Towards Responsible Story Telling
Underneath our story telling
We are living in a golden age of storytelling, the sophistication with which we can weave a tale, and the diversity of storytelling means at our disposal has never been greater.
Our understanding too has grown, about how stories shape opinion, win support and change behaviours. In the past few years, our highly developed skill in using storytelling as a quick route to people’s hearts, minds and pockets has reached a tipping point. In the wake of seismic changes in Western political systems the notion of sophisticated storytelling has come under fire - charged with the discrediting of expertise, the toppling of credibility and, according to commentators like Adam Curtis, its abuse has laid the foundations for the normalization of chaos.
There is no going back from here. We can’t stop relying on our stories, but we can’t turn our attention away from their susceptibility to misuse or the responsibility telling them carries. But what does forward look like, and how would we like it to be? If we were to develop a responsible approach to this work where would we start? I propose a way forward here which focuses on what lies underneath our stories, their building blocks, our narratives. To talk about these is to cut through the chaos and to get to a place where you can stick a pin in the matter at hand.
To expand on this, I’ll explore a few different kinds of narrative development work drawing on my own professional experience. This draws on my background in art history, interpretation and exhibitions and my experience as a relational dynamic coach and strategist.
Starting with history
History is possibly the most straightforward example of narrative development because of its relationship with evidence. There are strict rules and practices around what can be used to build a narrative, but at heart it’s a process of unearthing and then connecting fragmentary traces of the past (now itself out of reach) and arranging these in a way which tries to get as close to a kind of truth as possible. There are a range of approaches available for this work. You can take a traditional top down approach where you move through big events in sequence, or you can focus on building a picture of what life may have been like for different groups of people - to take just two examples. However thorough and rigorous you may be there is always the possibility that there’s a missing piece of information that, in coming to light, changes everything.
Art interpretation …
Art tends to be firmly rooted in the realm of human subjective experience with all its messiness, emotional content, flaws and biases. Largely because of this, the interpretation of art has the capacity to be a creative discipline in its own right – a riffing off of an artist’s work, or bringing art works together so they can riff off each other. Taking a historical perspective on art combines this more subjective work with the attempted distance of historical narrative development, and so becomes a process of deconstruction and reconstruction. It’s fun (if you like that sort of thing) and there are infinite possibilities in its unfolding.
... in museums
When you take art interpretation out of the academy and into the museum, the process becomes different for many reasons. The audience is general, the space you have to tell your stories is seriously limited (for example, an object label in an exhibition should contain around 75 words or less). The people engaging with museum interpretation, be it in the form of wall texts, tour, audio guide or PDA, are often on their feet, have a lot to take in and tend to be either looking for quick anchors or answers to specific questions. Ultimately, this marks a shift in emphasis – the process becomes about the audience and what they need and want, and what you want them to come away with.
Responsibility
Surrounding each of these disciplines there is debate about the responsibility of those developing the narratives and telling the stories, be you in the academy, the museum or the studio. Because to select is to exclude, and to spin a story is to build a world. If that world gains traction and is accepted by others, it can significantly impact other lived experiences.
Personal narratives
A number of years ago I went through an intensive training programme to become an accredited relational dynamics coach. A large part of this training invites the trainee coach to focus on awareness of self, so that when it comes to being alongside another as they work thought their own challenges, you’re not clouding their perspective with your own.
Another way of looking at this would be to say as coach you’re taking your own internal narratives off the table so you can focus on those of your coachee or colleague. For me, this practice has brought to the surface just how fundamental and deep this process of narrative development goes.
We humans experience the world in ways that are specific to us as individuals. We take in a hugely complex and often chaotic set of data and must shape this in order to understand ourselves, the world, our place within the world and where we are going.
Our narratives are our foundations, the means by which we and our complex consciousness can function in the world. They run so deep that it’s quite possible to go through life without being aware that many of them are even there. What is your narrative around money, love, success, equality, death, food? You have them around all of these things and none of them can claim universality – when you dig into the detail, they reveal themselves to be quite unique to you.
Its both disorientating and liberating to get them all out into the sunlight and see them for what they are – vital fictions which take us in the general direction of an inaccessible truth.
Responsible narratives
Once we have a fairly complete set of narratives we go into fine tuning mode – often selecting from the information available in the world those things which fit our existing narratives and discarding the rest.
Narrative development becomes dynamic for us as individuals when coping with change, adjusting to grief or branching out into the unknown. When they do adjust, we are literally disorientated – if you’ve ever experienced a personal breakthrough, be it though talking therapy, sweat lodge or spontaneous epiphany, you may well have experienced a period of clumsiness afterwards.
Our narratives can trap us, though, when they become too tightly woven to incorporate new information or so simplistic as to sever us from our natural curiosity, and the narratives we don’t know we have can direct our beliefs and actions in ways we can’t see.
Our narratives clash and but up against each other constantly, and when they’re questioned this can elicit a naturally strong emotional response. (How does it feel when a sibling or other such member of your family remembers elements of your childhood very differently from you?). When different narratives are competing, whose narrative wins out and becomes accepted can often be a good indication of where status and power lies in a dynamic. And our ability to cooperate on any level involves our ability to create and hold shared narratives, however fragile they may be and gently we need to hold them.
Public storytelling through this lens, be it a novel an advert or a politician’s speech, can be seen as the public face of our narratives. At their best they invite us in to the lived experiences of other people, sharing narratives which wouldn’t otherwise compute for us and giving us opportunities to adjust our own narratives to incorporate more than our own finite beings could experience on their own. At their most insipidly stealthy they can reinforce the insular narratives we hold which focus primarily on our own experiences, particularly those which may be hidden, reactionary or fearful.
Spatial and emotional knowing
Many of our narratives sit with our intellect, but not all of them. Some are housed in our bodies as muscle memory, some exist within our emotional life or subconscious. They don’t always talk to each other. When we are struggling to work something out, or accept something which part of us finds difficult to incorporate, it’s worth approaching the issue from a few different angles. A physical shift can translate to a perspective shift, and literally stepping into another’s shoes can take you there metaphorically too, but faster and perhaps with more punch.
This speaks to the rise of ‘experiential’ in entertainment and in marketing. It’s a level of storytelling (in its current guise) which is still in a sort of infancy. It has the potential to become a particularly powerful tool, which could be used or misused in much the same way as all other methods of storytelling. It would be wise to start educating ourselves as to its mechanisms.
Conclusion
We know that the world is changing fast, and perhaps the shift is so fundamental as to be centred on our relationship to narrative. I see a way through the confusion in bringing the mechanisms of narrative development out into the open; to stress the continuous development of narrative, and to openly acknowledge the artificial nature of the process while embracing it as a fundamental necessity to us.
From this I believe I’m beginning to form a code of responsible narrative development which may start a little like this; To bring our personal narratives to the surface, examine them and make decisions about whether or not to keep or refine them. On an academic level, to frame the process as much as the content, and on a communications level, to empower with stories. To embrace complexity and respect the audience, to trust the listener and invite them to trust you.