Annette Simmons

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The Secret of Storytelling: Take a bite

Apple

Let’s pretend I’m Eve and you are Adam. Don’t worry about what we are or aren’t wearing. So in my hand is this apple, and with it the secret to finding good stories. All yours, free of charge.  But, before you take a bite I have to warn you; there is a big downside. This apple is from the tree of knowledge (yep, that one) and each bite can be as difficult as it is joyful. Tiny bites are okay, but tiny bites mean tiny difficulties and tiny joys.

As a general rule, I harbor deep suspicions against anyone who says they have “the answer” to anything. Storytelling took off around the same time my book The Story Factor was published. Probably a coincidence. I wasn’t the only exploding with ideas at the Jonesborough storytelling festival in 1994. In 1998 and 1999 I wasn’t the only one running experiments and writing about stories. But there wasn’t a big crowd, either.  I felt complete freedom to explore storytelling without restraint and I had more than enough arrogance to assume I understood what I thought I understood. I mainly sought advice from traditional storytellers although my questions came from psychology, group dynamics, and teaching self-awareness workshops.

It was a lot of work…but I felt pure joy writing about storytelling (except for the editing part, editing sucks). Back then stories were allowed to go anywhere and come from anywhere. It felt like exploring a natural wilderness of surprises. There was no internet to harsh my buzz with numbered lists and so I mapped what felt natural to map, connecting my own dots, for my own reasons: I had a shiny messiah complex and I was out to save the world – share storytelling for good, not evil, and all that.

Anyway, it’s 20 years later and you can’t swing a dead cat in a coffee shop without hitting a storyteller. The neighborhood looks a lot different than it did. I see the equivalent of fancy cars and big malls, secret clubs and Disney story wonderlands with hefty entry fees. My friends call it the “storytelling industrial complex.” Do any of them have “the answer?”

Honestly? Some do. I still like my six stories and I’ve felt “this is it! several times since then. But after twenty years, the “this is it!” moments run together. So…I needed one big thing, something pivotal, basic, primitive, and organic to help organize my thoughts and zero in on really good stories.

It’s not surprising I found my new “unifying theory of story” listening to Joseph Campbell. I was two blocks from my house walking Lucy, when through my earbuds I heard Joseph Campbell tell Bill Moyers that he had revised his opinion that the purpose of myth was to create meaning. His tone got lively as he explained that maybe creation stories prompted it, but in his revised opinion the purpose of myth is to chart what it is to “feel truly alive.”

Who cares about a love story if it doesnt make you feel more alive? Horror stories aren’t interesting unless they remind us how precious life is or validate that you are not alone in your fear, a good mystery offers shared wonder that produces a visceral and physiological change in heart rate, etc.  I now think this is the common denominator in all good stories.  They remind us we are alive.

The secret to great storytelling is: does this story make me/us feel more alive? It is as simple and as difficult as that. This aliveness seems to happen when opposites touch: life/death, good/evil, rich/poor, dangerous/safe, dark grey/light grey, love/emptiness, beauty/ugliness and the rest. So contrast is key to creating a narrative frame, but there is a big difference between a story that should work and one that does.

Joseph Campbell spoke of the knights on their quest for the Holy Grail “If a path exists in the forest, don’t follow it, for though it took someone else to the Grail, it will not take you there, because it is not your path.”

My advice? I recommend you go take a big juicy bite out of a real apple. Let the juice run down your chin, look at the red, green, brown and white of it and think about what else makes you feel truly alive. Then look for stories that make you feel like that: more alive. When you find it, that’s a good story.

 

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Can we “science the shit” out of storytelling?

I loved the movie The Martian. It’s based on Andy Weir’s debut novel “The Martian” I read the book first. Andy described it as basically Robinson Crusoe on Mars without the monkey. So I got curious about his writing process.  He LOVES science, so did he use storytelling science to create this story?

I listened to several interviews.  He loved science fiction- still does.  Andy learned about space travel because he loves space travel.  He read and consumed every documentary he could find.  He is such a cheerful science nerd his interviews are charming to watch. He says he made it up the story as he went along.  Yes, he had planned the final scene, but when he got there “it couldn’t happen,” so he made up a new one.

His day job was coding software, writing was no more than a hobby. He published web comics, short stories and the first copies of The Martian for free on his own website. He wrote one chapter at a time until it was a book (technically his third) putting it on Amazon, more to make it easy to download (at the minimum: 99 cents) than to make money on it. Sales attracted a publisher to knock on his door, not the other way around.  He did nothing to promote it. He’d already taken a couple of years off to be a writer and considered it a failure, so he was back to treating it as a hobby.

He refers to the plot as “man vs nature, where nature gets the first punch” or so he knows a lot about storytelling. He probably studied storytelling as much as he studied science during his two years being a writer.  But the lead character ,Mark Watney didn’t come out of some algorithm, Mark is an idealized version of Andy – with Andy’s passion, enthusiasm, and a cheerful smart ass personality.  The character feels real, because he’s based on a real person.  Story arises from origins (like chemical elements) that can’t be science-ed up from scratch.  They exist already. The elements: human, unpredictable, and personal emotional experiences we feel compelled to share exist already.  Science can tell us how to mix them for particular effects, but not how to make them from scratch.

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Storytelling as dialogue: the back and forth of shared context

Uri Hasson uses fMRI scans to show how storyteller patterns of brain activity are significantly duplicated in the mind of a story listener.  But of more interest to me, he pinpoints the yawning gap between lab research and real life near the end of his talk (after 10:00)

Does the neural coupling magic happen everytime you tell a good story?

No. No, it doesn’t.

This neural coupling only happens if teller and listener share the same context or “have common ground.”  I don’t think analyzing your audience is the same as feeling solidarity with your audience.  The stories that flow from solidarity enable much deeper connections – like a dance the storyteller both leads and follows.  Placing yourself firmly in an empathetic relationship with those you wish to influence may inspire higher levels of engagement, too.

Traditional storytellers often go back and forth with their audience until they find a shared context. They know it will be there – humans are humans.   Once they find it, their stories flow along the shared context to deliver a kind of “you are not alone” feeling as well the emotional ride of the journey they narrate.

I found another interesting observation about the back and forth relationship between teller and listener in the online version of his research article:

“We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding.”

Enabling an audience to anticipate what’s going to happen next may be another benefit of starting out from a shared context.  Traditional storytellers often give their audience a chance to jump ahead – narrating slowly enough to let their audience experience the delight of getting there first and guessing right.

Why not add a bit of back and forth with your audience to negotiate a shared context before telling a story? It will put you at ease and may reveal gaps in understanding before they cause a problem.

 

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The cost of incivility, territorial games, and trump

A person exposed to incivility (not a victim, just an observer) is 3 times less likely to help others in lab experiments.  His willingness to share resources drops by 50%  Worse, those who experience incivility first hand…

I didn’t call it incivility back in 1995, but the behaviors workers described as I gathered stories that narrated events behind organizational metaphors like “turf war,” “silo,” “back-stabber,” “pissing contest,” etc. sound awfully familiar.  This research described ten “territorial games” that seem to be correlated with “incivility.” If so, I think it’s worth talking about territorial games again because how we characterize a problem completely alters the solutions we invent.

If we call it incivility then the “cure” might sound like individual training to increase mindfulness and self control. All good, but I’m concerned that most people are in very short supply of the additional willpower necessary.  Not to mention the least civil do not seem interested in this kind of training.

If we look at the behaviors as a function of group norms, then the “cure” is to change the norms.  My approach is to provide a map of how groups end up with “default norms” then help the group collectively reflect and choose new norms by design rather than default.  Groups that share personal stories get there faster. It’s that psychological safety thing.

But what if the behaviors represent a sweeping cultural response to changes in the emotional tone of daily communications (perhaps the daily use of fear/uncertainty/threat stories to grab attention) then we have an epidemic on our hands. An epidemic that makes Trump’s incivility look “smart,” that makes people want to use the same tactics to protect themselves, and worse tells a story that civility is weakness even subterfuge.

No matter what we call these fear-based behaviors lets talk more about how we can make a difference, connect people back to themselves and each other.