Annette Simmons

  • About
    • About Annette
    • Annette in Action
  • Books
    • Territorial Games
    • A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths
    • The Story Factor
    • Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins
  • Services
  • The Six Kinds of Stories
  • Storytelling 101
    • Blog
    • Q & A
    • Metaphor Maps
  • Clients
  • Contact

April 29, 2020 by Annette Simmons 4 Comments

Storytelling Moral Survival System: part 12 (suggestions)

Make sure your stories always make your own heart sing.

Make sure your stories always make your own heart sing.

Art Your Heart into Storytelling

I worry that people who promise to science the shit out of storytelling haven’t been doing it long enough to understand how linear reasoning can ruin the flow of the creative process. Wise mystics used stories precisely to capture life’s mysteries intact, so anyone who promises to de-mystify storytelling needs to either explain how to re-mystify these paint-by-number stories or stop oversimplifying the process. If you agree, I believe the answer is to always put your heart into every story you find, develop, and tell. Not someone else’s hypothetical heart, but yours, the one that beats inside your chest when you feel inspired and suffers when you see others suffer. Now that storytelling ideas and advice are increasingly translated to suit the goals of technology and digital media, protecting a few primary concepts from being sliced and diced will help storytellers stay in touch with centuries of storytelling wisdom that is impossible to accommodate in linear binary formats. Novelist Haruki Murakami explains it this way: “In many cases, it’s because works that critics see as analytically excellent fail to win the natural empathy of readers.”

Excerpt from Chapter 11, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019)  AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

Filed Under: Annette's Blog Tagged With: Annette Simmons, business storytelling, communication, influence, inspiration, narrative, storytelling, Storytelling Moral Survival System, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

April 24, 2020 by Annette Simmons 3 Comments

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part nine (templates)

Stories that cherry-pick correlations and represent them as causation can be misleading.

Stories that cherry-pick correlations and represent them as causation can be misleading.

A Story Spine

The best storytelling templates arise from the arts. Improv artist Kenn Adams laid out what he called a “story spine” as a mechanism to help children and adults play with improvisational theatre. According to Kenn, the origin of his template arose from his desire to bring arts, creativity, and improv play to more people. The template is a guide for creating characters and a plot that produces a spontaneous play that is as satisfying to the players as the audience.

Pixar Studios uses a similar template to provide structure to illustrate core human conflicts with a story.

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___.
One day ___.
Because of that, ___.

Because of that, ___.
Until finally ___.
(And ever since that day______.)
A beginner storyteller given this template might find fill in the blanks with merely plausible events and characters instead of looking to personal experiences with real people, actual life events, and the sensations of time and space. No template can correct for a storyteller who doesn’t remember to “write what you know.” It’s worth noting that this template is only one part of Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling. Without the other twenty-one rules the template could be limited to creating merely feasible characters negotiating hypothetical situations. Apply the other twenty-one rules, such as “remember that what is most fun to write doesn’t necessarily translate into what is most interesting to an audience,” and the template becomes much more useful.

Story as Cause/Effect

The novelist E.M. Forster famously stated that “the king died then the queen died” was not a plot until adding the detail that the queen died “of grief”. Some have interpreted this to mean that stories set up clear cause/effect relationships. It’s not a bad way to hunt for a plot – love sets you free, pride leads to a fall, etc. – but this method risks oversimplifying relational truths, and correlations. Love usually kicks your butt before it sets you free and pride leads to wins as well as losses. Whenever a storyteller forces a story to suggest an easy cause/effect relationship he runs the risk of omitting complexities that render the story as recognizably realistic. Perhaps the king killed the queen’s lover before he died. Her grief gets a bit more complex and the reader is offered more freedom to come to his or her own conclusions.

There are risks to restricting a story to the format of cause and effect. We create unnecessary problems when we tell a story that suggests a clear single cause and direct effect, when the truth is far more complex. Cause/effect stories can discredit story-supported social norms, like the golden rule. For instance, if a story translates “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” into a cause/effect relationship, it unilaterally suggests treating people fairly automatically causes others to treat you fairly in return. Forcing a story to characterize any human dilemma as an effect of a single cause unwittingly encourages oversimplified solutions that don’t work in real life. Even when simple parables imply cause/effect sequences, the goal is to reinforce reliably accurate correlations—not statistically provable causes and effects. Within storytelling, then, be advised that impressions of cause/effect are usually metaphorical and correlational.

Excerpt from Chapter 11, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019)  AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: business storytelling, communication, correlations, interview techniques narrative, narrative, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

April 23, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part eight (templates)

South Park writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone popularized the application of “And, But, Therefore” as good storytelling advice.

South Park writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone popularized the application of “And, But, Therefore” as good storytelling advice.

“And, But, Therefore”

Contrast is key to the structure of any story. For example, characters with a recognizable internal struggle provide the most engaging points of reference. It is actually easier to visualize a CEO who takes paternity leave, a hero who stutters, or an enemy who loves dogs than it is to imagine a one-dimensional character. Contrast in storytelling reflects the effect of painting red and yellow stripes side by side. The contrast makes both elements more vivid than they are when seen in isolation. The “and/but/therefore” template is a good way to keep contrast lively. In this framework, rather than progressing smoothly through narrative with only “ands,” a storyteller is encouraged to revisit conflict and consequences in the form of “buts” and “therefores.” For instance the character who hears a hotel’s fire alarm and grabs his briefcase and runs outside is less memorable than a character who hears the alarm and runs outside, but then remembers he left his briefcase containing $50,000 and therefore runs back into the smoke-filled lobby.

South Park writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone popularized the application of “And, But, Therefore” as good storytelling advice. This template reminds us to refresh a story’s core contrast by illustrating wins and setbacks that make the core conflict feel more tangible. Parker and Stone suggest “whenever you can replace your ‘ands’ with ‘buts’ or ‘therefores’, it makes for better writing.” These writers know deep in their bones how to keep a cartoon TV series interesting. And this is great storytelling advice as long as we don’t invent random conflicts. Adding random “buts” unrelated to a story’s core conflict dilutes the realism and coherence of a story in ways that shift perceptions away from the true conflict.

Good storytellers come to understand that the “but’s” and “therefores” they seek already exist and only need to be emphasized. Margaret Atwood even demonstrates how “and, but, and therefore” can exist within a single sentence in her book, A Handmaids Tale: “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”  Which I take to mean that you may force me to say you didn’t hurt me, but you did hurt me, therefore I work to hide my hurt as well as work to endure the hurt.

Of course, the whole book goes into much greater detail about the price women pay when we remain silent about injustice. A Handmaids Tale vividly imagines the long-term emotional and physical consequences of silence in a way that makes the long-term consequences of “therefore I stay silent” demonstrably worse than the short-term consequences of the implicit alternative: “therefore I speak up.” Atwood affirms that every event and character in A Handmaid’s Tale was based on real people and real events. “If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened.” Storytellers like Atwood understand that the best way to ensure a narrative feels real is to base it on reality, and reality is full of contrasts.

Excerpt from Chapter 11, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019)  AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

Filed Under: Stories Help, Uncategorized Tagged With: And, Annette Simmons, business storytelling, But, communication, leadership, narrative, storytelling, The Story Factor, Therefore, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

April 21, 2020 by Annette Simmons 2 Comments

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part six

Photo by cjphoto.com

Photo by cjphoto.com

Defining Story as a Significant Emotional Experience

My current teaching definition of story is:

“the narration of a significant emotional experience that feels meaningful to both teller and listener.”

Teaching non-professional storytellers helped me realize that it is much easier for them to find a great story if I ask them to think about a significant emotional experience from real life or existing literary and film stories. I never suggest a beginner try to construct a story from scratch. The best storytelling advice in the world will not help you describe something you have never experienced. Coming from the arts, I favor Tolstoy’s perspective that the role of any art (including story) is to communicate emotion. He wrote that art begins when a person, “with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it with certain external signs.” (By external signs he means dance, images, and other arts, including storytelling.) I strongly believe the stories that resonate most with others always reflect experiences of truth and beauty that connect us to what Tolstoy calls the “oneness of life’s joys and sorrows.” In War and Peace, for instance, Tolstoy showcases the kind of extreme experiences that change people forever and how love changes the trajectory of our lives.

Once people learn to mine genuine memories of significant emotional experiences, they learn to recognize stories that ring true and represent the way life actually works, they learn how to avoid inventing stories that misrepresent or mislead. This isn’t new advice. This is the same advice that suggests writers write what they know. Creative storytellers may invent fantastical worlds to illustrate core truths but they don’t try to invent new core truths out of thin air. Unfortunately, some of the popular templates for storytelling don’t always prioritize this.

Excerpt from Chapter 11, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019)  AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

Filed Under: Stories Help, Uncategorized Tagged With: Annette Simmons, business storytelling, communication, definition of storytelling, leadership, significant emotional experience, The Story Factor, true stories, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

April 20, 2020 by Annette Simmons Leave a Comment

Storytelling Moral Survival System: Part five

Apple

Story Is Still the Foundation of Culture and Context

If formulas and machine learning could solve all of our problems, we wouldn’t need stories. Like every religion, technology delivers dogma and formulas that promise more clarity than they can deliver. Religions recruit metaphor and storytelling to make sense of ambiguities that dogma can’t condense. Technological dogma—definitions, templates, and formulas based on accuracy and consistency can’t duplicate the way moral emotions encourage us to toggle back and forth between small circle goals and big circle needs. That’s why now, just as technology fails to deliver the panacea of solutions it once promised, we discover what is missing—the emotional solidarity needed to implement big circle solutions to global problems. A decrease in the number of stories that drive emotional urges to identify when, where, and why to sacrifice selfish goals in favor of a collective goals means fewer people value the sensory cues moral emotions deliver.

From a cultural point of view, any definition of story must reflect the role stories play in creating and sustaining shared assumptions about appropriate behaviors, fair play, and important values. These are the stories that guide continuous re-discoveries of the “Big T” Truths that transcend the limitations of rational understanding. Economic logic alone will not keep golden rules of spiritual generosity alive. To rise above our selfish instincts we cultivate stories that build faith that doing good is it’s own reward. These stories reinforce good behavior so a community can maintain the fragile but functional faith that goodwill, good actions, and good intentions are worth the minor sacrifices they require. Slack off on the stories that keep these promises/morals alive, and faith begins to die.

Stories that clarify and reinforce habits of imagining long term collective benefits whenever we make important decisions build a culture with strong emotional instincts for doing good. One of my mentors, Joseph Sobol, director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at University of South Wales, recently shared his current working definition of story as:

“The representation and evaluation of consequential actions by sentient agents in imagined worlds.”

For those of us who want to reinforce cultural contexts that support moral behaviors, Sobol’s definition helps us pay attention to story elements that are vital. Setting out to represent “sentient agents” discourages flat emotionless characters. Working to simulate “consequential actions” ensures a storyteller can include contradictory aspects of sequential events. For instance, Little Red Riding Hood is more than a children’s story. It illustrates the point at which a seeming virtue (bravery) can lead to trusting wolves who only pretend to be kind. Sobol’s definition also includes a vital reminder that every story’s end goal is only fully realized within the imagination of our listeners. For culture keepers, Sobol’s definition helps us remember that new media, like old media, either does or does not reinforce imagined futures that correlate individual sacrifices with cultural values and payoffs.

Excerpt from Chapter 11, 3rd ed. of The Story Factor (2019)  AUDIBLE VERSION HERE

Filed Under: Big T Truths, Stories Help, Uncategorized Tagged With: Annette Simmons, business storytelling, Collective, communication, consequences, Definition of story, Golden Rule, Joseph Sobol, moral storytelling, narrative, storytelling, Storytelling Moral Survival System, The Story Factor, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Next Page »

Storytelling 101

Ray, Rosa, Ted and me sharing dinner and stories.

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 8 of 8

May 14, 2020 8:43 am

  We need a Magic School for Storytellers Thirty years before J. K. Rowling created Harry Potter, Ursula Le Guin’s... Read more →

Posted in: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths
BIg T Truths make stories come alive.

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 7 of 8

May 13, 2020 7:37 am

  Truth in Storytelling When I wrote the first edition of The Story Factor twenty years ago, I began with the... Read more →

Posted in: Uncategorized
oz

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 6 of 8

May 12, 2020 6:48 am

The Moral Dilemmas of a Lion, a Scarecrow, and a Tin Man Frank Baum’s original introduction to The Wizard of... Read more →

Posted in: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths
We need trust to survive and thrive.

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – part 5 of 8

May 11, 2020 8:38 am

  Blueprints for Building Trust Learning to drive was fun until I hit the mailbox. I burst into tears, blaming... Read more →

Posted in: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths
"Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything."

Stories with a Moral Blueprint – Part 4 of 8

May 8, 2020 8:13 am

  Brand Stories: Trust Based on Trustworthy Behaviors Nike has employed corporate storytellers since the 1990s. Their decision to illustrate... Read more →

Posted in: Annette's Blog, Big T Truths

Subscribe to Annette's Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Like us on Facebook:

Like us on Facebook:

Contact Us

Group Process Consulting, LLC
phone: 318.861.9220
email: annette@annettesimmons.com
facebook: www.facebook.com/thestoryfactor

Group Process Consulting, LLC

Group Process Consulting provides keynotes, workshops and personal coaching to CEOs, senior executives, sales staff, fund-raisers – anyone who wants to use stories to motivate groups and/or individuals, via personal interactions or personally delivered presentations.

DIsclaimer, Safe Harbor & IP Notice

click here for details.
© Copyright 2016, Group Process Consulting, All Rights Reserved.
Based on the ·Executive Pro Theme/Genesis Framework by StudioPress · Built using WordPress · Log in