Story Dynamics - Stories » Meaning and Stories

A Huge Opportunity For Storytellers

Doug Lipman — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 01:51:42 +0000

1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

2) MY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU: A NEW, FREE NEWSLETTER

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1) A HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR STORYTELLERS

We face a significant opportunity

In the U.S. public schools, 48 states have now adopted the “Common Core State Standards” for what students should learn.

This is an enormous development for teachers of children in kindergarten through high school.

The near-universal adoption of these standards is so new that teachers are scrambling to adapt their teaching to them. Even some of the largest textbook publishers have not yet provided full sets of materials.

As a result, these standards represent, I believe, a significant opportunity for storytellers.

“Standards? Storytellers Don’t Do Standards!”

For those of us who, like Einstein, cherish imagination above knowledge, trends toward standardized curriculum don’t necessarily sound inviting.

We are reminded of the French school administrator of years past who famously bragged, we are told, that he could look at his watch and know what every student in France was studying at that moment.

Where is there room in such a system, we might say, for individual learning styles? Individual interests? Divergent thinking?

Where is there room for education as an exciting adventure? For the thrill of discovery? For any form of enjoyment at all?

Not As Bad As I Feared…

Once I looked at these standards, though (and talked to the forward-looking educator/storyteller Lynne Burns about them), I saw them in a more hopeful light.

First, the creators of these standards have given some thought to what skills they think high school graduates need, to succeed in college and their careers. Indeed, each grade-level standard refers to a long-term “College and Career Readiness” standard.

This means that, unlike some other systems, the work at each grade level builds in a meaningful way on the work at previous levels – and helps prepare the student for the next levels.

Second, these standards don’t seem to lend themselves to over-reliance on uncomprehending memorization.

The vast majority, in fact, seem to focus on thinking skills. They are dominated by words and phrases like “analyze,” “compare and contrast,” “explain the relationships between…,” etc.

But Wait: There’s Another Problem

If the good news is that these standards seem to challenge students to do more than memorize, that merely highlights an ongoing problem: from the students’ point of view, why would they want to exert the effort? What will motivate them to rise to the challenge?

Imagine a student who is faced with a task like this, for example:

Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details.

I readily imagine the student thinking, “What does that have to do with my life? Why would I care about that?”

The more a curriculum requires mental exertion (learning to analyze requires more effort than simple memorization, for example), the more important it becomes to answer the students’ questions about “Why?”

This is a huge potential problem inherent in all standards-driven education: the student might be treated like a thinking machine, expected to perform tasks that seem unconnected to the student’s universal human motivations, such as:

What do I want to accomplish? How can I accomplish it?
Who is on this journey with me? How do we fit into each others’ lives?

In other words, these standards don’t, by themselves, make curriculum meaningful to the student.

Stories and Connection

Who could help humanize such a curriculum?

Needed: connection, meaning, involvement

Such helpers would need to be experts in:

Connecting to human motivations;
Putting problems in understandable contexts; and
Engaging people both intellectually and emotionally.

Sound familiar?

If anyone knows about connecting to human motivations and emotions, it’s storytellers. After all, such meaning-building is the essence of what stories do.

Re-wording E.M. Forster’s famous dictum, I would say:

“’The king died and then the queen died’” is a series of unconnected events. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a story.”

In other words, a story differs from a recital of facts in that a story creates causal connections between the facts. A story is really the most basic way of giving meaning to events, of interpreting people’s motivations and personalities.

Such interpretation is essential both to story and to human life.

Specialists in Meaning

Whenever you need to create personal involvement in an otherwise impersonal context, the premier discipline to call upon is storytelling.

Said another way, the missing element in the Common Core State Standards is EXACTLY what storytellers have, since time beyond memory, always known how to provide.

We specialize in helping people create meaning and become involved.

Like a shovel-store in a gold rush, we have what people need

How Often Does This Happen?

Two factors are therefore converging. First, teachers are desperate for help in this time of change.

Second, storytellers have the exact skills that educators need.

We are like a long-established shovel store that just happens to be near a new gold rush. Suddenly, everybody needs what we offer!

A convergence like that comes once in a long, long while.

So How Do We Help?

I see three principal ways that storytellers can help well-meaning teachers carry out a Core Standards based curriculum, so that students become engaged. We can do, or assist teachers in doing, the following:

Perform stories;
Help students learn, create, and tell their own stories;
Teach storytelling games.

In a future article, I’ll talk about the contributions that each of these methods can make.

In the meantime, read on for a new, free resource for the least familiar of the three: Story Games.

2) MY HOLIDAY GIFT TO YOU: A NEW, FREE NEWSLETTER

Storytelling is a part of every human culture; so are games.

Storytelling games can help teach subjects, enjoyably

So it’s natural that people in many cultures have created games that involve stories.

For me, a storytelling game is any game that involves:

Telling a story;
Telling part of a story; or
Using a skill that’s used in storytelling.

It turns out that people have created such games, for entertainment purposes, for generations.

Many such games help the beginning storyteller develop a particular storytelling skill. Other games focus on particular kinds of content that are of interest to teachers – and that apply to educational standards.

For example, there are storytelling games that require the use of words or phrases that can have two or more meanings. In such games, the spotlight of attention is easily and entertainingly focused on homonyms and metaphors.

To learn more about storytelling games every month, just subscribe – at no charge – to my new, free Storytelling Games newsletter.

In the newsletter, you’ll get games, variations on games, hints on teaching games, and suggestions of Common Core Standards that particular games help develop.

In time, I’ll have a website devoted to storytelling games. For now, you can subscribe by double-clicking this link:

http://www.storydynamics.com/games.newsletter

Questions or problems? Please use my contact form: http://www.storydynamics.com/contact

This newsletter is a gift from me to the storytelling (and education) communities. Happy Holidays! Enjoy!

Subscribe to the Storytelling Games Newsletter (free)

Is Storytelling Like a Rubber Duck Race?

Doug Lipman — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:57:40 +0000

Soon after moving to my new town (Marshfield, Massachusetts) I stopped by the local high school. There I saw a promotional table with a sign that said, “Duck Derby.”

The Duck Derby table caught my attention, but it led me to think about storytelling...

I asked the friendly-looking woman behind the table, “What’s a Duck Derby?”

She said, “Once a year, we throw rubber ducks into the river and let them race downstream. The sponsors of the winning ducks get prizes. The proceeds benefit Habitat for Humanity.”

Thinking strategically, I said, “Can I help my duck along?”

She replied, “No. You can’t touch it, even if it gets stuck in the reeds.” She smiled. “The Duck Derby’s not meant to be too serious.”

In my storyteller’s brain, which imagines such things without my conscious volition, I saw eager “duck sponsors” along the river bank, trying to control their rubber ducks without touching them. I pictured dozens of business people on their knees, blowing into long straws aimed at their ducks.

I smiled to myself.

“That’s the spirit,” said the woman at the table.

Storytelling As Rubber Duck Racing?

For some reason, 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. Such meanings are powerful, because listeners are committed to meanings that they create for themselves.

Not all tellers, though, are satisfied with allowing each listener a different meaning. Applied storytellers like teachers, clergy, salespeople, and managers often want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want two things at once:

1. The listener’s commitment to the meaning that the listener has given to the story;
2. The assurance that the listener’s meaning is the same one the teller has in mind.

Some tellers would maintain that such expectations are like saying, “You can have whatever you want – as long as you want what I feel like giving you.”

Such tellers might go on to say: If you intend for people to create their own personal meanings about a story, you need to “throw” the story into the river of the listener’s consciousness – and then leave it alone. If you “touch it” by telling the listener what the story means, the story runs the danger of never making it to the listener’s mental “finish line.”

Are There Other Ways?

If you could steer your duck, you could avoid these pesky traffic jams!

The “throw it in and leave it to work” point of view is valid much of the time, especially in performance settings.

But what if there were ways to “blow on” the story’s meaning without “touching” it? What if there were ways to influence the listener’s meaning-creation process without the listener crying, “Foul!” and going home before the race is over?

Such ways exist, I believe. Most are, individually, as subtle as the influence of one straw blowing on a rubber duck from a yard away. But many straws blowing at once can, indeed, change the duck’s course.

What Varied Meanings You Have, Grandma!

Consider the folktale, “Little Red Riding Hood.” Here are a few of the many meanings that have been attributed to the tale:

- The danger to children posed by strangers.
- The perils of sexual awakening for young women.
- How women can pretend innocence as part of seduction.
- How humans of any age can be “reborn” with more wisdom after a foolish act.

"Good day to you, Little Red Cap!"

How might you tell the story, in order to influence the listener’s interpretation of the girl’s actions – without coarsely telling the listener what to think? A simple method is to shape the characters’ non-verbal communication. Here is the girl’s simple first exchange with the wolf in the Grimm’s version:

[Wolf] “Good day to you, Little Red Cap.”

[Little Red Cap] “Thank you, wolf.”

If your intended meaning is “stranger danger,” you might give the wolf a predatory posture and an evil-sounding voice as he speaks these commonplace words. Red Riding Hood, on the other hand, might respond with the posture and mannerisms of a child at play, along with an innocent tone of voice.

But if your meaning is “how women can pretend innocence…,” on the other hand, the Wolf may stand as a humble servant and sound as benevolent as actor Morgan Freeman. For her part, Red Riding Hood might sound and act mature and seductive.

Dozens of Subtle Methods?

The use of body language and tone of voice are fairly obvious ways to “blow through the straw.” Less obvious ways include color clues.

Charles Perrault, for instance, explicitly interpreted his 1697 “Little Red Riding Hood” as about the dangers of “charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet” men who pursue young women “at home and in the streets.” He was also the first to associate the girl in his story with red-colored clothing. (In European cultures, red is often associated with blood and with sexuality, especially with menstruation and a woman’s first experience of intercourse.)

If you wanted to emphasize the danger to the innocent girl, on the other hand, you might choose to talk about her white cheeks or dress – and the wolf’s dark colors, which, in Western cultures, tend to be associated with the sinister.

There are dozens of such tools for “blowing” a listener’s attention in one direction or another. They range from obvious to extremely subtle. They can be delivered via the words of the narrator, the words of a character, and even the words of the master of ceremonies. They can alter the story itself or just the context in which the story is told.

And the Meaning of This Essay Is…

The moral of this essay applies especially to stories told in applied situations, when it’s also important that listeners adopt the teller’s attitude as their own:

“Don’t pick up the duck when simply blowing on it would do.”

When you take this advice, your stories for teaching or persuading won’t be so often “disqualified” in the minds of your listeners.

To be sure, the development of subtle storytelling tools requires some extra investment of time and thought. But the reward is great. In the end, you’ll more often cross the finish line. And both you and your listeners will feel that the race was fairly run.

The Seven Differences Between Stories and Concepts

Doug Lipman — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:39:40 +0000

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, stories can appear to leaders in organizations as, at best, needlessly verbose and time-consuming and, at worst, artsy and utterly unbusinesslike. So how can we interest business leaders in expanding their communication options?
I have found that one way to bridge the gulf between their familiar conceptual communication and storytelling is to explain in conceptual terms what stories are and how they work. In other words, I try to translate the workings of story into the “native language” of the business world: the linear, analytic language of the conceptual.
To do so, I describe seven differences between story communication, on the one hand, and conceptual talk, on the other. What follows is a version of a talk I give to business and non-profit groups.
I begin with my version of a true story:
France. The 1950′s. A poet, Jacques Prevért, was walking down the street. On the pavement, he saw a man sitting on a blanket. In front of the man was a hat with a few coins in it. Propped up next to him was a cardboard sign: “Blind. No pension. Please give.”
The poet said, “How is it going for you?”
“Not well. People are stingy. They rush by without stopping.”
“Maybe I can help,” the poet said. “May I change your sign?”
“Change it?” The beggar hesitated. “Well, write on the back. I can always turn it over again.”
The beggar heard the scratching of the poet’s pen on the cardboard sign.
A few days later, the poet returned. He said, “How is it going now?”
“Fantastic! People have become so much more generous. I have to empty my hat three times every day!”
“I am so glad. Well, good luck to you.’ The poet turned to leave.
“Wait,” said the beggar. “What did you write on my sign?”
The poet paused. “I wrote something very simple,” he said. “I wrote, ‘Spring is coming, but I will not see it.’”∗
One value of a story is that it can transform the purely informative into an experience that can change a listener’s point of view. The beggar’s original sign had all the necessary information and even a “call to action.” But the poet’s version caused the passersby to participate in the beggar’s point of view. Only then were they motivated to act.
THE CENTRAL FACT OF STORYTELLING
In this article, I will explain seven characteristics of story communication that distinguish it from your customary, conceptual communication and contribute to its particular form of effectiveness. These characteristics will also help you understand when not to tell a story.
But before I can begin, I ask you, the reader of this article, to close your eyes for a moment and answer a question about your experience of the above story: In your mind, what color were the clothes the beggar was wearing?
It’s okay if you don’t have an answer. But please notice whether you do. And if you didn’t imagine the color of the beggar’s clothes, how was he sitting? Or what was the color of the blanket he was sitting on? Or were there buildings on the street around him? (If so, how tall? If not, what was there?)
Almost everyone fills in one or more such details, spontaneously and effortlessly, in the course of listening to the story. That means that they actively create images in their minds.
By the way, your images may not have been visual. Did you hear sounds of the streets? Did you imagine the sound of the beggar’s voice? Or the poet’s? Did you imagine the sound of the pen scratching? These are auditory images. But you may have also have created tactile images (the cardboard sign in the poet’s hand) or smells, or kinesthetic feelings (the poet bending over to talk, or the beggar’s gut wrenched with anger or hopelessness). In other words, you may have created images in various sensory modes.
All seven of the following differences between story talk and conceptual talk stem from this central fact that, in response to story talk, listeners create images based on their own experiences and predilections. The unique powers of storytelling do not stem directly from what the story-teller does, but rather from what the story-listener does: create mental images.
DIFFERENCE #1: MODE OF LISTENING
When you listen to a story, you actively create images. You are in creation mode.
When you listen to conceptual talk, on the other hand, you are in evaluation mode. You are comparing and contrasting what someone else says to what you already know.
These two modes, it turns out, put people in different frames of mind. In one psychological experiment, for example, three groups of people were given five one-dollar bills and a choice of how many of them to contribute to a worthy cause. Before being asked to give some of their money, one group was given a conceptual task, another was given no task, and the third was given a task that involved calling up images.
Which group gave the fewest dollars? Those who had been put in conceptual mode. Which gave the most? Those in image mode.
So putting people in creation mode can be useful, not just for getting them to participate imaginatively but also for changing their attitude toward you and what you are describing.
DIFFERENCE #2: ESSENCE
The essence of a story is a concrete, unique event: in one place, at one moment, one character makes one action. For example, in a French street, one day a poet speaks to a beggar.
The essence of concepts, on the other hand, is abstraction. The power of concepts comes from things that apply to many situations, not just one.
Stories are closer to experience. After all, we only live one moment at a time. But concepts express what applies to many experiences.
The concrete is not better than the abstract (and vice versa). Stories and concepts are two different ways of thinking and communicating. Each one of them is like a leg. It can support you. You can move around on either one. But you move much more effortlessly and efficiently when you alternate gracefully between them.
DIFFERENCE #3: CAUSES AND EFFECTS
When I said at the start of this article, “Stories are powerful,” I was speaking conceptually. This abstract concept, though, may possibly have invoked in your mind a particular time when you experienced the power of stories. In other words, concepts are abstract in nature but may sometimes cause you to think of a specific experience.
Conversely, stories are specific but may cause you to form an abstract conclusion. You may hear the beggar-poet interaction and then say, “Yes, there are times when it makes sense to make a situation personal for the public so they can relate to it more.” That’s a concept that you may have created from the example of the beggar.
Therefore, if you want people to reach a conclusion (such as “This is an excellent product and will be a good value for my company”) the best way may not be to simply state it. Why? Because the statement tends to put them in evaluation mode. They may immediately jump to “Well, maybe it’s not. Prove it!” If this happens, they will have put their minds in opposition to the very conclusion you want them to reach.
But if you tell a concrete story, your listeners will often create their own abstract conclusion from it. If you tell the story of your product (or of someone who has used it), for example, they may conclude, “This sounds excellent. I can see our company getting good value from it.”
We tend to assume that the most effective way to get people to accept a concept is to simply state it. But it is often more efficient to tell a story that will cause them to formulate the concept themselves. After all, the conclusion that they create is the one they will act on most readily.
DIFFERENCE #4: OWNER OF THE MEANING
Since story-listeners create images and then endow them with meanings, they feel a form of ownership of the meanings that they create in response to a story. Therefore we can say that, in story communication, the listener is the owner of the meaning.
But when you hear a concept, it belongs to the one saying it. Initially, you evaluate the speaker’s meaning. Later, you may accept it as your own, but at the moment of communication it still belongs to the person expressing it. In other words, in conceptual communication, the speaker owns the meaning.
This has enormous impact when it comes to the question of buy-in and of commitment to a course of action. People tend to remember and act on their own ideas, not on yours. Therefore, if you want people to act on your idea, help them make it their own. One way is by telling them a story and then trusting them to interpret it.
DIFFERENCE #5: PRECISION OF MEANING
When a concept is communicated well, the meaning is well shared. No short sentence can transmit a complex meaning exactly, but if you know what I mean by “stories” and by “powerful,” then the sentence “stories are powerful” is likely to be understood with a relatively high precision—that is, with a fairly narrow range of interpretations of meaning, among the people listening.
But with stories, the precision is small. That is, the range of meanings received is relatively wide. In other words, the meanings are diverse rather than shared.
This means that if you need instantaneous, shared meaning, you should not tell a story! For example, if your message is, “The bus is on fire. Get off now!” then you should not begin, “One day, long ago….”
But later, when the bus fire is out, when everyone has safely reached the destination, and when you are helping people figure out how, in the future, they could each help prevent a future fire, then you can create individual buy-in by telling the story of how the fire happened.
The trade-off for increased commitment (or participation or creativity) from people is almost always decreased control of exactly what people do. Conversely, increased control usually reduces things like commitment. In every encounter, use a mix of the two forms of communication to create the best balance between shared meaning and listener buy-in.
DIFFERENCE #6: SCOPE OF THE MEANING
Conceptual communication gives the listener the literal meaning of the concepts. The conceptual statement, “Our highest value is customer service,” tells you the relationship the speaker is positing between our company and customer service. But it doesn’t give you an experiential context in which to interpret that relationship. That’s why I say that concepts convey a literal (as opposed to contextual) scope for a meaning.
Stories, though, are not removed from experience. By describing actual or imagined experience, they include a context in which concepts are turned into actions. So, when new Nieman Marcus employees hear as part of their training the story of the clerk who gave a complete refund—without a receipt—for a set of tires, the employees get a more specific idea of what is meant by valuing customer service above all. And when they are told further that Nieman Marcus never sold tires, they have an example that suggests an even broader interpretation of what they might be expected to do in order to act on the high value attached to customer service.
Both forms of communication give benefits here: the pure concept gives maximum portability of an idea, but at the cost of understanding how to apply it. The story, on the other hand, makes it easier to know how to apply a concept in a real-life situation, but may limit the concept to what is directly implied in the example. To be most effective, flexibly combine the two forms of communication!
DIFFERENCE #7: EMOTIONAL RESPONSES
We can respond emotionally to concepts. If you work for me and I say, “Our profits are down 50% and we have to do layoffs,” you are likely to care about that! Nonetheless, any emotional response to concepts is primarily “reactive”: listeners have feelings in reaction to a fact or idea.
In stories, though, you follow the point of view of a character through one or more actions. In the beggar-poet story, you perceive the world alternately from the poet’s point of view and from the beggar’s. And so your emotional reaction is empathic: You see, hear, and feel the world as that character does.
In your business or other organization, when you need people to change how they view and do things, you need them to have a new perspective, an altered way of viewing the world. The only way to get someone to accept a new perspective is to give them a new experience—either a real experience or, in the case of stories, a virtual, imaginative experience that nonetheless expands their repertory of points of view.
We have learned from brain studies that emotion not only motivates action but actually enables reasoning. As a result, trying to motivate and explain without also creating empathy is a losing battle. And stories are a key tool for creating empathic emotional reactions.
NOW YOU CAN CHOOSE
Each of these seven differences between stories and concepts (summarized in Table 1) suggests times when each form of communication is more appropriate. When you understand what each mode of communication offers, you can choose, at each moment, which to employ. Skillful business leaders have a command of both modes. They are also adept at flexibly alternating between the two to achieve their business goals.
How about you? Is your beggar’s sign factually accurate but unmotivating? Are you content to walk on only one leg?

Table 1: Summary of the Seven Differences

Stories Concepts
1. Mode of Listening Creation Evaluation
2. Essence Unique event:
• one moment,
• one character,
• one place,
• one action Abstract commonalities:
what many events (etc.) have in common
3. Causes & Effects The specific
which may lead to the general The general
which may evoke the particular
4. Owner of Meaning The Listener The Speaker
5. Precision of Meaning Diverse
(wider range) Shared
(narrower range)
6. Scope of Meaning Contextual Literal (“Textual”)
7. Emotional Responses Empathic Reactive

Three Paradoxes of Story Meaning

Doug Lipman — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:35:23 +0000

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.

Let’s look at three paradoxes that concern meaning.

Story vs. Plot

Do you know E.M.Forster’s famous distinction between story (what happened) and plot (why it happened)? He said,

“The king died and then the queen died” is a
story. “The king died and then the queen died of
grief” is a plot.

Forster goes on to say (in his book, Aspects of the Novel, page 86) that a plot with mystery in it is higher still, because it gets us further from the bare facts of what he calls “story”:

The queen died, no one knew why, until it was
discovered that it was through grief at the death
of the king.

As a plot grows further from a purely sequential recitation of events, Forster claims, it demands more than curiosity from its listeners; it demands intelligence and memory.

Adding a Third Level

Now enter Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl does not discuss plot or story, but what humans need:

What man actually needs is … the striving and
struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he
needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost,
but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be
fulfilled by him.

From this point of view, neither the sequence of events (what you seek) nor the causality (why you seek it) is as important as the meaning of seeking it. The most important aspect of a human’s “striving and struggling for some goal…”, we could say, is a potential meaning, waiting to be embodied by a person’s actions.

Forster’s examples don’t take on the question of meaning, but perhaps Frankl’s level of story would be met by something like this:

The queen saw that, once her husband’s inspiring
personality was no longer among them, her subjects
needed an example of selfless bravery; and so, on
what turned out to be the last night of her life,
she carried bread through the snowstorm to the
stranded and starving peasants; that was how she
caught pneumonia and soon died.

Combining Forster and Frankl, therefore, we can view a story on three levels:

The events: what happens;
The causality connecting the events;
The meaning that the causally connected events have.

The Paradox of Importance

Paradoxically, the third, most important aspect of a story – its meaning – is not intrinsic to the story. Rather, it is born in the minds of the listeners.

For example, the queen’s sacrifice of herself may be seen by one listener as noble. Or, by another listener, as a tragic waste of her own life. Or, by a third, as ineffective, self-delusional folly. A fourth may conceivably find it a slightly comic reminder of our tendency to over-estimate our own importance.

So we have this paradox: as humans, we need meaning above all. Yet the meaning of a life’s story is determined, not by the person living it but by those who hear it told.

From the storyteller’s point of view – especially in applied storytelling – we care most about the meaning that our listener’s receive. Yet our stories never fully “contain” that meaning. Rather, we must induce our listeners to create it anew each time.

Are You Helpless to Determine the Meaning?

The teller of a story can certainly slant our understanding of its meaning in own direction or another.

If the teller thinks the self-sacrificing queen is unrealistic, for example, the teller may give the queen a breathy tone of voice, or insert a scene early on in which she is primping herself in front of a mirror, imagining herself being lauded for selfless bravery.

Another teller, who thinks the queen is a true hero, may instead say the queen’s words with a sincere voice and solid posture, or may insert scenes that show how close to death the peasants are and how few options are available for saving them.

The teller’s artistry can make it more likely that listeners will attribute a particular meaning to a story. But, in the end, meaning is always the listener’s creation.

The Paradox of Ownership

What about just telling your listeners what your story is supposed to mean?

When the meaning is not that important, that strategy works well. But here’s another paradox:

When listeners create their own meanings for a
story, they feel ownership of them and therefore
hold them close to their hearts. But when they are
told what the teller thinks a story means, they
are less attached to that meaning.

In other words, there is a trade-off between participation and control. If you want high listener participation in meaning-making, you lose some control over what meaning they make. If you reassert control, you lose their sense of commitment to the story’s meaning.

The Paradox of Character Speech

That said, there are certain techniques that increase the probability that the meanings your listeners create for your story will be closer to the meanings you have in mind.

One example is having a character make a meaning statement in the course of the story. Suppose the queen said this as she began her fatal journey into the snow:

I think I can more helpful to the peasants as a martyr than as a living queen.

In this case, a meaning has been suggested, but not by you. Because the queen is attributed with saying this, your listeners won’t likely be resentful of your saying it. But, because they will identify to some extent with the queen, they will entertain that meaning – and perhaps even adopt it as their own.

Paradoxically, by speaking as the queen, your words aren’t attributed to “you.” Your words do their suggestive work, but you aren’t blamed for it.

Living in Paradox

Keeping all these tricky paradoxes in mind as you tell can be daunting. It may even be daunting enough to keep you humble – and light on your feet.

Paradoxically, those are good qualities to adopt, if you want to stay effective as a storyteller!

(For more techniques for combining participation with control, see the Message Telling course.)