perhaps, but empty. With this answer, even a bare room can become memorable.

There is a close kinship between storytelling and architecture. Both must endure over time. Both must be traversable. Both must allow those who enter to orient themselves without overly explicit maps. A good story, like a good system, never tells you everything right away. It lets you discover. It rewards you if you go back. It makes you feel that there is always one more level, but does not force you to descend.

Technology has a serious problem with stories: it often uses them to cover voids instead of revealing structures. It tells stories to hide, not to clarify. I do the opposite. I use storytelling to make visible what would otherwise remain abstract: the decisions, the compromises, the sacrifices. To tell why something is the way it is, not just what it does. This applies to a line of code as well as to a narrative universe.

Worldbuilding, when done well, is not accumulation. It is coherence. It is knowing what does not exist in your world with the same precision as knowing what does exist. It is accepting that every world has limits, and that those very limits make it believable. A world without limits is a childish dream. A world with clear limits is a place where you can live, suffer, choose.

Writing stories today is also an act of resistance. Resistance to the speed that always demands the next piece of content. Resistance to the idea that everything must be immediately understandable, immediately monetizable, immediately shareable. I believe in the long term. In stories that return. In those that, when reread after years, change meaning because you have changed. This is the true measure of success.

Here, under this tag, you will find reflections on cinema, writing, editing, imaginary worlds, and storytelling applied to technology. You will not find formulas. You will find attempts. Sometimes successful, sometimes not. Because storytelling is not about proving you are right. It is about exposing yourself. It is saying: this is my reading of the world, tell me yours.

If Systems is the place where stability is sought, Story is the place where meaning is sought. And meaning is never definitive. It shifts, it cracks, it recomposes. But without it, even the most perfect system is just a machine running in vain.

In the end, storytelling is this: preventing movement from becoming just noise. Giving direction to the flow. Accepting that not everyone will reach the end, but knowing that those who do do not arrive by chance. And continuing, stubbornly, to believe that a good story does not solve the world, but makes it, at least for a moment, more livable.