About this book

This is an online book about how to get started working with stories, using an approach I helped develop and recommend, on a small scale in communities and organizations. Since 1999 I've helped plan and carry out several dozen story projects for corporations, governments and non-profits around the world, and I've learned a lot. This book is my attempt to give some of what I've learned to the world.

I got the idea for writing a resource like this many years ago, but never had the time (or felt I knew enough) to attempt it. When I found the book Where There Is No Doctor, which was written to help people who have little access to medical care learn to help themselves, I started joking with friends that I should write a book called "Where There Is No Story Consultant". I looked around on the web, but aside from a thousand books on how to tell stories, I could find almost nothing to help people get started working with stories.

There are quite a few people working in this area, all over the world, most of them as consultants to large firms and governments. People who want to get started doing this sort of consulting, or who work at places that have budgets, have many resources they can use to get started in this area. But as far as I know, there aren't many good resources for people in small communities or organizations working without budgets to get started doing small-scale story projects.

My assumptions

I assume you are a person who is responsible for or represents or just belongs to a community or organization and wants to help that community or organization become more healthy in some way. Perhaps you believe your community needs to:

• know something about its members or customers or constituents, or
• learn better, or
• be more productive, or
• be more peaceful, or
• resolve an internal conflict, or
• get along better with another community, or
• plan for the future, or
• make decisions, or
• reduce danger, or
• broaden thinking, or
• consider fresh perspectives, or
• get new ideas, or
• remember the past, or
• learn from each other, or
• pursue a common goal, or....
• many other purposes.

I assume that maybe you've heard about this type of work in general and want to find out more about how you can get started doing this sort of project but don't know what to do and have some questions. I also assume that you don't have the time or money or interest (yet) to get more deeply into the subject than what I cover here. I point to some recommendations for further reading in the Resources section and at the end of some sections.

A note on terms

The approach I describe here was developed by a loose community of people working over the years, sometimes together and sometimes apart. Sometimes we have agreed on what to call things and sometimes we haven't: that's healthy. I use the terms I like best (they are the ones I use to myself) for two reasons: first, it's my party and I'll say what I want to, and second, I prefer the terms I use because I think they are simpler and easier to understand. You are free to look at alternative terms in other places and decide whether you agree with me or not.

A note on links

Links off this site are denoted by placing the word in small capitals. Many of these links are to Wikipedia articles. Links within the book are denoted by placing the word in bold italics.

A note on references (and the lack thereof)

I'm the kind of person who usually writes papers with a hundred references listed, and that takes time. In order to force myself to get this written quickly (because I don't have a lot of time to spare and because I have a tendency to take too long to perfect things) I haven't allowed myself to cite references for statements like "people have an innate ability to tell and understand stories". Most of what I say here is from my own experience helping people with story projects, but I do say some things I first read in the literature on narratology and sociology and psychology and anthropology and so on without specific references. Most of the statements I'm making here can be looked up easily by anybody who cares to look. Generally, if I say "it is well known that" something, it means "you can go and look it up and you will find evidence for it". Granted, that is not proper scientific writing, but I'm writing this as more of a friendly conversation than a peer-reviewed publication. You as the reader should take it in that light. I do list some of my favorite references in the Resources section.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Printer-friendliness

Here is a PDF version of the whole book for review.