The importance — or lack thereof — of defining what a story is has been an ongoing theme in this blog. See a compilation of views from my Q&A subjects: DefiningStory.pdf.

My own thinking has evolved. I am certainly in favor of a stricter definition of storytelling than I used to be. I still tend to hold a fairly broad perspective on the definition of story. At the same time, I get frustrated to see many people claim “story” status to entities that really do not seem like stories to me.

For those who care about a strict definition of story — or who want to understand the perspective of strict story definers — two new methods have surfaced.

The first is an entire Web site, The Story Test, developed by the folks at Anecdote. The site presents 10 examples and asks the user to choose “yes” (this is a story) or “no” (it isn’t). You don’t get Anecdote’s view of the “correct” answers until you go through all 10 examples. I scored a 7, meaning I’m “on my way and with a little more work, I’ll be spotting stories all over the place.” (I also went through the examples very quickly, skimming them because I wanted to see what would be revealed at the end.)

The examples are all taken from real speeches and pieces of writing, and I’m guessing the authors purported all of them to be stories. If you want to cut to the chase and see both examples and explanations for how they are or are not stories, you can go here.

The other method — or test — comes from Thaler Pekar in a blog post from earlier this week. She writes:

If, upon watching a video on an organization’s web site, your description of the video is, “It’s the story of what they do”, or, “It shows what they do”, you’ve viewed a message, or a description, or lots of information, not a story.

If your response is, “That’s a great story about what the organization accomplishes,” or, “I could really relate to [the protagonist]”, or, later that day, you find yourself sharing what you have seen, now that’s a story.

Here’s another test: did you watch something about people in general, or one particular person? And not simply told by a person, but about a person, and his or her challenges, triumphs, and resolutions?