Category Archives: Storytelling: Other

The question came up on the Working Stories list — how do you define “narrative practitioner?” Seth Kahan offered this definintion: For me a narrative practitioner is someone who applies the notion that human beings deal with their experience by constructing stories and listening to the stories of others. As … Continue reading →

Seth Kahan this year has started a blog on collaboration: collaboratioNation, a look at how people work together across boundaries.

I was very close to the finish line of my dissertation when I suddenly started seeing a source pop up in virtually everything I read. It’s not like he was someone new on the scene; on the contrary, Jerome Bruner’s work is seminal in the storytelling world. As pointed out by a member of the Working Stories group, Bruner, in his Acts of Meaning suggests that stories are hard-wired into humans – that they are the primary symbolic activities that human beings employ in sense- and meaning-making. “There are certain classes of meaning to which human beings are innately tuned and for which they actively search.” Narrative, he says, organizes experience and “specializes in the forging of links between the exceptional and the ordinary.”

Odd that I didn’t come across his work till so close to the end of my research. So close in fact that I ended up not citing Bruner. I have nightmares that someone reviewing my dissertation will gasp, “I can’t believe you didn’t cite Bruner!”

This concept of people being hard-wired to think in narrative is important for my work, though, because it suggests that hiring managers are more receptive to job-search communications in narrative form.

Another member of the Working Stories group suggested a number of additional works that address narrative as a way of thinking. See those in the continuation of this entry. Continue reading →

The story is everything. – Print ad for the Law & Order TV franchise

I wanted to report about the Web site connected to a new book, 99 Ways to Tell a Story, by Matt Madden, but the site has MADDEN-ingly disappeared. Perhaps it gave away too much and would have hurt book sales? Here’s the (very cool) concept, as described in promo material … Continue reading →

Terrence Gargiulo, to whom I feel a kinship through his terrific book on using story in human resources (and who has a new book, The Strategic Use of Stories in Organizational Communication and Learning), has compiled a very nice bibliography of links to storytelling articles at his MAKINGSTORIES.net site. It’s … Continue reading →

Rick Stone’s story-pitching game, Pitch-a-Story, is now available. Way to go, Rick!

My local newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel, has launched an ad campaign called The Story of You. Perhaps the story aspect is why I’ve been a newspaper reader since age 7, when I read a certain piece of information about Santa Claus in Dear Abby. I consider newspaper reading one of … Continue reading →

“I don’t send postcards anymore; I send stories.” — commercial for MS Windows

Trendwatching.com has a wonderful quote in its Life Caching article, but it’s not atttributed. I’d love to know who said it: “Human beings (fueled by vanity, by a need to raise their self-worth, by their desire for validation, for control, for immortality) love to collect and store possessions, memories, experiences, … Continue reading →