How to find and tell your story

Every family is unique. Every folklore fieldworker has his or her own special interests and style of interviewing. Because of this diversity, no single set of questions will successfully elicit folklore from all families. The most useful questions will be those that you develop through knowledge of yourself and your family.

For your initial efforts the following 16 questions may be helpful. Just remember that they are meant to be suggestive, not absolute. Pick and choose among them as you see fit. By all means change the wording to suit your own situation and personality.

[thanks for the lead from @storytellin tweet about PIE: http://www.cimorelli.com/pie/library/intrview.htm]

The basics of leadership storytelling was the topic of Steve Denning's talk at the TEDx conference in Utrecht on November 8, 2011 on moral persuasion.

In the talk he:

- explained how Al Gore went from being Mr. Boring to Mr. Excitement and in the process won an Emmy, an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize.

- told how he stumbled on the power of leadership storytelling while working at the World Bank.

- noted that most leadership stories don’t work. The stories that most leaders tell are ineffective or even counterproductive.

- described the four main characteristics of leadership stories that do work.

To view the video:  http://youtu.be/RipHYzhKCuI 

You’ve probably heard me say it before…when you find your story, it makes all the difference.

We find the best stories are usually not those that talk about the photograph (how it was taken, what kind of camera was used, color, composition, etc.), but those that talk about the life the photo represents.

Think of the image and text working together as equal partners.  Not so much a caption supporting a photograph, but a story standing on its own, enhanced by the presence of an image.

You can ask yourself the following questions...

Ah, writer’s block. We all know it, hate it, dread it. One second you’re zooming through your story, and the next you’re hopelessly stuck. What’s a wordsmith to do?

The best thing you can do for yourself is learn how to spot the signs and find out what you can do to counteract full-blown writer’s block. This is especially important now that I’m going to lay some horrible, horrible news on you:

There isn’t only one kind of writer’s block; there are six!

Never fear. I’ll let you know where you’re most likely to get hung up and what you can do to bust through the barricade and journey on.

You don’t have to study theatre to become a storyteller. It comes from the home, from the little babies onwards, from around the kitchen table when you’re with your family and you’re happy.

Because it is a part of everyday life, everyone can be or is a storyteller, though there is a lot of work involved in being a good one.

Niall de Burca's biggest aim is to use his stories to reveal to young people that they have a remarkable heritage that they can be proud of and learn from.

Drawing on both his Irish and Kiwi experiences, de Burca fishes many of his stories from a seemingly inexhaustible pool of legends, while others are created anew.  To invent a new story, he told Vienna Review, he “takes the local and ordinary that people enjoy, puts it in a pot, stirs it, adds a little bit of exaggeration, and draws it out”

Is storytelling a "switch" you can flip to make things happen in your corporate or personal life? I was recently on a panel-discussion show where one of the other experts said that he believes that storytelling is not a lever that can make things happen. Is he right?

Yes, storytelling can be used to inspire and create new behaviors but you need to know how to use storytelling techniques.

Publishing shares something in common with roller coasters: The rewards are strongly and positively correlated with the capacity to instill fright.

A group of us recently started a new journal, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics: A Journal of Qualitative Research. While we publish some traditional types of articles, our hallmark is the “narrative symposium”—roughly 12 personal stories on a common theme followed by two commentary articles that draw out lessons from the stories and relate them to current debates.

The day before publishing our first call for papers, I woke up at 2 a.m. worried: What if a nursing assistant names an administrator who ignored reports of elder abuse? What if a physician discloses that a specific corporation offered to pay kickbacks for referrals? Eeek! Of course, we already had a confidentiality policy in place, but the reality of soliciting a large number of stories on sensitive topics made me question just how good it was.