Story Dynamics – Stories

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for students in US public schools emphasize thinking skills. But they lack something essential that storytellers can help provide. We are in the enviable position of knowing things that teachers are desperate to learn!

This makes storytellers like pickaxe-sellers in a gold rush. We have meaning-related tools that teachers desparately need.

The image of “trying to influence the direction of a rubber duck by blowing on it” has stuck in my mind with regard to storytelling.

After all, stories can lead people to create meanings. Is it possible to influence them toward creating meanings similar to what you have in mind, using only “rubber duck race” techniques?

Of all the books written about storytelling, can you think of a single one that opposes storytelling?

But now we have Christian Salmon’s “Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind,” published in March, 2010.

Salmon doesn’t just hate storytelling. He thinks storytelling is dangerous and disruptive to modern civilization.

That’s the best news I’ve heard in our decades of trying to spread the word about storytelling. Our movement is finally big enough to be someone’s target.

How do we describe different styles of coaching – objectively and clearly? This article sets out four pairs of roles. The way these roles are each assigned specifies important parts about coaching styles. As a bonus, these also help distinguish styles of directing and interviewing.

This is an expanded version – with summary tables – of the article “Four Roles for Storytellers – and For Those Who Help Them“

When we storytellers talk about the power of stories, we usually think of the stories we ourselves tell. To be sure, those stories are important and powerful.

But there’s a trend emerging that features another kind of story: the kind told by ordinary individuals about events or things that have affected their lives. Let’s call those “personal encounter stories.”

Personal encounter stories have some very practical uses. At the same time, they are easily overlooked…

Stories are powerful. They have been used since prehistoric times and have an important role in the modern organization. But most business leaders have been trained not to talk in stories. Instead, they have been trained to talk in bullet points, to “cut to the chase,” to get to the core concept. As a result, [...]

Listening to a radio interview about Haiti earthquake relief, I realized the three qualities of a message that made me take immediate action. Can a knowledge of these qualities improve your ability to use storytelling to motivate?

In storytelling, paradoxes abound.

In every case of paradox, we need to notice not just the effect we intend to create, but also the potentially opposite effect.

Continuously noticing the effects of our storytelling like this is demanding and sometimes unsettling. But it can also help our telling.

This article looks at three paradoxes that concern meaning – and how they might affect our storytelling.

We tend to assume that a story has a single meaning. “I need a story about cooperation,” you might say to a group of storytellers, as though the meaning about cooperation is fully embedded in the story itself.

But is this an accurate assumption? What is the exact relationship between a story and the meaning or meanings that a listener experiences?