Resources
These are some informational resources I recommend for supporting work with stories.
Oral History
Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum.
This is a great book for understanding the complexities of oral history, which is basically asking people to tell stories and so a useful topic to study if you want to do story projects. I particularly liked chapter seven ("Oral History: An Appreciation"), where this quote appears:
Oral history has a proper place in the system of evidence, experience, and analysis that produces good history, and properly used it can make an important contribution. Improperly used it can be mischievous and destructive.
That reflects my own understanding of what I call "the power and danger of narrative". Listening to and telling stories can do wonderful things, but if handled badly it can backfire. Stories, like people, demand respect.
The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson.
This is just an excellent overview for finding out what oral history is about, its history, what people are doing with it, views of its future, what sorts of problems often arise, and so on.
Stories in communities
Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative, by Richard Bauman.
This little book, though certainly not exhaustive or groundbreaking, is one of the best descriptions of what storytelling in real communities is like that I've ever found (and better than any textbook on folklore that I've read, either). Here's a quote:
[C]onsiderations of truth and belief will vary and be subject to negotiation within communities and storytelling situations. This would suggest that if we are interested in the place of narrative in social life, it is the dynamics of variability and negotiation that we should investigate; the issue should be transformed from a typological comparative one to an ethnographic one.
According to Bauman, many stories that may be patently untrue at a purely factual level can reveal deeper truths about the community in which they are told. He quotes a man, during "an exploration of storytelling and dog-trading in Canton, Texas", who says, "when you get out there in the field with a bunch of coon hunters, and get you a chew of tobacco in your mouth, and the dogs start running, you better start telling some lies, or you won't be out there long." Among the coon-hunters described in this book, lying is a mark of truthfulness, that your word, deep down, can be trusted. People who stick to the literal truth simply aren't playing by the rules. I think when it was when I read about those coon-hunters that I first understood the power and danger of listening to stories.
Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, edited by Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman.
This edited volume has several useful chapters, but my favorites are "The Narrative Quality of Experience" (Chapter 2) by Stephen Crites and "Storytelling in Criminal Trials: a Model of Social Judgment" (Chapter 4) by W. Lance Bennett. Crites talks about how stories are essential to the human experience because the time element in stories parallels the time element that defines our lives. Crites also talks about the essential difference between sacred (what we are) and mundane (how we operate) stories, thus:
[Sacred] stories, and the symbolic worlds they project, are not like monuments that men behold, but like dwelling places. People live in them.... For these are stories that orient the life of people through time, their life time, their individual and corporate experience and their sense of style, to the great powers that establish the reality of their world.... Between sacred and mundane stories there is distinction without separation. From the sublime to the ridiculous, all a people's mundane stories are implicit in its sacred story, and every mundane story takes soundings in the sacred story.
When you do a story project, you collect many mundane stories but you can almost always find some of the sacred stories lurking beneath them. After a while you learn to recognize when a story contains a sacred element. Those are the stories that most need to be guided to where they need to go.
Bennett's chapter on storytelling in criminal trials talks about how people weighing evidence rearrange what they hear until it forms a story:
[E]ven when evidence is introduced in the often disjointed "question-answer" format in a trial, the key elements generally will be abstracted by jurors and arranged in story form during deliberation.
He also says that people use narrative form to try out explanations:
The story form ... aids the listener in drawing certain conclusions about the interpretation: Is it plausible? Is it more plausible than some other interpretation? Is it humorous? Is it ironic? Does it fit with some prominent theme in my relationship with the storyteller or in our immediate interaction? Have I had an experience like this that I could recount to indicate my comprehension of, or agreement with, the point of the story? In short, stories are powerful means of transmitting precise interpretations of distant and complex events to people who either did not witness those events or who did not grasp them from the storyteller's perspective.
The exciting thing about this chapter, and this quote, is that this perfectly describes what people who face the challenge of making any decision need to do; which is why gathering and looking at, thinking about and talking about stories is one of the best ways to make a sound decision.
The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture, by Robert Fulford.
This isn't an academic tome, it's just a fascinating look at how storytelling affects culture. This is from a page I have marked:
This has been the century of mass storytelling. We live under a Niagara of stories: print, television, movies, radio and the Internet deliver to us far more stories than our ancestors could have imagined, and the number of stories available to us seems to grow larger every year. This phenomenon, the rise of industrialized narrative - storytelling that's engineered for mass reproduction and distribution - has emerged as the most striking cultural fact of the twentieth century and the most far-reaching development in the history of narrative.
Well said. My feeling is that the scale has balanced too far into the range of industrialized narrative and and out of the range of personal narrative for a healthy society. I think people need to hear more of the raw experiences of other people and less of prepared, packaged goods. (And not fake rawness either like on talk shows and reality shows; that's just another trick of packaging.)
Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter; and Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium by the same authors.
I like these books because they are great examples of people successfully collecting and disseminating unscripted, raw stories of personal experience. If your story project gets stories like these, you are doing it right. Also, I like this quote (from the first Gig book):
Gig presents the mesmerizing, many-textured, profound, hilarious, and above all, unscripted voice of the individual. Unmediated by TV or magazine editing, it's something that nearly goes unheard beneath the deluge of movies, TV, celebrity coverage, advertising, and general hype that pours down upon us every day. When it is heard, it's almost always distilled and distorted by high-level media pundits whose last experience of ordinary American life was around 10,000 expense account cocktails ago. We feel that the world hears too much from "experts" of all political stripes, and not enough from the people for and about whom they presume to speak.
Indeed.
Sensemaking
Sense-Making Methodology Reader: Selected Writings of Brenda Dervin, by Brenda Dervin and Lois Foreman-Wernet, with Eric Lauterbach.
Of the sensemaking folks I like Brenda Dervin the best. She's one of those people who, when I read what she writes, I'm constantly saying "yes yes" under my breath. In this book she attacks one set of unexamined assumptions after another, from "traditional categories of users" to connections between democracy and the use of information. Dervin also has a sensemaking web site with lots of information on it.
Methods
Focus Groups as Qualitative Research, by David L. Morgan.
For the most part I think focus groups are not that useful, but I did learn a lot from this little blue book. It helped me to figure out what pitfalls to avoid and what opportunities to pursue in the context of a group session.
Narrative and decision making
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, by Gary Klein.
I've got a forest of notes sticking out of this book. This is probably the single most interesting quote in the book:
Before we did this study, we believed that novices impulsively jumped at the first option they could think of, whereas experts carefully deliberated about the merits of different courses of action. Now it seemed that it was the experts who could generate a single course of action, while novices needed to compare different approaches.
That certainly turns decision support on its head! Klein goes on to debunk every theory of cognitive science that says people carefully weigh the pros and cons of a long list of options before taking action, and instead says that people who really know what they are doing think back into their past and remember patterns (i.e., stories) that relate to the current situation; and if they can't find any patterns that match, they mentally simulate new patterns and think about what might happen. This book makes the case for supporting decision making with narrative.
Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge, by David Turnbull.
This fascinating book challenges the notion that all technological and scientific advances are planned and rational enterprises and "assumes that there is not just one universal form of knowledge (Western science), but a variety of knowledges." Turnbull describes several instances of technological marvels made in the ages when masons and other artisans who had an intimate knowledge of materials and a "laboratory" in which to experiment allowed structure to emerge from the interaction of parts without central architects or blueprints. He argues that even today knowledge, including scientific and technological knowledge, is assembled, social, and local:
I argue that the common element in all knowledge systems is their localness, and that their differences lie in the way that local knowledge is assembled through social strategies and technical devices for establishing equivalences and connections between otherwise heterogeneous and incompatible components.
Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May.
This is a fascinating look at how analogies can be used and misused (deliberately and unconsciously) in making complex decisions, mostly in foreign policy. They describe:
- how some stories have an allure out of proportion to their appropriateness as an analogy because of emotional elements such as fear
- how some stories have an inappropriate degree of strength in coming to our attention as analogies because they are connected to "folk memories", or things too close to personal experience to be ignored
- how some patterns that are analogous to the situation are not called forward because they are too painful to think about
If you want to help people make decisions based on past events, this is a good book to read to avoid common errors.
Narratology and story writing
Narrative Comprehension and Film, by Edward Branigan.
Most of this book is about film narrative, but if you want to think about what makes a story a story, how people think about stories, and the many ways in which stories can be presented, it is fascinating.
Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, by Mieke Bal.
This is another great book for understanding the "insides" of stories. I especially liked learning about all the different elements that come together to make a story work (and what happens when they don't). You don't have to know about narratology to work with stories, but it helps you understand more of what people are saying when you do hear a story. For example, Bal has an interesting way of talking about the forces operating in a story in pairs: subject-object, power-receiver, helper-opponent. I've found those helpful in understanding what told stories are trying to say.
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee.
This book is the grand-daddy of books about story structure. If you want to know what makes a good story, read this. It is written for screenwriters, but it is so accessible and understandable (not to mention enjoyable) that it is worth reading anyway. The only down side is that McKee's ego is the size of Mount Everest; but put that aside and you'll find this useful if you want to understand what makes stories tick.
Complexity
I haven't talked about complexity much here (just a few brief mentions of emergence), but if you really want to work with stories you can greatly increase your effectiveness by learning about complexity theory, or the study of complex systems. This is simply because some of the same phenomena that take place in other complex systems also occur when people tell stories to each other.
Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, by John Briggs and F. David Peat.
There are four reasons this book is my absolute favorite book about complexity and chaos (and I've read quite a few):
- the writing is completely accessible and understandable for any audience
- there's nothing wrong in it (you'd be amazed how many of the popular books get some of the basic facts way wrong)
- it covers both complexity and chaos (and gets the distinction between them right)
- it makes the whole idea of complexity and chaos amazingly enthralling (I don't know how many times I was underlining things and sticking notes all over it in my excitement!)
If you can only read on book one complexity this should be it, in my oh-so-humble opinion.
The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature, by Philip Ball.
If you were trained as a scientist, you will find this book exactly what you need to understand complex systems. It is light on the social elements, but the many examples from bubbles to boiling water to seashell patterns (with loads of great pictures) give you a lot to think about.
Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick.
I read this book when it came out in 1988. I can't remember a bit of what's in it, but I do know I stayed up all night for two nights reading it, and I've never thought the same way since. I think probably any book that is your first introduction to complexity and chaos will be on your "best books" list, but still, this book is an excellent gentle introduction to the topic through reading about the people who are studying it.