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.

Of all the books written on storytelling so far (4,469 hits on Amazon.com), 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!

Why Is This Good News?

Since storytelling was rediscovered in the 1970′s, the world has seen storytelling as something quaint and harmless. For decades, you and I have tried to correct that view by asserting that storytelling is timely and powerful. Sometimes it felt as though we were whispering into a hurricane.

But now that an author took the time to research and write an entire book against storytelling, our years of work must have had an effect.

Well, Not Exactly Storytelling

If you’re a performer, don’t worry; Salmon isn’t aiming at you. Rather, he is concerned about applied storytelling: storytelling that is used to persuade, sell, or educate. In particular, he rails against the use of stories and storytelling in business and politics – in seven chapters with titles like these:

• The New “Fiction Economy” (about manipulating workers emotionally so they can, in turn, fool customers)
• Turning Politics Into a Story (about the role of narrative in recent presidential politics in the U.S.)
• Telling War Stories (about video-game-like, immersive military training) and
• The Propaganda Empire (Karl Rove, Fox News, the internet and more.)

Salmon sees all these trends as combining to form a frightening replacement of a reality-based world with a series of “shared fictions” (p.67).

His claim is that storytelling puts emotions ahead of rational thought, elevates entertaining fiction over hard reality, and replaces political skill with “fictional competence.”

Blaming the Hammer?

Like all tools, storytelling can be used for good or bad, to illuminate the nature of reality or to conceal it.

Salmon, to be sure, puts his finger on some disturbing uses of storytelling. But he focuses blame on the tool, not on those using it or even on those of us who allow ourselves to be manipulated.

Too Simple a Story

I would have loved a good book about the dangers of mis-applied storytelling. But this isn’t it.

Salmon writes like a muck-raking journalist. He is good at assembling many examples of storytelling-as-deception and assembling them into an alarming montage. But he has clearly spent more time compiling examples than constructing a penetrating analysis of them – or suggesting a reasonable corrective for society.

To make matters worse, his writing is frequently lacking in the logic that he glorifies. He often uses examples that don’t support his conclusions. He uses emotional language in an apparent attempt to prejudice the reader against his targets. (For example, people in favor of storytelling are usually called “gurus,” whereas those critical of it are “researchers.”)

He doesn’t appear to have noticed that the emphasis during the Industrial Age on “discipline” and “rational argument” has failed to make us either disciplined or rational – never mind relaxed or peaceful. Most importantly, he doesn’t seem to notice that storytelling’s increased presence is in part a reaction to the suppression of important aspects of the human experience.

Altogether, his implied story has more in common with tabloid journalism than with reasoned analysis: “We are being manipulated by unseen forces that are taking over the world. Be afraid!”

Our First Critic. Hooray!

If Salmons’s book were well-argued and well-interpreted, it might be a valuable addition to the literature about storytelling.

As it is, it’s a source of references to story and storytelling in contemporary culture. (Did you know that one of President George W. Bush’s speeches used the word ‘story’ 10 times?) That’s the best recommendation I can give it.

We deserve better critics. I hope that the coming years produce them.

But for now, let’s celebrate: we are powerful enough to be on a critic’s radar. At last, storytelling has come of age!

The guest was the director of Partners in Health, a local Boston non-profit that has worked for years in Haiti.

The talk turned, naturally, to the recent earthquake. I listened numbly as the host and guest outlined the disaster and predicted that weakened buildings would continue to collapse for days and weeks.

Then the host summarized a staffer’s urgent email:

S.O.S. – S.O.S. – Please help us – Pain meds, bandages needed.

The guest said she had heard more from that staffer’s field hospital:

There are reports of a lot of casualties that are coming
there with only one doctor and no medical supplies still.

Without realizing it, I began to imagine myself as that lone doctor, trying to attend to hundreds of injured people without supplies.

I imagined myself looking over rows of makeshift beds, thinking, “Where is the rest of the world? Why aren’t they helping me?”

In the process of imagining, I had stopped being so numb.

I had begun to weep.

Before eating my sandwich, I went to the computer and made a donation to Partners in Health.

Why Was I Weeping Now?

What was so different about those two sentences? How did they break through my haze? How did they motivate me to interrupt my lunch to make a donation?

As far as I can tell, those two sentences had three important qualities.

The first quality: narrative

First, those two sentences told a little story. Therefore I had something to imagine.

But the director had told other stories already. She had told about her group’s history in Haiti and had narrated what groups were sending aid.

So what other qualities were important?

The Second Quality: A Single Point of View

The director’s other stories were about organizations, hospitals and agencies. They weren’t about individual people. Most of them weren’t even about individual locations.

But the two moving sentences evoked a single doctor in a single location.

As soon as the director described one person’s point of view in one place and time, I begin imagining empathetically.

The Third Quality: Innocence

Looking back, I realize that the immediate context of the director’s story played nearly as big a role as the story itself.

In particular, the director’s story wasn’t a “pitch.” It wasn’t (it seemed to me) pre-calculated to have an effect on me. It came up in response to a question by the interviewer.

I can imagine that the following sentences would have had a much smaller effect on me:

We need the help of those listening to this program. We have a hospital near the airport that urgently needs doctors and supplies. Please donate!

Why? Before she could even describe the need – as soon as I felt that she was trying to persuade me to take an action – I would have unconsciously closed the door to my heart.

Implications for Your Storytelling?

If you use storytelling to persuade in any way, you may want to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What stories (however brief) can I tell about my organization?
2. Which of those stories concern (or could concern) a single person in an easily imagined situation?
3. What opportunities do I have, that would allow me to present narrative apart from a plea? In other words, can I trust the story to do the work of persuasion by affecting my listeners’ hearts? Can I trust my listeners to make their own best decisions based on my straightforward narratives?

If you make any experiments along these lines, please let me know the results by adding a comment, below.