Planning your project

There are five decisions you need to make in planning a story project:

1. Why are you doing the project? (goals)
2. What is the project about? (focus)
3. What will the project juxtapose? (breadth)
4. How big of a project will it be? (scope)
5. How will you carry out the project? (plan)

Goals: Why are you doing the project?

If the project was over and had succeeded beyond your wildest dreams, what would have taken place? What would you have gained or found or achieved? Ask yourself this question, write down as many brief answers as you can think of (without stopping yourself to critique; just brainstorm), then cluster the answers together (put ones that seem similar, for any reason, together) and see what patterns emerge. Then do the same thing with the opposite question: what if the project was over and had failed beyond your worst nightmares? What would you have missed or lost or been disappointed about? This can actually bring out more goals than the positive story, since you might not admit some goals to yourself.

It's best to do these kinds of thinking about goals in a group if you have one. You might end up with more than one goal, but usually one will be primary and the others will be secondary.

To better understand your goals it is useful to put them into a category or categories. You might recognize this list of things you can do with a story project from the start of this book:

• find things out,
• catch emerging trends,
• make decisions,
• get new ideas,
• resolve conflicts,
• connect people,
• help people learn, and
• enlighten people.

Which of these match what you want to do? If more than one match, which are the most important? Does that help you refine your goals?

Focus: What is the project about?

The focus or center of a project can include things like:

• a topic, like "our community's ten year vision"
• a question, like "what is the range of views about the planned bridge?"
• a decision, like "should we build a shopping center or a park?"
• a problem, like "what can we do about science illiteracy?"
• a goal, like "we would like to improve our services to patients"
• a group of people, like "my family's story"
• a perspective, like "how new immigrants see our town"
• a person, like "stories about our founder"

The focus is going to have a lot to do with the project's goals, but it is more like the "what" instead of the "why" of the project. These are some ways to think about the focus of your project:

• If you could ask any person any question and would be guaranteed to get an honest answer (magically), whom would you ask and about what? Why would you want to know that? What would knowing that do for you?
• If you had "magic ears" and could overhear anyone talking to anyone at any time and in any place, where and when and whom would you want to listen to? Why?
• If you could be a "fly on the wall" and observe any situation or event, what situation would you want to witness? Why?

Some answers might be:

• If I could, I would ask my grandfather how he came to this country, because I'd like to understand that part of my past.
• I wish I could ask customers who have stopped coming here why they left, so I could change those things and make them want to come back, and prevent other people from wanting to leave.
• I wish I could overhear people making a decision to commit a burglary, so I could understand their motives and prevent it from happening.
• I'd like to overhear people talking honestly about whether they think I'd make a good mayor, because I need to decide whether to run or not.
• I'd love to be a fly on the wall the very first time a person sat behind the wheel of a car, because I'd be able to better understand what sorts of misconceptions they had that I could help them with.
• I'd like to be a fly on the wall when people are finding courage they didn't know they had in terrible circumstances, so that I could better help the young people in my community to find courage they didn't know they had.

Once you have thought of some of these fictitious ideal circumstances, you will know what the focus of your project will be: it's whatever you want to ask about, or overhear, or observe.

Breadth: What will the project juxtapose?

All good story projects have breadth as well as focus, though breadth is easier to overlook. Breadth usually involves juxtaposition, or comparing things side by side. For example:

• possibilities, like "shopping center, park, and bridge"
• groups of people, like "immigrants and natives"
• perspectives, like "technophiles and technophobes"
• time frames, like "views today and views from the turn of the century"
• locations, like "local views and views from around the world"
• goals, like "things we'd like to accomplish in the next ten years"

Breadth is not so much about why you are doing the project but what will make it succeed. For example, you aren't going to be able to find out what your community's ten year vision should be unless you include people from all parts of the community, or all ages, or all perspectives, or stories from the community's past. One way to decide on the breadth of your project, once you have your focus, is to pretend the project succeeded and ask yourself "what made it work?" And then pretend it failed and ask yourself "what made it fall down?". The answers to those questions may give you what you need to decide on the breadth aspect of the project.

Scope: How big of a project will it be?

The collection of stories and other information generated by a story project should be rich in meaning. That does not necessarily mean it needs to be large. There is a tension between the sheer number of stories you collect and how many questions you can ask about each of them (and get meaningful answers). I've seen story sets with 50 stories in them that were richer in meaning than story sets with 500 stories in them but in which either few questions were asked or few meaningful answers were given.

As far as a minimum, I wouldn't recommend collecting fewer than 30 stories. One hundred stories is a good number: enough to show some useful patterns and trends, but not enough to be hard to manage. When you get over 200 stories dealing with the volume starts to get limiting.

But it depends on what you are doing with the stories. If you are looking for patterns in them yourself, volume is a more important consideration than if you are just making them available for other people to look at and talk about. It also depends on how many projects you've done and what sorts of methods you've worked out for processing the stories. If you're just starting, a nice manageable project where you ask 30 people to tell two stories each is a good idea.

Plan: How will you carry out the project?

What I mean by the plan of the project is what you do in it. For nearly all story projects you collect stories, so that part doesn't differ (much) from project to project. It is in what you do with the stories that one project differs from another.

There are three general types of plan:

1. Look: Find useful patterns that provide insights into important topics.
2. Think: Make sense of things and come to decisions.
3. Talk: Connect people and stories.

Any project can involve more than one type of plan, but usually one will be more important than the others. For example, you may help people resolve conflicts by giving them ways to look, think and talk about the stories told by other people; but probably getting them to talk will be the primary plan.

Bringing it together

Once you know your project's goals, focus, breadth, scope, and plan, it's a good idea to write them into a nice clean sentence that you can use to describe the project to anyone involved. Here are some fictional examples.

• In order to find out what people want for our community in the future (goal), we will ask people from all demographic categories in our community (breadth) to tell at least two stories (scope) about the next ten years of our community (focus), and we will look for patterns in the stories told (plan).
• In order to rediscover forgotten ideas and get new ideas for extending the art of photography (goal), we will ask 20 current photographers (scope) to talk and think about (plan) stories about decisions and dilemmas (focus) collected from 150 photographers (scope) going back through 15 decades (breadth).
• In order to improve our patient care (goal), we will collect stories about office visits (focus) from 50 patients and doctors (scope) across a wide spectrum of disorders and complaints (breadth), then we will look at and think about the patterns we see in the stories and disseminate a report to all doctors and waiting rooms in the network (plan).
• In order to help foreign students succeed at our university (goal), we will ask thirty students (scope) from all countries attending the university (breadth) to tell stories about their first month at the university (focus) and make those stories available to other foreign students who need help settling in (plan).