You've probably heard of fields. Gravitational fields. Magnetic fields. Fields are invisible forces that fill space and tell stuff how to move. Like how a magnet pulls iron filings without touching them, or a star pulls a wandering meteor into its orbit. Fields enable action at a distance. They push and pull. They lie in wait until you come under their thrall.
The narrative field is like this, but instead of mass or quantum energy, it pertains to stories. The stories contain positive and negative charges, and these affect the positive and negative associations in the minds of people. Once those people are exposed to a story, the invisible forces of the narrative field shape their behavior.
Let's extend the analogy of the narrative field and see if it breaks down:
Omnipresence - The field exists everywhere in social space, just as temperature exists everywhere in a room -- varying in strength across nodes on the social graph.
Source charges - Stories, symbols, and memes serve as "charges" that generate the field
Force carriers - Media, conversation, and social interactions transmit the field effects, much like air transmits sound; the ocean, waves; and spacetime, light.
Field effects - Observable changes in beliefs, emotions, and behaviors when people enter the field. Narrative fields change behavior in social nodes (ie individuals) just as gravitational fields turn matter in its course.
Like gravity, the narrative field is inescapable. We are all embedded in it, and pulled by it. Some might say we seek it. The attraction goes both ways.
To push the analogy past its breaking point, narrative fields combine the properties of gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Similar to electromagnetism, you have both positive and negative charges. But similar to gravity where mass attracts mass, with narratives like attracts like. While a negative charge repels a negative charge electrically, in the narrative field they attract each other.
Like all fields, the narrative field sets bodies in motion. It prompts action. It does so by putting the positive and negative elements of story in relationship to each other, and to the charges the listener or reader carries within themselves.
A story is an excitation of the narrative field, just like a planet is to gravity. Stories gain power and momentum when there is the gap between what a person wanted (good) and what s/he got (bad). That gap repeats itself from scene to scene, as each attempt at remedy produces some new unexpected. Very often a villain (bad) causes a rift between want and have. And a hero (good) remedies it. Sometimes you have a dichotomy pitting a villain against a hero. Sometimes you have a triad where the villain does bad things to a victim and the hero intervenes.
The victim-villain-hero triad creates a narrative field that tries to align you with the hero and victim against the villain. It gives you a chance to play one of those parts, and most people play victims or heroes by following the gradient of the narrative field. This triad is most effective in politics, where leaders rally voting tribes by building outgroups (villain) and ingroups (heroes, victims).
There are lots of stories. One is a meta-story called the hero's journey:
The hero's journey can overlay the victim-villain-hero triad, and it goes roughly like this: Normal person is forced to leave their small and comfortable life. Maybe bad things are happening to good people because of bad people. Normal person sets off to do something hard to remedy the difference between is and ought. Normal person is transformed by this process into someone wiser and stronger who sees the world in a new light. A boy becomes a warrior; a scrooge becomes a benefactor; a Saul becomes Paul.
The hero's journey is an illustration of the narrative field insofar as it shows how a paradigm shift changes behavior. Hard suffering and a long journey lead to a change of view, a change of life. The hero learns to tell a new story to themself, even as they participate in a bigger story that we consume. The drama is in the transformation of the hero via the change in their narrative perception of their world. While many narratives do their work on us without requiring quite as much, they are particularly effective when we have left our comfortable life behind.
(For still other story types, here’s a list of some basic plot lines from the BBC and Kurt Vonnegut.)
That is why COVID was such a powerful moment. Because so many cities, schools and workplaces were shut down; because so many small and comfortable lives were disrupted, an extraordinary number of people were forced to embark on a journey. They acquired a new charge, and that charge related strongly to other charges in the changing narrative field. Democrats became Republican, agnostics were born again, libertarians longed for totalitarian measures.
When politicians opine that you should "never let a good crisis go to waste", they are recognizing that narrative fields grow stronger when people are set in motion, when a gap opens between what they expected and what they got. Dislocating change forces them to embark on a kind of hero's journey. "Do your own research" is the hero's journey online. Conspiracy theories are the way grownups re-enchant the world, because they are given a story to live that attaches powerful narrative charges to people they think are real.
If you have ever studied the wave forms that make up a field, you know about constructive and destructive interference. When two waves align at peak and trough, a larger wave emerges with greater force. And when they are out of phase, where the peak of one overlaps with the trough of another, they cancel each other out. Narrative fields are like that. Story A can either amplify (constructive) or neutralize (destructive) story B.
An example from 2025: When Jake Tapper launched his book showing that the Biden clan had concealed a sitting president's deepening infirmity, that was one story. It cast Biden and clan as villains. When the news emerged immediately after that Biden had stage 4 prostate cancer that would soon kill him, Biden became the victim and the previous story was neutralized. Our pity submerged our anger; impending death eclipsed the lie. One story ran destructive interference on the other.
Lots of people want to tell stories, and all of us are submersed in them. So what are the elements that bend the narrative field to make a story powerful?
While there is a large subjective element that determines a given story's power, powerful stories have some common elements.
How bad is the bad thing that is happening?
How good is the victim that the bad thing is happening to?
How alienating and unsympathetic is the villain responsible for the bad thing?
How easy is it for us to see that this bad thing could be stopped; ie to step in as hero?
How promising is the promised land the hero takes us to?
And above all, how much does this story agree with the others already inside of us and inside those we look to for social validation?
Because stories are social and collective affairs. It's one thing for a single fan at a baseball game to stand up; it's another for the entire crowd to move the human wave around the stadium. Big stories move like those waves. A few people can trigger them, but everyone feels their power, whether we stand up or not.