The Value Of The Story

"We all have a sense inside ourselves that [a] story does something," Ashlock told the several hundred who attended MES West. "It has power. It is a machine that functions efficiently to create something."

And what it creates is a connection with everyone in a room that "should send you out into the world a little bit differently than when you came in," he said.

The key behind the connection is uniting different pieces into a whole, Ashlock said.

A story "takes fragments of ideas, bits and pieces of meaning and it places them in relationship to one another so that the sum is greater than the parts," he said.