Storytelling Species

Some nights when I’m putting my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to bed, she asks me to tell her the owl story. It’s a very short story about a time when I was driving late at night and accidentally bumped into a snowy owl with my car. I was able to slow down before it hit my windshield, so it had been a relatively light bump.The owl had been standing in the middle of the road, and jumped up in the air as I had come around a corner. When I stopped my car to get out and look for the giant white bird, it was gone. I tell my daughter that the owl probably flew back into the forest to be with its friends. My daughter loves the owl story and asks for it again and again.

One night when she asked for this story, I tried an experiment, and subtracted much of its usual narrative structure. I talked about the concept of a speed limit, and about how cars that are going too fast will sometimes hit animals. I told her about the habits of nocturnal species like owls, and about snowy owl migration patterns. As I had predicted, she quickly lost interest, and eventually interrupted me. She wanted the story, not a list of facts.

Why does my toddler already prefer stories to non-stories? Some would say that, because she’s human, this preference is built into her DNA. Have humans evolved as a storytelling species? If so, why? Why would storytelling have helped us survive and reproduce in our ancestral environment? 

Not everybody believes that humans have evolved as storytellers, but there’s a growing body of scholarship to support this view. Literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall surveys this research in his recent book The Storytelling Animal. And Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at UC Santa Barbara, also touches on the role of the arts (including storytelling) in human evolution in his book Human. Both have some compelling ideas about the possible biological role that storytelling might have played in human evolution.

Let’s start with the explanations proposing that storytelling gave our ancestors a practical advantage. Then, we’ll work our way towards theories of how storytelling improved their minds. Gazzaniga suggests that, deep in human history, storytelling provided a survival advantage by facilitating the exchange of crucial information and skills. Stories, in this view, served as conduits for the transmission of knowledge such as how to find food, shelter, and water, and how to avoid enemies and predators. A skeptic, however, might say that this kind of information could just as easily be passed along in non-narrative form (a list), so there would be no need for humans to evolve as storytellers. 

A slightly stronger argument, I think, is that storytelling provided a survival advantage by increasing group cohesiveness. Both Gotschall and Gazzaniga point out that oral storytelling necessarily brings humans together, in both the literal and figurative sense. Storytelling in groups facilitates a shared, single focus of attention, and such physical and mental proximity would have been likely to strengthen social bonds. Stories can also be used to teach codes of conduct, and might have helped our ancestors rally around a common set of values. For reasons that are easily imagined — fewer intra-group conflicts, better coordination in hunting, child rearing — a more cohesive group would have had a survival advantage over its less cohesive neighbors. While the story-less would die out, the storytellers would live to tell another tale.  

So we have two explanations so far: stories conveyed information; stories helped us bond. But maybe they did something totally different. Maybe stories helped us to, ahem, better reproduce.

Gottschall and Gazzaniga (drawing on the work of Geoffrey Miller) conjecture that storytelling served as a fitness indicator to attract potential mates, much like a peacock tail, which provided our early ancestors with an opportunity to display their skill, intelligence, and creativity. A good storyteller might have risen above his or her mate-seeking competitors in the group. And if a talented storyteller was better at attracting good mates, then that storyteller probably had more offspring, and then there would be more little storytellers running around…

Many theorists agree that storytelling probably helped in all those ways. Some argue, though, that storytelling’s most important contribution happened inside our heads. Gazzaniga argues that storytelling, and aesthetically-driven behavior more generally, served to increase neuro-cognitive organization in early humans. (Here Gazzaniga pulls from the work of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides.) In the words of another prominent scholar who writes about literature and evolution, Brian Boyd, “A work of art acts like a playground for the mind.” Stories, like playgrounds, are fun to engage with, but as any storyteller will tell you, the act of creating a story demands a certain amount of mental exertion. While playgrounds provide us with opportunities to strengthen our muscles, storytelling adds wrinkles to our brains.    

But storytelling provides more than just a mental playground. Which brings me to the most compelling theory about possible evolutionary advantages provided by storytelling: Keith Oatley’s flight simulator theory. This theory comes up in Gottschall’s book, and goes like this: stories provide a low stakes environment for humans to practice navigating risky scenarios, especially emotional scenarios, just like a flight simulator provides a safe space for a new pilot to practice the dangerous task of learning to fly an airplane.

Gottschall puts it succinctly: “Fiction [storytelling] is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.”

The flight simulator theory is at least in part based on recent studies of the human brain. In an oft-cited 2012 opinion piece in New York Times, The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction, Annie Murphy Paul writes that in fMRI scans, stories light up parts of our brain that process language (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas), but also areas of the brain that have little to do with language, like areas the process movement and emotion. When we listen to a scary or sexy story, our brains activate our bodily representations of what those stories feel like. And this provides a unique learning environment, in which we cognitively benefit from a rich experience, without having to take the risks associated with it.

And, Gazzaniga writes, the more stories we hear, the more experiences we become familiar with. So when we do run across a tricky situation, we have a wealth of background information to help us deal with it. 

But a flight simulator is doing more than providing a pilot with background information. A simulator allows a new pilot to rehearse a set of skills, which leads to enhanced performance, regardless whether the training is explicitly remembered. Stories work in a similar way, and over time this process fundamentally reconfigures our minds. Boyd writes, “Exposure to a single story told once will not transform a mind substantially, but many repetitions, or many different stories, can improve our capacities for social cognition and scenario construction so valuable to us in the non-story world.” 

Or, echoes Gottschall, “The constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems.” 

The theories are pretty convincing that storytelling provided early humans with an evolutionary advantage, but some biologists nevertheless hold that storytelling played no functional role in our evolution. Stories, they say, are just like drugs, and humans use them to escape the boredom and brutality of real life. It’s not biologically useful; it’s just for kicks. These thinkers argue that the brain may not have evolved in order to be good at storytelling, but that there are glitches in the brain’s structure that make it vulnerable to storytelling. (Just as fingers did not evolve in order to type on a keyboard or play the piano, but they happen to be very useful for those purposes now.) My toddler’s predilection for narrative, in this view, is just the result of a series of lucky accidents in human evolution. 

After doing the research for this post, I am prone to think that our species-wide penchant for storytelling is indeed an adaptation, and not just a quirky by-product of evolution. And if the literature had failed to convince me, my daughter’s seemingly innate appetite for stories would have.

But these are all still open questions. Evidence for both arguments is still coming in, and we are a long way from having proof for one theory or another. In the meantime, toddlers all over the world are demanding stories with good strong narrative structures when we put them to bed.

The Commitment Story

I have been lucky to have mentors throughout my life. As a young adult, there was one family friend in particular who took me under his wing. His name was Scott Gorman, and he died a few years ago. In his obituary, he is described as a humanitarian, arts organizer, writer, activist, and the first person without a college degree to win a Fulbright scholarship. Scott was what some psychologists would call a “highly generative” person — that is, he made a positive, lasting impact in his community, particularly among its younger members. And his life offers a lesson in how we can use storytelling to become generative people too.

This is the third in a sequence of three posts about what I’m calling our “personal myths,” the stories we tell about ourselves, how we came to be, and where our lives are headed. The first two were about crafting and editing our personal myths. Here I will describe a set of common narrative patterns in the life stories of highly generative people like my friend Scott. These patterns in personal myth-making deeply shapes our lives. 

The narrative patterns of highly generative people are, briefly: (1) a sense of being advantaged in early life, (2) witnessing the suffering of others, (3) moral steadfastness and continuity, (4) redemption, (5) conflicts between power and love, and (6) a pro-social vision for the future. We’ll come back to them in some detail soon. 

Like a lot of generative people I’ve known, Scott was an amazing storyteller. His most powerful tales starred himself, as an unrelenting, engaged citizen, who worked for fairness, beauty, and peace. Scott once told me that his parents were both dead by the time he was a teenager, and that because he had overcome some substantial hardships in his youth, he felt compelled to help others, especially those more vulnerable than himself. 

Turns out that the way Scott related his life story is typical of a highly generative person, at least according to Dan McAdams. McAdams is the author of a 2006 book called The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (which I will draw on heavily for my discussion here). In a body of research spanning almost 30 years, McAdams has shown that highly generative adults in the United States tend to tell uncannily similar stories about their lives, which feature the six themes I mentioned above. 

In the year I took off between graduating from high school and enrolling in university, I moved back to my hometown of Anacortes, WA, where Scott lived. I renovated Scott’s garage into a livable writing studio and stayed for six months. On the day that I had my wisdom teeth removed, Scott picked me up from surgery, drove me back to his house, brought me a pot of medicinal tea, some ice cream, and set me up with Lawrence of Arabia on his television, which he knew I hadn’t seen yet. So while I recovered on his couch, I also mended a significant gap in my cultural education. This is just the kind of mentor that Scott was: he was there when you most needed him, and he anticipated your needs before you were even aware that you needed anything. It genuinely made him happy to take care of his friends.   

McAdams’ research helped me put a finger on something I’d only suspected about Scott: that his ability to communicate his life in narrative terms helped him to achieve his goals. In Scott’s personal myth, he was a hero (a narrative role), working to create a better future for his community (a narrative outcome), and he always framed obstacles as temporary and surmountable (providing narrative tension). This kind of personal myth has the power to sustain generative people, giving them the confidence and commitment to make continuous contributions to their communities. And across a wide range of individuals, generative people’s life stories are remarkably similar to one another, to the point that McAdams has coined a term for the genre: the commitment story.

Redemption

A common narrative pattern -- the most common, in fact -- in a commitment story is redemption. Redemption, or what McAdams calls a redemption sequence occurs when a person transforms their suffering into a higher and more positive mental state. For example, when they transform fear, guilt, anger, or shame into happiness, joy, or excitement. Generative adults, McAdams found, create these transformations much more often than their less generative peers. Scott did too. When his wife of ten years left him for another man, he somehow managed to interpret the ensuing divorce as a favorable turn of events. 

This tells us something important: the number of bad things that happen in a person’s life matters less than whether those bad things are interpreted in a good way. Redemption sequences are not synonymous with simply telling happy stories -- a highly generative person’s story does not avoid accounts of suffering, but tends to construe suffering as leading to some sort of benefit. People who do more good in the world are better at turning lemons into lemonade. 

Five Additional Common Themes

Yes, yes, adding some positive twists to your life story seems like an obvious place to start in your process of becoming a better citizen. If you feel better about yourself, you will likely have more creative energy to put towards helping others. But McAdams’ research suggests that the path is less straightforward than that. Not only do generative people’s stories have a marked prevalence of redemption sequences, they are highly likely to contain five additional common themes. And to me these don’t seem immediately evident. They are: 

1. A sense of being advantaged early in life. The story begins with a blessing, or some sort of privilege.

2. Witnessing the suffering of others. There is an early recognition that the world is not safe, and life is not fair. 

3. Moral steadfastness and continuity. As older children and adolescents, the generative person internalizes a set of core values. Throughout the person’s life, these values remain constant and unquestioned. As McAdams puts it, “Their narrative identities rarely give the starring role to the searching, self-doubting existentialist hero.” 

4. A perceived conflict between agency (power) and communion (love). The trick here is that the more power the hero gains, the more able the hero will be to make a larger positive impact in the world. This ongoing back and forth between power and love drives the plot and gives the hero’s life story much of its narrative suspense.

5. Articulating pro-social goals for the future. The story has a hopeful ending, in which the hero’s good work will live on after the hero dies. 

The six themes of a commitment story function in concert to create a certain type of individual, one who feels especially compelled to help others. For example, McAdams suggests that the contradiction between 1 & 2 sets up a moral contrast in the generative person’s life, which goes something like this: “I was blessed, but others suffered. Because I was fortunate and because others were not, I should make the most of my good status and work hard to make the world a better place.” The highly generative person is what McAdams describes as a “blessed protagonist who ventures forth into a dangerous, unredeemed world.”

To be honest, I’m not sure if all of these themes were there for Scott. I don’t know whether he considered himself to have been privileged at an early age. And did Scott perceive a conflict between power and love? I wish he were still alive so I could ask him. Scott’s personal myth might not have perfectly fit McAdams’ model, and this reminds us that model is just that: a model. But generally speaking, these are patterns that we can consciously insert into our own life stories, in the interest of leading more magnanimous lives.   

Is There a Pattern for Less-Generative Life Narratives?

While I was doing research for this post, I wondered if there was a similar model for less generative people’s life stories. So I wrote to McAdams and asked. His answer, in short, was no. He wrote:

“There is no clear prototypical narrative for people low in generativity. Part of the reason for that is that people can be low in generativity for so many different reasons — from economic hardships to trauma to mental health issues to just plain being selfish.” 

Although there is no prototypical life narrative for the less generative person, McAdams went on to point to two common themes in their life stories: the presence of contamination sequences and vicious cycles. The opposite of a redemption sequence, a contamination sequence is coded for when positive events have negative outcomes. And a vicious cycle occurs when the protagonist struggles with issues early on, and then continues to struggle with those issues, and they never get resolved. These are patterns that we can consciously avoid when we’re crafting our personal myths, lest they lead us down a less generative road. 

Towards the end of those six months that I lived in Scott’s garage, he gave me a silver whistle in a small black box, and told me that if I ever needed anything, I could blow the whistle, and he would come to my aid. I haven’t used the whistle yet, but I know someday I will, when I need his particular brand of guidance.  

Just as we look to mentors, like Scott, for personal examples of how to live a profound and satisfying life, we can also look to research like McAdams’ for more generalizable guidelines. I think it’s wise to diversify the venues from which we seek life advice, because gosh darnit, great mentors like Scott can just up and die on us. Though their legacy lives on…

Change Your Story, Change Yourself

Let’s consider an unfortunate hypothetical situation in which a person reaches his or her mid 30s or 40s, and things aren’t going so well. This person’s self esteem is low, they are having a hard time finding work, or a romantic partner, or whatever… there are so many ways that things can be less than perfect in mid-life. What should this person do if they’d like to make some serious changes in the way they experience the world? 

One suggestion is succinctly summed up by Maria Popova, who, in a review of psychologist Timothy Wilson’s newest book, Redirect, suggests that we approach life changes as narrative challenges. “Our experience of the world is shaped by our interpretations of it, the stories we tell ourselves,” Popova writes, “and these stories can often become so distorted and destructive that they completely hinder our ability to live balanced, purposeful, happy lives, so the key to personal transformation is story transformation.”

Last week I wrote about the creative process of formulating our lives as stories, which starts to occur during that torturous and twinkly era of early adulthood. This week I’ll focus on how narrative psychology is applied in a more therapeutic context, especially during the later part of adulthood, when we can find ourselves in the doldrums, feeling stuck in unhealthy patterns, and wanting to make edits to the stories we’ve already spun about ourselves. As I mentioned in my previous post, the narrative layer of our identity is continually evolving, and it is possible to intentionally make changes here. This post is about techniques for doing so. 

Therapy

Seeking professional help in any kind of transformational process can really speed the process along. If you take this first approach, and seek the help of another, well-qualified person, you will likely find yourself telling a lot of stories about yourself to this person. As narrative psychologists McAdams and Adler write, therapy of most kinds is easily understood in narrative terms: our stories about ourselves reflect our personal struggles, and therapy involves working with these stories in order to revise and edit them. To change a person’s story is in effect to change the person, and many therapists are aware of this.

Some therapeutic methods, such as narrative therapy, make editing and revising a client’s personal stories explicit. In their book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, White and Epston, grandfathers of narrative therapy, propose a therapeutic process in which the editing and revising of one’s personal stories is undertaken literally, using letter writing and a variety of other exercises, such as co-authoring a certificate of Graduation from the Blues.  

Practitioners of narrative therapy liken themselves to investigative reporters, whose aim is to uncover the events in their clients’ past, and to help their clients externalize problematic stories in order to consider them as entities distinct from themselves. A therapist can also function as a mirror of sorts, as someone who can reflect your stories back to you, and help you see things that you otherwise might not see. By encouraging clients to draw back from their stories and reflect critically upon them, narrative therapists empower their clients to re-author their stories in ways more conducive to personal well-being. 

In giving clients a safe space to talk about difficult experiences which they may have avoided in the past, therapists provide opportunities for making sense of those difficult experiences and integrating them into their evolving sense of self. McAdams and Adler argue that on a meta-level, therapy can do much more: if the experience of going to therapy is retrospectively added to your personal myth as a turning point, when things in your life changed for the better, it can add a positive twist to future developments in your story. 

DIY

Therapy is not for everybody. A second approach is to use a narrative toolkit for undertaking the hard work of personal transformation on your own (it is personal, after all). If you are interested in coming to a new understanding of a particular set of difficult or traumatic events in your past, and doing it by yourself, Timothy Wilson, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, has proposed a set of story editing techniques that do not require one-on-one sessions with a therapist to achieve their effect. He outlines these techniques in the book mentioned above, Redirect.  

As the title suggests, Wilson’s book outlines a set of techniques designed to redirect people’s narratives about themselves and the world in more positive directions. He places his strategies into three categories: story-editing (making desirable changes to life stories), story-prompting (this one requires a second person, who uses subtle prompts to help you redirect your interpretation of traumatic events in more positive directions), and the do-good, be-good principle (start by making positive changes to your behavior, then your narrative will change to match your behavior, and your happiness will increase). 

Wilson proposes that story-editing is most useful for people who have recently experienced an important event, maybe an event that is still unpleasant to think about, or doesn’t make sense yet. These DIY techniques are helpful for creating a coherent interpretation of such an event. Here’s how the first writing exercise works: 

Find a quiet place to write. Recount the situation, move away from it in your mind, and watch it unfold from distance. Try to see yourself in the event, and try to understand your feelings (as if observing yourself). As Wilson says, ‘Don’t recount the event, take a step back and reconstrue and explain it.’ Write about what you see and why you felt what you did. Do this for 15 minutes, three days in a row. 

Like White and Epston, Wilson claims that this writing exercise works best when people are able to gain some emotional distance from the difficult event, so that thinking about it doesn’t overwhelm them, and they can analyze the event with a degree of dispassion. This will allow them to better reframe the event, and to find new meaning in it. Wilson calls this the “step-back-and-ask-why” approach, and claims that through fostering greater emotional distance, this technique can help to blunt the event’s traumatic impact, and help people avoid similar situations in the future. 

The same goes for pleasant experiences: if you can understand why something happened, you will be in a better position to make these things happen again. Pursuers of pleasure beware: Wilson warns the step-back-and-ask-why approach can also have the effect of blunting your experience of happiness.

A second story-editing exercise proposed by Wilson is the Best Possible Self Exercise. Here’s how it works: 

Think about your life in the future, imagine everything has gone as well as it could and you have achieved success in all your goals. Now write about what you imagined. Write about how you got there. This exercise is intended to help you create a more optimistic story about your future, which can help you cope better with obstacles as they come up.  

Narrative Choices

Let’s turn back to our hypothetical friend who’s not doing so well. Maybe they will seek a therapist to help them review and reflect upon their past experience, and by doing so they will feel more empowered to make changes to their personal myth. Or, perhaps they will take the DIY approach, and do a story-editing writing exercise on their own. In either case, what they’re doing is creating change in themselves by exploring and changing the story they feel themselves living within. Stepping back from their life, they will realize that a lot of what happens to them is determined by circumstances which they cannot control, but within any circumstance, they can make choices about who they are and who they want to become. 

Those choices are in large part narrative. Living life well, with meaning and purpose, is not just something he will stumble upon, but a deeply creative act, which will require a certain amount of imagination and artistry. 

Crafting a Personal Myth

Crafting a Personal Myth 

I love telling stories about other people’s lives, but when it comes to telling stories about my own, I usually get embarrassed and flustered. Part of my dilemma is that I have had a disparate mix of life experiences, and sometimes it’s difficult for me to string them together into a single, coherent narrative. 

Depending on who I’m speaking with, I tend to narrate different versions of my past. And, usually, the story I tell becomes a dramatized version of events, with heightened ups and deepened downs, lessons learned, and projections about how my past will continue to shape my future. And slowly, as I creep into adulthood, these narrativized versions of my past are becoming smoother, more consistent with one another, and easier to tell. 

This post isn’t about one story in particular; it’s about the stories that we all tell about ourselves, who we are, and how we came to be. This post raises the stakes in our discussion about craft, because the same skills required to tell a good story in general (eg on the radio) also enable us to formulate what some have called a good strong story about who we are. Research has linked high levels of narrative complexity in a personal myth to correspondingly high levels of ego development, and openness to experience. So, what are some ways to better craft your own personal myth?

Narrative Psychology

There is an entire wing of psychology, narrative psychology, dedicated to the study of similarities and differences in people’s life stories, and the varieties of narrative identities created through their construction. Reading some of the research in this field has helped me to understand what’s happening when I’m telling stories about myself and my cheeks get all red. It has also helped me to become more self-aware, confident, and articulate in these situations. I will summarize my findings here, in hopes that, in the course of mythologizing your own life, you might find these pointers as helpful as I have.

Prominent narrative psychologist Dan McAdams at Northwestern University puts forth a model in which a person’s identity develops sequentially in three layers: actor, agent, and author. This model provides a framework for understanding how and when our personal myths are first constructed, how these myths play into our evolving sense of self, and why the mythic or narrative layer of our identity is generally considered to be more amenable to changes than layers that develop earlier in life. 

The first layer, actor, comes to the fore in early toddlerhood. Studies have shown that as children we begin to recognize themselves in mirrors as early as 18 months, which probably corresponds to the time when we begin to develop a sense of self-awareness. McAdams calls these little self-aware toddlers actors, because this is when we start to gauge our behaviors and form traits based on the feedback we receive from our caregivers. 

Perhaps because traits are established at such an early age (or perhaps because we are born with them), they are pretty stable over time. Even and by the age of ten, most kids will have a pretty solid description of themselves. By the age of thirty, I can now safely report, traits can feel as if they are set in stone (though even stones can be lifted!). 

The second layer of identity begins to develop around age five or six, when a child begins to see herself as a motivated person, with goals and plans to achieve them.This little kid with an agenda is what McAdams calls an agent.

The third layer of identity starts to take shape in our late teens and early 20s. There is a lot going on in these years, obviously, but chief among them is that we are expected to become more adult-like. McAdams calls these young adults authors, because this is when we first start to narrate our lives as stories. Young adulthood is when we first begin to craft a personal myth, which explains our origins and our destiny.

A commonly held notion, according to McAdams, is that we choose our goals and have our traits. In other words, we feel as if we can change our goals without too much fuss, but our traits seem like an essential part of ourselves. The underlying assumption here is that the outer layers of our identities are progressively more pliable than the inner layers, because our identities develop in a tree-like fashion wherein the newest layers form in the outermost rings. We develop our life narratives after our traits and goals are already in place, so this outer layer of our identity feels much more plastic.* 

Crafting a Personal Myth

There’s nothing objective about a personal myth. There is no impartial storehouse of autobiographical information that magically morphs life events into myth-shape. Rather, crafting a personal myth is an interpretive operation, which draws on a highly selective and reorganized version of the past. Our personal myths are full of biases, distortions, and mistakes. These mistakes aren’t necessarily conscious, it’s just that certain embellishments are inherent to the storytelling process. In order to narrativize the past, we have to smooth things over a bit, sharpen pivotal transitions, add drama, tension, resolution… these are just features expected of good stories! And why not tell good stories about ourselves?  

At the heart of the literature surrounding the personal myth is a liberating suggestion: it is not through experience alone that we become who we are, but through the creative act of storytelling that we glean a sense of meaning, identity, and power from our past experience. Of course, the quality of our attachments in early life is very important in determining aspects of our characters, but even if our past experience has bestowed us with certain traits, the narrative part of our identity is open to constant reinterpretation. McAdams likens this part of ourselves to a revisionist historian, who uses the selective, creative, and adaptive powers of the storyteller to create an evolving sense of identity. In an email to me, he wrote,  

“People are constantly editing and amending their stories as they go through life, through conversations with others, introspection, and many other means. Many forms of psychotherapy — from psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral therapy — aim, in one way or another, to alter the person’s narrative of life.” 

That’s good news for all of us. In crafting our personal myths, McAdams writes, we can go so far as to make new facts about our lives, draw new conclusions about ourselves, derive new themes, motifs, causal connections, meaningful insights, and life lessons. 

As time goes by, your personal myth will probably start to feel more cemented, and yet, at any given moment, you have the opportunity to make changes. This moment, right now, is as good as any to look back and reevaluate which experiences have been the most formative for you, and the meaning that you’d like to draw from them. In focusing your attention on the creative act of narrating your life, you’re giving yourself permission to craft the story you want to be living in. 

*After this post was published, McAdams wrote with a correction. In contrast to my portrayal of dispositional traits being set in stone by adulthood, research has shown that traits can change quite a bit over time. However, he added, it is true that they do become somewhat more stable as we grow older. 

Ending Stories

Because stories are the medium by which we express and absorb meaning, they can have a healing quality. It’s not surprising that storytelling is becoming more widely used in medicine, especially in end-of-life care, where the need for meaning-making tends to spike, the focus of care is less curative and more palliative, and the physical, psychosocial, emotional, and existential aspects of wellness are viewed in a more integrative way. 

Using narrative in end-of-life care goes by various names: dignity therapy, life story work, life review, client biography, to name a few. These are all different versions of a similar process, and here’s how they work: a nurse, a therapist, or sometimes a volunteer, sits with a patient who is near the end of life. The patient is asked to tell their life story, and their story is recorded, transcribed, reviewed with them, edited, and given back to them and/or a loved one. Storytelling interventions at this crucial juncture have been shown to have positive impacts on patients and families; for the community the resulting stories offer an insight into death and its attendant reflections. 

For the Patient

For the patient, having their stories recorded and transcribed offers the opportunity to create something that will survive their death. In a piece about dignity therapy on NPR’s Morning Edition, Alix Spiegel interviews Harvey Chochinov, creator of dignity therapy, who says that for many people, the most difficult aspect of dying is the idea that they will completely cease to exist after death. The ‘legacy’ or ‘generativity’ document that Chochinov’s patients receive in dignity therapy is meant to abate the fear of being forgotten. This, in turn, creates a sense of having contributed to the wellbeing of future generations, and thereby buoys the patient’s sense of dignity. 

In one study about the impact of dignity therapy, family members reported that the intervention improved a patient’s sense of meaning, purpose, quality of life, and preparedness for death (see that abstract here). This suggests, at a fundamental level, that listening is an act of love, and the aim of these biographical interventions is to create a supportive environment where the patient feels safe to express themselves (‘Listening is an Act of Love’ is the slogan of StoryCorps, and the title of their first book.) Older people in care homes tend towards the lonely end of the spectrum, and for them this kind of intervention offers an engaging form of companionship, albeit brief.  

Another study shows that the process offers the patient a chance to reflect over their life and reorganize their prior experiences. This might seem like something everybody does at the end of life, but for many people it does not occur easily or automatically. Storytelling is a safe place to work through difficult emotions, and a biographical intervention offers a final opportunity to resolve problems encountered earlier in life. Sometimes we all need a helpful nudge in the meaning-making direction, and telling one’s stories can instigate a tremendous unburdening, a catharsis which in turn can ease the process of letting go and saying goodbye. 

William Breitbart drives the point home in Alix Spiegel’s story, mentioned above: "The prevailing mythology is that you die the way you live, and you can't change yourself in any way. The fact is that the last few months of life — because of the awareness of death — create an urgency that facilitates growth and change." 

For Families and Loved Ones

For a dying person’s kin, the stories they receive can be helpful during the bereavement process. In many cases, people use excerpts from these transcripts in funeral ceremonies, and many family members anticipate finding long-term comfort in their beloved’s transcript. If a family member is invited to participate in the interview process (à la StoryCorps), it can strengthen the relationship between the interviewer and the dying person. And the information conveyed in the transcript can be important for generations to come, because it preserves a thread of a family’s oral history. 

For the Community

But what do these end-of-life stories have to offer to community as a whole? Could these documents offer us clues as to what is most important in life? Some experts on death and dying argue that at the edge of life we see life most clearly, and so the life stories of those facing death can represent a valuable insight into what is truly important and precious.  

Content varies greatly from person to person, but there are some common themes. One study on biographical approaches in end-of-life care did a qualitative analysis of such transcripts and coded their ‘core values’ by theme. Here’s what people near the end of life focus on most: family (observed in 92% of transcripts), pleasure (36%), caring (32%), a sense of accomplishment (26%), true friendship (22%), and rich experiences (16%). Notice what’s missing from this list: grudges and disputes, monetary and material wealth, physical appearances, the stress of school and work… all things that can occupy our attention on a day-to-day basis, and much of which becomes trivial in hindsight. Should we in turn take a moment to reflect on our own values, and make more of an effort to integrate them into our lives at an earlier stage?  

If you know somebody who is close to death, a grandparent, for example, consider taking your recording equipment for a visit. I neglected to do so with my grandfather, who passed away several years ago, and I thoroughly regret it now. I think he would have relished an opportunity to put his story down, and maybe it would have made his dying easier in some way. I’m sure my family would have cherished such a recording, mostly for the cache of family history we lost when he died, but also as a token of his particular quality of wisdom. Now that my grandfather is gone, I realize that the sound of his voice is something that my own child will never know. 

And when you come to face your own mortality, however far away it might feel, consider setting down your story in oral or written form. You might have a lot of stories to tell, and it might be difficult to choose from among them. But certain kinds of stories will be more valuable than others, both for you and the people around you. As a helpful framework for your story, consider the insights of Ira Byock, who describes four messages which help establish closure in any relationship: forgive me, I forgive you, thank you, and I love you. If your story touches on these four messages, you’ll be making a steady approach to the more difficult message, which is also important: Goodbye.

Promises, Promises

Some people have superpowers, and Ira Glass's superpower just might be framing and introducing stories. My friend Will and I have been so awed by this superpower over the years that we finally decided to concatenate a bunch of Ira Glass intros, listen to all of them back-to-back, and see what kinds of lessons we could glean. We decided to x-ray that uncanny knack he Glass for duct-taping us to every story This American Life presents.

This exercise is hard for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s like turning on the song of the siren and trying to not get hypnotized. While we were working on this, we had to remind ourselves, “No, we’re not here to listen to the stories. We’re here to listen to the introductions.” Glass puts you right in that place where you care about what happens next. The process is incredibly frustrating, and that’s because Glass is doing his job incredibly well.

Another reason the exercise is hard is there that Glass doesn’t use a formula—it’s not like the introduction to a sitcom or an NPR news show. He does, of course, use the structure of “'Act... Title of Story...” then give the name of the storyteller, as well as a couple other details—the location, maybe an important character or two, and the basic setup. But these are not the elements that get us hooked. 

We noticed two elements occurring over and over in every introduction: a promise and a consistent sensibility.  

Glass is a master of promise. Let’s focus on this aspect first: there’s a promise in nearly every sentence of every intro, which builds into one big promise, and the story is what ultimately delivers on that promise. Here’s one of the introductions, as an example, with our comments in bold:

Glass: “Act 1: Hasta la Vista Arnie. Scott Miller was not an experienced therapist back when everything you’re about to hear took place. (I’m about to tell you what he was.)

He was a beginner, a grad student, starting off at a local psychiatric hospital, when this patient came in. (I’m about to tell you more about the patient.)  

A guy who had been doing ok, leading a more or less normal life, when one day, the guy snapped.” (Curious? Don’t worry, you’ll get details on what I mean by this.)

Scott Miller: “He would go on and on babbling about how he was the Terminator.” (Are you even more curious? Better listen to the story then...)

It’s a little like carrying a candle into a magical cave where every step shows you something that makes you want to take another step inside.

The other element, sensibility, is a bit more complicated to describe. It has to do with the kind of thing Glass promises: authentic, human-level drama. Listening to these, you get the sense that the discoveries Glass promises are the kind of things that he genuinely cares about. You see this sensibility in the foreword to Glass’ book The New Kings of Nonfiction. Whenever he describes why a piece has been selected, these are the words that consistently appear: discovery, curiosity, empathy, transparency, human drama, and pleasure. 

Here’s another example from the concatenation; this time our comments, in bold, attempt to pull out the sensibility that is inherent to the intro.

Glass: “Act 1: ‘I’m the Decider.’ You know there are all kinds of situations where we step in as reluctant proxies. (It’s good to help other people, even though sometimes it’s not convenient.)

As a favor to friends and family, taking over a chore that they don’t want to do, taking their kids or their pets off their hands for a while. (It’s good to help other people with their everyday responsibilities.)

Doing something because it’s the right thing to do and nobody else is stepping in. (Sometimes other people won’t step in to help when it’s needed, but it’s good if you do.)

That’s what happened to Davy Rothbart, more or less.” (Meet our story’s main character, who is about to do a good thing, by stepping in to help somebody.) 

This story is about Davy Rothbart trying and failing to help a friend. But notice that Glass’ intro doesn’t give away the main character’s ultimate failure in the intro, but focuses instead on his sense of duty, which is the positive vein, and the thing we can all relate to.

So there is no formula per se, but there is the perpetuation of promise, and more promise, and more promise. Alongside a genuine appreciation for the generous, altruistic side of human nature.  

We can all mimic this, of course, in our own ways. You don’t have to be passionate about the same things Ira Glass is. Take the energy of what you love about your story, and exude that in your introduction. Then don’t reveal too much. Just promise us that what’s coming next is worth sticking around for. 

Co-written with Will Rogers. Host intros pulled from the following This American Life episodes: 263 Desperate Measures; 327 By Proxy

How to Tell a Heartbreaker

I’ve been trying to finish Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for a year and a half now, and can only get through one chapter before I have to set it down. It takes a month or so before I have the energy to pick it up again. These kinds of stories take tremendous effort to absorb, and yet these are important stories and we should know them.

But how do we convince our listeners to listen to stories that yield an immediate jolt of sorrow and shame? 

One way is to couch them in more hopeful narratives, as evidenced by pieces like this, which tells the extremely difficult story of Chief Joseph within a more buoyant, contemporary framework.

What NPR’s Alex Chadwick accomplishes in this piece is amazing. His first strategy is to set the story in the present, so that it is not simply a retrospective piece, like many documentaries. The action here is ongoing, so as listeners we have an investment in how it will unfold. 

It begins when a local archaeologist proposes that the government officers of the Clearwater National Forest and representatives from the Nez Perce tribe take a trail ride along the historic Nez Perce Trail together, so that the tribe can explain some of what is in the forest to the federal employees. This comes after many years of poor relations between the two groups, and the Forest Service is hoping that stories from the Nez Perce might provide a missing link in the broken chain of communication between them. 

Chadwick tags along, and we are privy to the small steps these two groups take towards reconciliation during their four days on horseback together. We listen to their ceremonies, their discussions along the trail, reports on the weather (rain), and descriptions of the passing landscape. We hear them enjoying each other’s company around the fire, their singing, and the periodic awkward silences between them. Through the first half of this story, we become increasingly convinced that some kind of peace will be brokered here. 

It’s at this point [11:00], that our narrator Chadwick brings in the agonizing story of Chief Joseph, his people’s flight through the mountains, and their eventual capture. And this is Chadwick’s second brilliant strategy: he withholds the central trauma of the story, and approaches the difficult material only after he’s established a positive tone for the piece. As listeners, we get our lesson in the gruesome side of American history without feeling trampled by it, because we are already feeling optimistic about the present-day part of the narrative. We can absorb the tragedy of the Nez Perce War, because we have already been given a sense that something is being done to understand and remedy its fallout.  

On the fourth and final day of their journey, there is an exchange of gifts, and the tribe is eager to broach the difficult subject of maintaining the historic trail in collaboration with the Forest Service. There is an openness which neither side has experienced before. As they reach the end of their ride, there is an acknowledgment of the lingering bitterness and anger felt by the tribe, but a mild sense of transformation is also palpable. 

When you are given a heartbreaker to tell, you can try these two tricks: set the retrospective action within a current, ongoing narrative, so that your listeners have a stake in the story’s outcome. Then postpone the most painful part of your story, and embed it within a chorus of brighter notes. Getting acquainted with history is crucial to the ongoing reconciliation process, and stories like this will make the learning process more accessible to a wider audience. 

This story reminds us that history is not over, or as one character in the story, Ben Horace, says, “Even today, we’re still on a journey. We need to have courage.” 

Native America: Our Nation’s First Nations, (19 min, starts at 2:30). Hearing Voices. Host: Alex Chadwick; producer: Carolyn Jensen Chadwick; editor: Christopher Joyce; engineer: Suraya Mohamed.

Adapting for the Ear

We often don’t think about it, but most stories that we listen to have been written beforehand. While some stories are easy to read aloud, the typical written story undergoes some key changes when it’s adapted for the ear. I thought it could be an interesting Marshall McLuhan-esque exercise (the medium is the message) to compare two stories by the same author, one written and another spoken, and to examine how each is composed to better suit its medium.

I recommend reading The Lost Father in the New York Times first, then listening to Vietnam's Postwar Legacy on All Things Considered. In both, Karen Spears Zacarais tells us about what it was like to grow up without her father, who was killed as a soldier in Vietnam. In the written story, she compares her own childhood experience to children who have lost parents in today’s wars, while in the spoken story, she recalls her personal journey to the place where her father died in Vietnam.

Both are beautiful, both touching, but they are also quite different, not just in form, but in content. While the most obvious differences are seen at the surface level, some are more radical, perhaps because different media are better suited for telling different kinds of stories.

Zacarais does, of course, make the changes we might expect, namely at the level of language. In the written story, her words can be a mouthful and her sentences long. In the spoken story, she simplifies her vocabulary and shortens her sentences. The result is that the spoken language packs more of a punch. Compare, for example, the opening sentence of each story:

WRITTEN: As the daughter of a soldier killed in action, I'm worried sick about this generation of war-torn families.

SPOKEN: As a young girl I grew up envisioning my father’s death.

Sentences are shortened, diction is narrowed. But a more profound change comes at the level of genre. The New York Times story is an op-ed. While it draws on her personal experience, it continually parallels our contemporary collective experience. This type of call for political action works well in print, but wisely, Zacarais decides to tell a different story when she writes for the ear.

In the All Things Considered story, the sole focus remains her personal experience, namely her journey to Vietnam. This shift in genre (from op-ed to memoir) is well suited to audio for two reasons. First, the story remains grounded in space and time, making it easier for the listener to follow. Second, she uses physical descriptions and details to communicate her ideas and emotions. In contrast to the written piece, the audio story does not feature a call for political action. A call for action isn’t necessary. We are profoundly affected by her experience, then left to draw our own conclusions.  

Finally, the narrative structure of the two stories is quite different. Very little is resolved in the written story. Zaracais finishes with a question, leaving us suspended in mid-air. In the radio story, the narrative arc has more of a flex, and we breathe a sigh of relief as Zacarais comes to the end of her journey in Vietnam. Compare:

WRITTEN: I'm troubled by the nightmares that surely await this generation of battle-scarred children. I know they will grow up longing for just one more embrace. And like me, they are doomed to spend their lifetimes asking, wasn't there any better way?

SPOKEN: But never again will I envision Vietnam as a god-forsaken place. I won’t dwell on its blood-soaked soil or Daddy’s cries as he lay dying. Instead… I’ll remember that my father died in a beautiful land, fighting for the freedoms of a loving people.

These two stories illustrate a few good tricks for adapting a written story for audio. Use simple words. Shorten sentences. Remain grounded in space and time. Rely on physical descriptions and details to communicate subtle ideas and emotions. And, perhaps most difficult, create a strong narrative arc by cultivating a sense of tension and release.   

The Lost Father (634 words), Karen Spears Zacarais, 
New York Times, April 21, 2004

Vietnam's Postwar Legacy (3:32), Karen Spears Zacarais, 
All Things Considered, October 21, 2003

Audio Danger

Let’s start with something that’s tremendously obvious. One thing you can do in audio that you can’t do in print is use recorded sound. But producers don’t record sounds for stories just because they can—they do it because a good set of field recordings can turn a regular story into a much better story. My friend Brett Ascarelli, reporter for Radio Sweden, is great at using field recordings to transport her listeners to new and dangerous places. 

In Sweden they get a lot of snow. One of the biggest concerns in cities like Stockholm is that icicles and chunks of ice can fall off rooftops and land on people's heads—accidents that can prove fatal. During a heavy winter, building owners call in special teams that clear ice and snow from rooftops. Have you ever been on the slanted, slippery roof of a four-storey building to scrape ice and shovel snow? No? Give Ascarelli five and a half minutes of your time and she’ll take you there. The in-scene sound in this piece is so crisp that you might be able to hear how cold it is up there. When I listened to Ascarelli’s nervous voice, I got that fluttery feeling of looking down from such a height.   

Notice the excellent quality of these recordings. Ascarelli’s on-location voice is crystal clear. The voices of the men she interviews have depth and texture. You can clearly pick out a telephone ringing in somebody’s pocket. This is at least in part due to the quality microphone that Radio Sweden has on hand, but it’s also due to Ascarelli’s skill in handling her equipment. 

Beginning radio producers tend to be shy with their microphones, holding them somewhere unobtrusive, attempting to be discreet. But for the best quality tape, you must shed your microphone phobia and get nice and cozy with the source of your sound. When I listen to this piece, I can see Ascarelli’s microphone quickly jutting back and forth between the space directly in front of her interviewee’s mouth and her own. 

While you’re listening, try to imagine this story without the field recordings. If Ascarelli’s rooftop adventure were solely recalled in the studio, this story just wouldn’t have the same effect. You wouldn’t be able to hear the empty sky above your head, or feel how far you are above the ground. 

Brett Ascarelli We Don’t Answer on the Roof (5 min 30 sec), produced in March 2011 for Sveriges Radio International, Stockholm, Sweden.

Also check out her story about checking gravestones and this one from the Venice Biennale.

Good Stories Make Good Lectures

Wade Davis is hands down one of the great storytellers of our time. Holder of the oxymoronic position of “explorer-in-residence” at the National Geographic Society, Davis is best known for his controversial work in the 1980s on Haitian zombies. Since then, he has traveled the reaches of the globe, thoughtfully documenting diverse spiritual traditions.

For a bullet train introduction to Davis’s repertoire, I recommend his 2010 lecture, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. This is part of a series of Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT) hosted by the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco.

This is a lecture, not a story. But it’s a great lecture precisely because it’s full of great stories. 

Part of what makes it so much fun to listen to is that Davis stays close to that old radio adage, “Show. Don’t tell.” A particularly captivating story starts at 16:39, in which he details a modern reenactment of an ancient Polynesian voyage across the Pacific. Davis describes the Polynesian wayfinders as 

… sailors who can sense the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon simply by watching and studying the reverberations of waves across the hull of the vessel, knowing full well that every group of islands in the Pacific has its own unique refractive pattern that can be read with the same perspicacity with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint. 

Many of his sentences are this long and this dense, which usually doesn’t feel good to the ear, but Davis, with his scrupulous attention to detail, and his voice lunging into each story, manages to keep us engaged in spite of his very writerly, academic diction. He is also good at summarizing his ideas with poignant analogies: “Take all the genius it required to put a man on the moon, apply it to the study of the ocean, and what you would get is Polynesia.” 

 Davis hits the ground running and wastes no time in driving home this central tenet: that the world into which we are born does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just a model of reality. Four or five times he asks the question, “What does it mean to be human and alive?” and each time it feels more relevant than the last. I don’t know about you, but I love that fundamental question, and am fascinated by its many, many answers.

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, SALT. [1hr 20min]

Fresh Air Extraordinaire

A while back, I wrote a post about the expert kindness of Ira Glass, where I said that Glass’ gentle touch was the secret to his success in a risky interview situation. But I’d like to revise my argument here, to take into account the tactics of another interviewer par excellence, NPR’s celebrated Terry Gross.   

Terry Gross is kind, don’t get me wrong, but she’s not gentle in the same way as Ira Glass. She has a way of probing her interviewee about their apparent contradictions, or their less than noble deeds, and once identifying a difficult point, she does not stop after a single question, but tends to push the point, and then push it again. Somehow, her persistent jabs do not come across as attacks. 

How is this possible? Is it the neutral tone of her voice? Is it her genuine curiosity? Is it that her critical questions are preceded by and interspersed with praiseful ones?

In this interview with Robert Hass, which centers on a recent reprinting of Walt Whitman's poem “Song of Myself,” Gross addresses a conflict between Whitman's huge ego on the one hand and his great mystical exuberance on the other. That Hass is then obliged to defend poor old Whitman against the arrowlike questions of Gross, and does so with such casual eloquence, is what makes this interview as affecting as it is.  

After introducing her subject, Gross begins the interview with an easy question: Why is "Song of Myself" so important in American history? This gives Hass the opportunity to get comfortable in the interview, and to relate some basic information about the poem, its style, Walt Whitman's education, and some historical context around its (first) 1855 publication. Her next question is also an easy one.

But her third question is a little more challenging. She opens the door to the more contentious territory carefully, by asking for Hass's opinion of a third party's critique of the poem. Ralph Waldo Emerson, she says, who was an early champion of Whitman, eventually got tired of his constant list making. “How do you feel about that?” she asks Hass, “That constant list making?” Hass laughs and says, “I think everybody gets tired of that.”

But the next question is more personal, and downright difficult: "I always find that when I read Whitman I never know which part is a huge ego and which part is this great mystical exuberance. What do you think? Do you feel that way too?" 

The difficult questions about Whitman’s character continue from here, and each one gives Hass the opportunity to more fully elaborate his understanding of the poet and the poem. If Whitman’s appears to be a personal narcissism, says Hass, it’s only that he means to write about himself for everybody’s sake. What a paradox! Hass is suggesting that Whitman’s ego is some kind of exuberant selflessness. This is the jewel that Gross has been working towards with her hard questions. 

The progression in this interview is one that Gross uses often: she starts by surveying the territory, then asks for an opinion about a third party’s critique, then comes in with the more personal, rigorous probes. By establishing a neutral tone from the start, and prefacing her tougher questions with more welcoming ones, her interviews achieve a sense of vulnerability and intimacy, without being contentious.  

Imagine that Gross didn’t push the point about the big ego. Then all we would get from this interview would be, Isn’t Walt Whitman lovely? Isn’t he great? But instead we get, Wow, what a brilliant and complicated person. Which I think is way more interesting. 

I stand by my claim to the importance of kindness. But we should all take a lesson from Gross in identifying the difficult questions and creating a comfortable atmosphere in which they can be approached in a nonthreatening way. This technique will take your interviews somewhere more profound.  

Terry Gross interviews Robert Hass about Walt Whitman’s poem, "Song of Myself." (24 min) Fresh Air, July 15, 2011.

Sonic Spotlight

Writing for radio is much like writing for the stage. The decisions you have to make are very similar. You have to set a scene, develop characters, and create a strong narrative arc. The format is also quite similar. You need to indicate entrances and exits, music breaks, and the like. 

As a playwright, you would have a variety of visual tools to add weight to the events on stage, like costumes, a set, and blocking. The spotlight, for example, is a great way to amplify the important elements of a scene. But in radio, all of your dramatic queues must exist in the realm of sound. What is the audio equivalent to a bright beam of light, focused on the speaker centerstage?

Let’s call it the sonic spotlight. 

The producers of This American Life have mastered the spotlight effect. Ira Glass has written about it in TAL’s comic book, Radio: An Illustrated Guide. Listening to their shows, I have probably heard it at least twenty times. But it’s become such a popular audio maneuver, that these days you hear it on other shows too. Recently I found it on Radiolab’s 23 Weeks 6 Days. Before we get to the spotlight, though, let me give you a brief synopsis of this super, super story.  

This is a first for Radiolab, where we spend the entire hour on a single story. Our two main characters, Kelley and Tom, have a daughter who was born at 23 weeks and 6 days, just on the edge of being viable, or capable of living outside the womb. When their daughter, Juniper, is first born, Kelley and Tom are not sure whether she will make it, or whether it is ethical for them to take extraordinary measures to save her life. In this hour, we are walked through the ups and downs involved in (... spoiler alert) keeping Juniper alive. 

Here’s how the sonic spotlight works. Our example starts at 6:38. Kelley has gone into premature labor. Atonal, tension-building sound drifts underneath Kelley and Tom’s voices while they recount her cramping, bleeding, and journey to the hospital. As listeners, we grow accustomed to the ambient sound, to the point where we kind of expect it. But suddenly, the sound drops (7:11). 

The ambient sound (or music, in most cases) dropping is equivalent to the lights on stage dimming down. This is our cue to listen in, that an important moment is pending, a spotlight on the speakers. Because the sound is gone, Kelley and Tom’s voices sound very close and immediate. The spotlight is on them, and they use it to say something really important. 

The doctors aren’t able to stop Kelley’s bleeding, and her life is in jeopardy. Kelley grabs Tom’s arm, says, “Don’t let me die.” We can hear Tom’s voice that he is scared, and Kelley is sure that their baby is dead. Then all of a sudden... the baby’s heartbeat appears in our headphones, accompanied by another layer of slowly rising ambient sound. This feels like the lights coming back up on stage. We relax, because the audio insinuates that the baby is still alive, and Kelley is going to be okay.  

Easy, potent. Take away the extra sounds (or music) when your speaker says something important. Then when your weighty moment has passed, bring it back up. We will listen closely in the interim. 

23 Weeks 6 Days (60 min), produced by Radiolab in April 2013.

Thanks to Jonah Willihnganz for the stage metaphor, pulled from his "Your American Life" course syllabus, which he taught at Stanford. This syllabus is a treasure, and has provided the inspiration for several of my blogposts.

Ditch the Narrator

It’s time to get a little bit personal. This week I’m going to write about one of my own stories. I had more fun producing this story than any other story I’ve produced.

It’s called People Find the Drum who Need to Find the Drum, and it hails from waaaaay back in the Stanford Storytelling Project’s archives—Hannah Krakauer (now a close friend) and I made it in 2008. It’s about a visiting artist at Stanford, John-Carlos Perea, who leads a ten-week course on pow wow music. He teaches his students the history of pow wow music, then how to play the drum and sing. We followed the course for several weeks, and witnessed the transformation that the students underwent during this time. 

In the process of scripting this story, Hannah and I scratched our heads and labored intensely over how to tell the story of Perea and the students we’d interviewed. We sorted and resorted our piles of transcripts, and went through several writes and rewrites of the story’s narration. And then, one evening at my house, over our tenth cup of tea, it dawned on us: this story was better without a narrator. The characters could tell their story themselves.

Our narrator was just getting in the way. She felt like a person in a white coat, observing the facts, but not affected. The third-person perspective was subtracting from the story’s emotional immediacy. 

The decision came when we realized that all of Perea’s students were telling different versions of the same story, and that Perea’s interview and music could be used to weave the students’ perspectives together. It was one of those moments where we both leaned in and raised our eyebrows. Deciding to switch to a non-narrated story, we poured an eleventh cup of tea and stayed up until three in the morning to finish the piece.

Storytelling guides will tell you to decide early in your production process whether to use a narrator or not. When we gathered the audio material, we hadn’t been planning on making a narrator-less story, but by a couple strokes of luck, it worked out. 

Here’s why:

1. We asked our interviewees to introduce themselves. (Around 9 min, one character appears who does not introduce himself. This is Ben Burdick. Sorry Ben!) Then we asked them to share a little bit about themselves. That way a narrator didn’t have to relay this basic information for us.

2. We asked all of our interviewees the same list of questions, and were surprised at how similar their answers were. This made it relatively easy for us to weave a variety of perspectives together along a single narrative arc.

3. We weren’t afraid of having too much material to work with. We had hours and hours of raw tape for this piece, which made it possible for us to comb through and find the logical connections we needed in order to create a seamless, coherent storyline. 

But you don’t have to rely on luck. You can plan all of these things in advance. Because we didn’t plan a narrator-less story in advance, we missed the opportunity to exercise a few more tricks. For example, we didn’t tell the people we interviewed about our plans to not have a narrator. Then we could have asked them to please keep that in mind while they spoke, i.e. to respond to our questions in full sentences. And we didn’t ask our characters to describe where they were, what was happening, and what things looked like. Such sensory details would have developed our scene and grounded our story.   

Deciding not to have a narrator presents a puzzle-like challenge that for some producers can be fun. And it can be liberating for your characters, who will speak for themselves.  

People Find the Drum who Need to Find the Drum (23 min), produced for the Stanford Storytelling Project by Hannah Krakauer and yours truly.

Short Pause

Sometimes when I’m reading an article or book, I take a moment in the middle of a paragraph to think about what I’m reading. Sometimes I’ll even read a good paragraph twice. It’s like my brain needs a moment to organize and process the information it’s acquiring. But when we listen to a spoken story, we can’t necessarily take that pause when we need it. 

As writers and producers of spoken stories, we have to anticipate those moments when our audience will need a moment to think about things, and give it to them. These are the pauses that give the audience space to make meaning, to move from witnessing the story to understanding the story. 

Or, in the words of the wonderful Ira Glass, “An image will stay with you a little longer if we put in more of a pause.” 

A great story by Snap Judgment shows us how powerful the pause can be. Jayne Larson, an actor and producer from Beverly Hills, spends a few weeks as a chauffeur to a princesses from Saudi Arabia. Larson’s story is told in short vignettes. Each sketch details a scene, a character (a princess!), a bit of action, then finishes with a reflective moment, where Larson tells us what she learned or how she was affected by the event that just took place.

At 4:45 Larson begins a sketch about driving a young princess through the campus of UCLA. I recommend giving a careful listen to this vignette. Pay attention to the use of tiny pauses that give emphasis to particular images and reflections and how those pauses create opportunities to absorb and reflect. 

An experienced storyteller knows when to pause for emphasis. But with some interviews, you might not get the pauses where you want them. The good news is that we live in the digital age, and if you need a pause where there is none, one can easily be dropped in. You can move your pauses around.

There is one small catch, which is that you can’t just use silence to fill those pauses. If you do, it will call a lot of attention to itself, distracting the listener from the story. You have to insert the particular silence of the room, the microphone, and the equipment that you used (and maybe, as in the case of this story, some music for mood and emphasis). Before you start your interview, record a few seconds of ambient sound. Then when you edit your story, you can cut and paste this ambient sound into your story, and in turn expand certain events or magnify moments of reflection.

It doesn’t take much. Just a second here and there.

Saudi Princesses (8 min), featuring Jayne Larson, produced by Anna Sussman. Episode 403 of Snap Judgment.

Note: Thanks to Ira Glass for Radio Tip Number 7.

Hello Space, Goodbye Time

There’s a strong impulse right now to organize stories by space, rather than time. It seems a natural extension of our communication technologies to map our environments with stories, and (attempt) to chronicle the fantastic volume of human experience that takes place all around us, all the time. 

I think this trend in storytelling is also part of a broader cultural move towards organizing our lives according to space (eating local foods, supporting local economies, flying less). But the impulse to put a story on a map can be taken one step further; it can be applied to the structure of a story itself. You can organize a story by the space in which it took place, rather than by the order in which it unfolded in time. Careful, though: when space becomes the supporting structure of your story, you’re unlikely to end up with a traditional narrative arc. And if you don’t have that, then you might have to find something else to keep your listeners in their seats.  

Out of the Blocks does a great job finding that something else. As a tour of the 3300 Greenmount Avenue block in Baltimore, it’s an experiment in spatial story structure that employs some innovative modes of capturing listener interest. Host Aaron Henkin literally walks us down the block. We visit a hair salon, a restaurant, tattoo parlor, pawn shop, check cashing business, licensing office, and meet a passel of characters on the street. Through these interactions, we develop a regard for the diversity that’s present in this tiny plot of urban space. But there’s not a lot of action or suspense in this story, and it risks becoming a list-like parade of character portraits. A promise of another kind keeps our attention through the hour: 

Wendell Patrick’s luxuriant use of sound. 

This story holds our attention not by the usual hook of plot suspense, but by sonic variation. Sound, either through intensive editing, manipulation of voices, or wonderfully immersive music, places emphasis on certain passages, provides chapter markers, and cultivates the continual promise of surprise. Through this assemblage of sounds, we develop greater insight to and greater appreciation for each person we meet.

A shining example of this is a phone conversation starting at 14:35. A woman at the licensing office answers the phone and quickly tires of her customer’s questions. We hear her become frustrated as the conversation escalates, and she hangs up the phone. “Thirty-one minutes and thirty-seven seconds with this chick on the phone!” she says (at 15:35). This cues us into the kind of editing that Patrick put into this piece: that thirty-one minute conversation took only one minute for us to listen to. He literally cut 97% of the original tape, and yet through the snippets that remain, we get a great sense of this woman and her day-to-day frustrations at work. And portraits of such microcosms keep coming, and keep expanding, and always with as much of a sonic twist. The widening quality of each vignette keeps us curious, and we come out of the story with a real appreciation for this single Baltimore block. 

This is not to say that you can’t create a story that is organized by space rather than time, and have your traditional narrative arc too (I’d love to hear it!), but this is to say that if you want to investigate a particular space, and you find yourself creating a story without an arc, then there are other modes of generating promise. 

Out of the Blocks (52 min), Aaron Henkin with music by Wendell Patrick, Hearing Voices, July 2012

Showing & Telling

There are certain stories that make me ache. Stories, usually, about a person’s suffering, and their ability to accept, endure, or overcome their pain. Sometimes my whole body will flush and I’ll cry. It’s not necessarily sadness, but the entire spectrum of emotions visiting me at once. A good story of this kind hits me like a lightning bolt of human experience. Hence the ache afterwards.

Claire Schoen’s Children Sometimes Die had such an effect on me. In a series of three 1-hour documentaries, Schoen introduces us to some of the difficult questions associated with death and end-of-life care. This story probes a topic that is so charged with pain that it is almost taboo. But Schoen reminds us that even though we might not want to think about it, “sometimes children do die,” and discusses what we as a society can do to “help them on their journey.” Schoen’s careful balance between showing and telling imparts this piece with both emotional and intellectual resonance.  

The hour centers on Brittany, a 13-year-old girl who is living with cystic fibrosis, and Lamante, a 5-year-old boy with severe cerebral palsy and obstructive airway disease. Both are raised by their adoptive mother Dawn and both “live in the shadow of death.” Brittany is facing a decision about whether to get a lung transplant, and Lamante is having such difficulty breathing that his caregivers aren’t sure that the benefits of continued treatment outweigh the distress of his everyday life.

The story of Brittany and Lamante is interwoven with the institutional perspective of pediatric palliative care: doctors, child life specialists, and healthcare administrators from around the United States describe the challenges associated with their work. The alternation between one family’s story and the reflection about the institutional context within which their story takes place is part of what makes this such a potent documentary. 

Achieving a seamless connection between specific instance and general significance can be one of the most difficult tasks in writing a radio script. In this piece, the movement between storytelling and reflection occurs in five-minute chapters. First we receive the sensory and emotional account of Brittany and Lamante, then this is balanced by the intellectual and analytical narrative of the healthcare professionals. 

There is a synergy at work between the showing and telling in this story. Without the story of Brittany’s panic attacks, or Lamante’s charming smile, the larger perspective of pediatric palliative care would not have much emotional relevance. In turn, the doctor who explains that children often do not have the words to express their fear about dying lends Brittany and Lamante’s story another layer of depth. 

Brittany does not let her disease define her, and she doesn’t let it prevent her from dreaming about her future. Her situation is heartbreaking and her cheerful resilience is incredible. That she should look so closely at mortality at such a young age seems unfair. But then the doctors who care for dying children on a daily basis remind us that though it is rare, a child dying is a part of life. Stories like this help us learn to confront such wrenching possibilities in a new way.    

Children Sometimes Die (1 hr), Claire Schoen, Part II of III in ‘Heart to Heart, ’produced for Public Radio International, 2003

Combing the Dragon’s Hair

I heard a story once about a professor who had trouble getting enrollment in a course, which was titled something along the lines of, ‘Representations of the Mythopoetic in Prose and Poetry.’ So few students enrolled that the course was nearly canceled. The following year he taught the exact same course, but this time he titled it ‘Combing the Dragon’s Hair,’ and it filled up right away. There was even a waiting list.

You know the old adage about not judging a book by it’s cover. It’s true, we shouldn’t judge people, courses, or stories by their titles. But we do, and so does everybody, because there’s something in human nature that gives tremendous weight to first impressions.

The secret ingredient to a good title might be as difficult to pin down as what’s behind Ira Glass’ incredible host intros (and there is some definite overlap here), but there are two important things it’s safe to say up front: the more playful the better, and descriptive is not necessarily best. 

Radiolab has mastered the art of the alluring, allusive title. We’ve collected an instructive sample here (see below for links). Notice that each of these only hints at the subject of its story, and that most are either riffs on familiar idioms or puns. Check it out:

1. Rippin’ the Rainbow a New One 

2. Why are Bad Guys Bad? 

3. Leaving Your Lamarck 

4. In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt 

5. One Good Deed Deserves Another

6. Rocked by Doubt 

Now here are those very same stories, but I’ve given them less fun, more descriptive titles:

1. Isaac Newton Unlocks the Mystery of the Rainbow 

2. Shakespeare on Cruelty in Human Nature 

3. The Effect of Good Maternal Care on Baby Rat DNA 

4. The Search for Truth in a Historic Photograph

5. A Classic Thought Experiment on Strategies of Cooperation and Betrayal

6. One Geologist’s Religious Doubt and the Toll it Took

A lot less appealing, eh? What is the principle at work in Radiolab’s enticing titles? 

The first thing I notice is that many of Radiolab’s titles are twists on English idioms. While they do have a familiar ring to them, they aren’t just tired turns of phrase. Take ‘In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt,’ a riff on the Bible’s ‘valley of the shadow of death.’ This story is about a man who obsesses over mysteries until he solves them. It centers on the riddle of a photograph taken during the Crimean War, titled ‘Shadow of the Valley of Death’ (another variation of the familiar phrase!). Which is to say, there’s a lot going on here, overlapping references on multiple levels. So it sounds familiar (but not quite), and it is full of intimations (but not explicit).      

Second, many of Radiolab’s titles are puns -- they are deliberately playful. Take ‘Rocked by Doubt.’ This piece opens as producer Lulu Miller stumbles across a geologist in the desert; he gives her a lesson on ancient oceanic sediment deposits, then confides in her that he is struggling because he has recently come to doubt the existence of God. So there are rocks in this story, and a lot of doubt, and the main character is “rocked by doubt,” i.e. shaken, or “wracked by doubt.’” But this simple pun is so much more fun than our descriptive “One Geologist’s Religious Doubt and the Toll it Took.” Mine gives too much away. 

Which is all to say that too much information in your title kills the promise of a story’s central revelation. And promises, as we learned from Glass, are a central tenet in listener-recruiting technique. Of course, your title should have something to do with the discovery that you’ll uncover, but it doesn’t have to be a plot summary. It should capture the essence of your story, without revealing its twists and turns. And if it has a slightly familiar (but fresh) ring, and it’s fun (or funny), all the better! 

Radiolab stories discussed in this post:

Rippin’ the Rainbow a New One

Why are Bad Guys Bad? 

Leaving Your Lamarck 

In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt 

One Good Deed Deserves Another

Rocked by Doubt 

Work with your Hands

The other day I sat down to tackle a long overdue sewing project, and as I started to thread the needle, I noticed a feeling of restiveness creep upon me. The slow task of mending the holes in my socks appeared before me as a dull, empty stretch of wasted time. I’m not used to the kind of mental space that mending socks brings. A product of my times, I am accustomed to a nearly constant stream of stimulation. Though I like to think of myself as an old-fashioned, crafty person, I’m really not used to working with my hands. I long to have such patience.  

When I need inspiration for reconnecting with that part of myself, I turn to the essays of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin is best known for “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which many undergraduates read at some point in their education. “The Storyteller” is another of his classic essays. 

In “The Work of Art,” Benjamin argues that the factory-made objects of modern times are without the auras of the handcrafted objects of yore. In “The Storyteller,” he departs from the realm of objects and applies the same thinking to the realm of experience and speech. A storyteller, writes Benjamin, is someone who has the ability to exchange their experiences with others through their voice. But the storyteller, as Benjamin describes them, is in sharp decline. Benjamin’s diagnosis for this problem is dense and complicated. But a good diagnosis is the first step towards finding a cure. In other words, these insights can help us find ways that we can recover the innate storytellers within ourselves. I will focus on one small part of Benjamin’s argument here, and leave to you discover the rest of this very rich essay yourself. 

Benjamin’s unlikely champion of storytelling is boredom. He writes that the traditional university of storytelling was the artisan’s workshop, where tradesmen rubbed elbows and exchanged tales while they did their work. Their work was often repetitive, and the tedious nature of good craftsmanship was also the key to developing good storytelling. “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience,” writes Benjamin. 

During hours of mundane tasks, the artisan’s mind had time to ruminate on his or her personal experience, then to formulate it into a well-tellable tale. They also had the time and repose to absorb the stories of others. By and large we are not the working artisans that we used to be, so storytelling, writes Benjamin, is coming to an end:  

“It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while [stories] are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself.”

If you are like me and you are sometimes seized by anxiety at the thought of working with your hands, try to remind yourself that the repetitive tasks of everyday life are useful in ways that might not at first seem obvious. While you are washing the dishes, folding the laundry, or mending the holes in your socks, you are also mulling over your days, formulating narrative structures that will later surface in your exchanges with others. The everyday practical work of life creates the time and space necessary for you to be present to the stories within and around you.  

The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin, written in 1936, 24 pages. Translated by Harry Zohn, from Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt.

Poetic Voice

As a child, I was lucky enough to grow up listening to David Whyte cassette tapes in my mother’s car. At the age of eleven or twelve, I had not yet come to appreciate poetry. But poetry came alive for me in Whyte’s tapes. Listening to a well-read poem is an entirely different experience than encountering it on the page. David Whyte reading poetry is like receiving a loaf of warm bread, fresh from the oven. It is life sustaining. Simple in its genius.

Achieving the most basic effect often requires the most adept skill. In this Tedx Talk, Whyte introduces us to his thorough, methodical approach to poetry, employing several poems as platforms for a discussion of what he terms the conversational nature of reality. 

First there is his charming accent. Whyte hails from Yorkshire, England, and so he has that classic British lilt, which for my American ear always signals a sense of confident erudition. But he is also a traveler and has long made his home in the Pacific Northwest, and so in his tone we sense a very down-to-earth, wool-socks-in-sandals kind of lilt. As a child, I remember being drawn in and calmed by the rhythm of his metered, melodic speech. He uses the range of his voice to strike a delicate balance between animating poetry with emphasis and variation in tone, and remaining neutral enough so that there is space for our own imaginations to work. 

Emphasis is placed not just by inflection, but also through repetition. An important line can be read two, three, or four times. Each time we hear it, another layer is peeled back, and we feel the language more profoundly. By the third or fourth time we are no longer just hearing the words—we are experiencing the meaning behind the words. 

In this talk, Whyte opens with his poem ‘Everything is Waiting for You.’ The first time he reads it, he repeats several lines, several times, as if he wants to make sure his listeners catch each piece. When he reaches the end of the poem, he repeats the last line, “Everything is waiting for you,” leaning in, repeating it again, “everything, everything, everything.” At this point you really feel it as an invitation, as if it emanates from something bigger than the poem or even poet. 

Then Whyte recites the entire poem again. You’ll feel comfortable when he starts over from the beginning: it is your chance to put together all the pieces that you caught the first time, and to catch more of the pieces you’d missed. 

Whyte’s poetic voice will—to use one of his own metaphors—make you feel like a snake, shedding your outermost skin. Little by little, he will peel away at your fragile defense, until you start to feel the steady warmth glowing at your core. 

Life at the Frontier: the Conversational Nature of Reality, David Whyte (20 min), Tedx Puget Sound

Holy Heck, I’m Hearing Triple!

I love it when Radiolab tells a story from the outside and the inside, in both past tense and in present tense, using different people's voices, and different recordings of the same person's voice, to create a single narrative arc that is easy to follow and dreamily immersive. 

There’s a lot of risk in using multiple tracks of the same person's voice to construct a single narrative. Such a tangle could quickly become disorienting, but with Radiolab, it's easy listening. 

Placebo is one of my all-time favorite Radiolab episodes—an hour of rapid-fire ideas and ruminations on the unknown. A great story-within-a-story starts at 32:20 and finishes at 39:05, in which Abumrad follows his father, a doctor, through a typical day at the hospital. 

It takes a while to pick out the three versions of Abumrad’s voice. First, there is what I will call his on-location voice, testing the microphone with his father. Then his in-studio voice, orienting you in the scene. Then, at 37:05, a voice that is distinct from both, in-interview with his father. Because each was recorded differently, presumably in a different space, or with different equipment, each has a slightly different timbre. 

The differences between them are subtle, but listen carefully and you can pick them out. Then notice how each one makes its own contribution to the story.

In film these types of voices or sounds are referred to as "diegetic" and "nondiegetic." Diegetic sound is sound that people inside the story can hear—in the case of radio, this is normally the on-location sound, the person speaking in a field recording. Nondiegetic sound is said to be sound that's just for the viewer or listener—in this case, Abumrad as the in-studio narrator, and the interview clips. 

In this story, as in most radio, the diegetic and nondiegetic voices fill different narrative functions. The diegetic (on-location) voice gives you a feeling of where your protagonist is and what it's like to be there. The nondiegetic (in-studio) voice provides structure, context, and background information that characters inside the story don't necessarily have. 

This story stays close to convention. Abumrad's in-studio voice speaks directly into your ear, giving you the inside scoop. Then Abumrad's on-location voice gives you a sense of the hospital environment as he follows his father through the bustling corridors. The interview clips play a third function, giving us a window into Abumrad’s relationship with his father. 

This story is brilliant because it hides its artifice well. You probably won't notice that there are three versions of Abumrad's voice, because they parallel one another closely, following the timeline of Abumrad's day in the hospital with his father. Even though each voice was recorded in its own moment, the chronological structure of this story creates a smooth, consistently supported, and satisfying story arc that feels like a single unfolding of time. 

Any one voice alone couldn't tell this story as well as the three combined. Without the in-studio voice, the story would lack in background and context. Without the on-location voice, there wouldn't be the same sense of immediacy. And without the in-interview exchanges, we would miss the father-son intimacy that these clips bring to bear. 

Building on a chronological structure, these three voices flow naturally together. Hearing triple has never been so easy.

Placebo, produced in 2007 by Radiolab, excerpt from "The White Coat" lasts from 32:20 to 39:05