Kendall Haven is another one of those story practitioners that I can’t believe I didn’t know about till recently. His fascinating background is a study in contrasts. I’m excited to be learning about it in his responses. This Q&A will run over the next five days.

Bio: Story consultant Kendall Haven is a nationally recognized expert on the structure of stories and on the Eight Essential Elements that form the foundation of all successful narratives. Haven’s acclaimed book, STORY PROOF: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, presents the first-ever proof that “story structure” is an information-delivery-system powerhouse, evolutionarily hardwired into human brains.

For 100,000 years, humans have relied on story structure to archive and to communicate key history, knowledge, facts, beliefs, concepts, and attitudes. Evidence Haven gathered from 16 fields of scientific research (neural biology, developmental psychology, neural linguistics, clinical psychology, cognitive sciences, information theory, neural net modeling, education theory, knowledge management theory, anthropology, organization theory, narratology, medical science, narrative therapy, and, of course, storytelling and writing) has shown that this has evolutionarily rewired human brains to automatically think, understand, and remember through stories. Applying the science of story is the key to the art of effective communication for anyone who needs to inform, inspire, or educate.

A senior research scientist turned story-teller and story-engineer, Haven assists agencies, organizations, companies, and schools to master the use and power of story.

Haven has authored 30 books, performed for world-wide audiences of more than 4 million, and has led acclaimed writing workshops with 40,000+ teachers, 6,000+ professionals, and 270,000+ students.

Q&A with Kendall Haven, Question 1:

Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?

A: My undergraduate schooling, graduate school, and early work were all science-based and engineering-based, and amounted to technical applied-science research. With a doctorate in oceanography, I led a small team assessing the “environmental implications of advanced oceanic energy technologies and future energy policies” at one of the chain of national research labs.

During that time I got married. My wife has a sister, a single mom of a (then) 4-year-old. My work schedule was flexible enough so that I developed the habit of taking that boy to the park two or three times a week to play during the middle of the day. He’d romp and race. I’d eventually grow tired and need to slow him down to give myself a break.

I found that the only way I could do that was to drop into the sprawling sandbox there at the park and offer to tell him a story. He would gladly flop down into the sand to listen. I just made these stories up as I went along. I never planned them or thought about them ahead of time. I just improvised rambling stories as a self-preservation scheme to keep him quiet and give my legs and lungs a break from the running.

I swear that, every time I started a story, other kids would materialize there in the sand to listen, demanding that I start over ‘cause they missed the beginning. (As if I could remember anything I had already said.) I’d start a story and literally dozens of kids would be sucked into the sandbox like iron filings unopposeably pulled to a magnet.

Soon, adults would drift over to see why their child was hunkered down in the sandbox with this strange man who wasn’t at work in the middle of the day when he ought to be. They’d march over with every intent of calling the cops, but would arrive and say, “Oh, he’s just telling stories.” More often than not, those adults would stay to listen. There were many days when I would glance up from these stories I was making up for my nephew and see rings of 60 to 80 people standing around the sandbox to listen. There was no guarantee that the story was going anywhere. There was nothing to indicate that this was worth their while. And they didn’t care. They “got” that it was a story and they were there to listen.

Then on one specific day, it hit me — one of those “Ah Ha!” epiphanies that, if you’re lucky, you get a couple of in a lifetime. I glanced up from that day’s story at a thick ring of almost 100 onlookers and it hit me: If I sat in that sandbox and read any of the reports that I was paid reasonably good money by the federal government to create, none of these people — and especially none of the kids — would linger and listen. They weren’t there because I spoke or because it was “me.” They were there because they somehow got that it was a story I was telling. And that made it worth their time and attention — whereas a report or a science lecture would not.

I instantly fell in awe of (and much later in love with) the form and structure of this wondrous thing called “story” that held such sway and power over the human mind. Within a month I quit my job at the lab and declared myself to be a storyteller — and then, of course, had to desperately scramble to figure out how a storyteller pays rent and buys food. But that’s a different story.