Story-Related iPad Apps

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While poking around my iPad, it occurred to me to search Apple’s App Store for apps related to story and storytelling, so I used those two search terms to see what’s out there. This listing isn’t intended to be comprehensive, and I would certainly love to hear of other great story-related apps.

I focused on iPad rather than iPhone apps because I have an iPad and not an iPhone. Even when not designated as being an iPad app, most iPhone apps, I’ve found, can be used on an iPad; they just aren’t optimized for the size of the iPad’s screen. For example, Eric James Wolf’s Art of Storytelling podcast app is ostensibly available only for iPhone, but it can be used on an iPad if you don’t mind its small screen image floating on the larger iPad screen.

The vast majority of results that come up when searching apps for “story” are stories or storybooks for children. Here are some that are not:

Story-prompt and brainstorming tools:
Storyteller HD helps users write that next story, that next page, or that next sentence, offering “thousands of character ideas, plot suggestions, location ideas and themes. Whether the hero is an insecure bodyguard obsessed with his own mortality or the suspect a vigilante father avenging his daughter’s kidnapping, Storyteller is sure to surprise you with intriguing and original ideas for your stories. There’s no need to ever fear writer’s block again!” $1.99

Story Tiles (sorry, can’t find a link for iPad version) enables users to arrange random word tiles into fun and interesting phrases, providing more than 13,000 random words and millions of phrase possibilities. $2.99

Stories and collections of stories to read:
The Narrative App brings Narrative Magazine to the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch and places the magazine’s entire library at your fingertips, for free. Narrative Magazine, named “the gold standard in online literary magazines,” is the leading publisher of first-rank fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. A nonprofit organization, Narrative is dedicated to advancing the literary arts in the digital age by supporting the finest writing talent and encouraging readership around the world. Read stories from award-winning authors such as Sherman Alexie, Rick Bass, Ann Beattie, T. C. Boyle, Robert Olen Butler, E. L. Doctorow, Gail Godwin, Jim Harrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joyce Carol Oates, and James Salter.” Free.

SpiritRenew provides content for spiritual development and growth. Content includes short stories and inspirational articles.

301+ Short Stories for iPad offers 315 stories by more than 90 authors (with more on the way)

 in these and more genres: adventure
, humor
, ghost stories, horror, mystery
, westerns
, fantasy
, romance and love
, and sketches of life
. 99 cents.

Created to keep literature vital in the digital age, Electric Lit features video-enhanced stories by great contemporary authors like Michael Cunningham (The Hours), Rick Moody (The Ice Storm), MacArthur “Genius” Grant winners Colson Whitehead and Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, and many more. Free.

Moving Tales: “The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross”: is the first in a series of Moving Tales’ Classic World Tales. Inspired by the age-old tale of a man who becomes rich through a dream, “The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross” describes the journey of a poor pedlar woman who, guided by the shifting line between the real and the unreal, discovers a surprising and wonderful treasure. The app’s dynamic typographic layouts can be animated using the iPad’s accelerometer, and randomly selected alternative perspectives are incorporated to ensure that no two viewings are alike. Other features include Cover Flow-like navigation, the choice to hear and display the story in Spanish as well as English and compelling, poetic voice-over narratives. $4.99.

Touching Stories: Enables the user to experience four interactive stories designed specifically for the iPad. “By touching, shaking, and turning your iPad, you can navigate, unlock and reveal unexpected variations in each of these stories. Shot by 5 different directors, these interactive, live-action, short stories evolve storytelling in ways that haven’t been done before on the iPad.” Free.

Blog-like story news:
Post Ad. Story Worldwide, a marketing agency that “connect brands to customers by telling engaging and entertaining stories that audiences actually want to hear” believes “the Interruption Age — the time for traditional ads — is over. The Post-Advertising Age is what’s now and next: Great content driving deep consumer engagement; less and less money wasted on expensive traditional media (like TV) as free media take over. It’s inevitable, it’s a good thing, and it’s already upon us…as this app aims to prove.” Free.

Tools for writers/creators of stories (and other genres):
Story Tracker helps writers keep track of stories, novels, poems, scripts, and articles submitted to publishers. “Many magazines, journals, or other markets for your work don’t allow simultaneous submissions,” the app’s description says. “When you’re juggling dozens or even hundreds of stories, it’s easy to make an embarrassing mistake. Keeping track of it all can soon become a nightmare.” $9.99

StoryPages is “for anyone that wants to create illustrated stories or guides of any kind and deliver them quickly and easily. StoryPages lets you create storyboard style pages with your drawing in a top panel and typed text in a bottom panel like a storyboard used during movie production. Draw in fullscreen (landscape or portrait) and optionally add a background to set the scene or use as a tracing template with transparency control. StoryPages can be used for sketching movie scenes, animations, and comics. Use it for keeping a record of your product ideas, visual instructions (for hardware, electronics, contractors and landscapers), help files, construction and restoration projects, teacher curriculum, travelogues, hobbies, dream recording and more.” $2.99

Successful Novel Plotting is described as a productivity app, but it seems more like a book to me. From the description: “This authoritative guide will help steer new writers through the minefield of the writing process. Using examples from her own work, and that of other top authors, [author] Jean [Saunders] explains how to create memorable characters, generate cliffhangers and keep up a pace that will hook readers. And when you’ve done that, she even gives advice on how to work with publishers and editors to make your novel a best seller.”

This site offers a collection of apps for digital storytelling on the iPad.

Shelly Terrell offers 17 Digital Storytelling & Literacy Apps/Resources, some of which are targeted at children, but others of which work for general audiences.

Lots of diary and journal apps also are available. Search for “diary” and “journal” at the App Store to see them.

Highlights from the World of Visual Storytelling, Part 1

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Back in the spring, Layton Payne wrote a blog entry declaring that Visual Storytelling [Is] Now Mainstream. The blogger was specifically referring to visual storytelling in the form of graphic novels, which are undergoing significant growth. But if visual storytelling in graphic novels is growing, it is also growing in numerous other manifestations and venues. Here’s a partial sampling from the last several months; look for Part 2 of this post on Oct. 10:

    1. Online and multimedia storytelling from the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners, which the site 10,000 Words says, “show that the traditional print stories can be married with multimedia and online projects to create a more dynamic and enticing story package.”
    1. Photography of Ryan Schude: “Focusing around a conceptual and narrative framework, Ryan blends a fine art background with a more produced look to create multiple stories within each photo,” says gismullr (Twitter handle).
    2. An Atmosphere Excavated by John Becker: “Architecture graduate John Becker’s final project involved creating the future headquarters of a fictional company that sells bottled water harvested from dew. The Columbia University School of Architecture graduate also constructed an invented history of the brand, but based the story on the real-life practice of collecting water in “dew ponds” and set the story in a real location in southern England.”

    1. Dialoogle (pictured above) is creative tool to kick-start, renew, diversify and qualify communication in dialogues and group conversations. Dialoogling makes use of a series of picture cards with motives created to stimulate associations, inspire creativity, and facilitate versatile linguistic formulation of feelings, perceptions and ideas.
    2. Renee Byer: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photojournalist, on the story telling power of photography. Byer isn’t the world’s most accomplished presenter — she mostly reads her notes, and the video is subtitled, perhaps because Byer speaks quickly — but about four minutes in, her presentation gives way to simply showing samples of her photographs and giving only the titles so that viewers can explore the emotions the images evoke for them.
  1. Imaginative Landscape Pictorials: Michael Vincent Manalo’s Wondrous ‘Tales from the Story Teller’ “feature beautiful photographs, some of which have been digitally manipulated to create a unique image,” says the site TrendHunter. “The images feature people with their backs to the camera, staring into their various landscapes.” (sample at left)
  2. Voices of Haiti is a photo essay by Jeremy Cowart. who says:

    After the 7.0 earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12th of this year, I was deeply moved as most of you were. For days I watched as the television flashed images of gloom and doom… dead bodies, crumbled buildings… It just felt like a heartless display of numbers and statistics. “How were the people feeling?” I wondered. I was tired of hearing endless reports from strangers that just arrived to this devastated nation. So I decided to go to Port-Au-Prince myself and ask them directly. My question was simply “What do you have to say about all this?” This photo essay reveals the many answers to that question.

  3. Florian de Visser’s paper art storytelling. de Visser says his “projects are storytelling and always contextual, at any scale level. I like to look at the world with eyes wide open, to give the ordinary a twist and make it extraordinary. I try to trigger people’s imagination of their environment. Fiction and reality can never be seen separately.”

Story Prompts Derived from Data

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In a blog entry back in the spring, Tony Hirst suggested some interesting story prompts that spring from data.

For example, map-based journey: “Given a trail, what can you tell about the journey that was taken and what happened on that journey?” Hirst asks.

This notion happened to resonate with me because I had recently wanted to express to my social-media friends the challenge of a particular bike ride Randall and I like to do. It’s a very steep hill with several switchbacks, but I didn’t feel I successfully conveyed the elevation and challenge of this ride. Photographs failed to communicate how high up we were. I used a Google satellite map that showed the switchbacks, but I still think I missed the mark.

Hirst suggested MapMyRide for telling the story of the ride. I’ve used the site before, but this time I fiddled with it for about a half hour and could not figure out how to show the route I wanted to show. Same for Hirst’s other suggestion, EveryTrail, which seems to work best with a GPS device. (However, if you look at the images in Hirst’s entry, you can get a sense of what I might be able to show of our ride if I weren’t a dunce using these sites.) Interestingly, “Tell a Story” is one of the tabs for constructing an EveryTrail route. So, given my ineptitude with these two apps, the best I could manage was a terrain map of the route (right), showing that we bike to an elevation of 2,000 feet.

But the twist Hirst suggests for these journey-related is to look up routes mapped by others and speculate on the story of the trip. He discusses the site GarminConnect, “where folks share all kinds of personal data:”

Running a Google search for site:http://connect.garmin.com/activity/ should turn up all sorts of results pages, which leads to one possible data driven storytelling assignment — given a Garmin connect data journey, what happened to that person on their journey?

Similarly, Hirst suggests Daytum, a personal data-logging site. In finding someone’s Daytum information, “what story can we tell about a day in the life of this person, inspired by what they spend their time doing?” Just as he suggests searching for the journeys of others to prompt stories about them, Hirst proposes performing the search site:http://daytum.com/ to “turn up a random selection of public data profiles around which we can ask: what’s this person’s story? (Or we may go one further: pull down two random profiles, and tell a story about their life together, how they met, etc etc.)”

Hirst shares a few data-driven story ideas from others:

Another way to integrate Google Maps and your childhood home into a story-like experience is with the recent viral video project, The Wilderness Downtown, featuring the song “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire (“The lyrics of the song refer back to the days before instant communications when we used to write letters and the anticipation of waiting for them to be delivered,” notes the the blog for the company Delvinia). Other bloggers have suggested that readers view the video before reading more about it, so if you haven’t experienced it yet, you may want to try that before reading further. (Supposedly, the video needs to be viewed on Safari or Chrome; when I tried it on Safari, it was still only 97 percent loaded after 4 hours — yes, you would think I would have given up sooner — but loaded in about a minute on Chrome). NPR and Delvinia describe the experience:

As the video plays, browser windows open and close, sending a flock of birds scattering to the movement of your mouse. You’re invited to interact with the video, writing postcards to your younger self and sprouting vines from your cursor. [Delvinia: “After drawing the message with your cursor, the animated birds fly in to roost on the type before flying off into another one of the panes.”] … Type in the address of your childhood home, and Google Street View personalizes the video for you [“a Google Maps satellite view and rotating Street View images appear based on the address chosen,” notes Delvinia]. … As the music swells, a browser window opens, showing a young man running down the street. It closes and reopens throughout the video. [Delvinia: “The song climaxes with animated trees exploding into view on the paved streets within the Street View image captures. The experience continues by ‘Sending your Postcard Downtown’. The digital postcard has a unique URL that the user is asked to bookmark, this is where they will receive digital postcards from other users. The postcards will also be used as live concert visuals during Arcade Fire’s tour. Some postcards will be made into printed cards on special paper that contains birch tree seeds and distributed at concerts. Plant the cards and a tree grows.”

Delvinia states: “The term ‘transmedia’ has been adopted to describe these experiences, as stories are presented across a number of media platforms with multiple paths, entry and exit points available to the viewer.” I’m not sure The Wilderness Downtown is quite at the transmedia level, but it is certainly an interesting, high-tech storied use of data.

Corporate Reticence to Tell Stories, and How a Story Matrix Can Help

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Why have I never encountered David Hutchens until recently? I was captivated by his article, Applications of Narrative and Storytelling as an Organizational Discipline; or Why Organizational Communication in the 21st Century May Find its Salvation in Talking Animals, which he initially created for the 10th Anniversary Edition of Outlearning the Wolves, one of his series of Learning Fables.

Why did this piece knock my socks off?

  • Because it is exceedingly well written.
  • Because it weaves didactic and essay-like writing with actual stories.
  • Because it presents brilliant ideas.

This piece is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Hutchens offers those interested in organizational storytelling and related concepts. He presents the article, Telling Stories, Making Meaning, his Learning Fables, simulation games with story elements (used to teach management concepts), and a charming story of himself and his career.

But let’s talk a bit about Applications of Narrative and Storytelling as an Organizational Discipline; or Why Organizational Communication in the 21st Century May Find its Salvation in Talking Animals.

Hutchens talks about how hard it is for corporate types to tell stories (“Storytelling is innate and intuitive, and yet I encounter a lot of people who feel anxious about it.”) and speculates on the reasons:

So what is it about the corporate setting that often makes it an inhospitable environment for narrative? Would telling stories simply have taken too long for this group of time-crunched executives or perhaps left them too emotionally vulnerable? Would their open-ended tales from the trenches have been too ambiguous for a culture that demanded precision and correct answers? Or have the PowerPoint body snatchers finally assimilated all of us so that we can now speak only in bullet-pointed reductionism?

One of the sticking points, Hutchens notes, is anxiety over which is the right story to tell. That’s where his Storytelling Matrix comes in. He describes four kinds of stories (read the article to learn the role of the storyteller, role of the audience, and examples for each of these four):

  • Literal Stories: Descriptive stories that exist in the present reality with buried connections.
  • Allegorical Stories: Stories that take place in a distant reality and have buried connections. They include fairy tales and movies such as Star Wars.
  • Transformational Stories: Stories that take place in the present reality with the connections made explicit.
  • Aspirational Stories: Stories in a distant reality with the connections made explicit.

I highly recommend you read Hutchens’s article and spend some time poking around his site.

Free Guide to Journaling Offered

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The site Women’s Memoirs is offering a free 22-page book, Journaling Essentials: Everything You Need to Know to Start by Amber Lea Starfire.

Here’s what’s in the guide includes:
Seven Wonderful Benefits of Journaling: Each benefit comes with an exercise and space to conduct the exercise. The benefits Starfire discusses are:

  1. Self-Care
  2. Catharsisand Emotional Healing
  3. Clarity
  4. Making Meaning of the Meaningless
  5. Personal Growth
  6. Holding Onto Memories
  7. Sharing Memories: Writing for Others
  8. Enhanced Creativity

Starfire offers chapters on Getting Started and Staying Started, with exercises for both, along with a piece called Schedule a Time Just for YOU.

Noting that there are really no rules, just guidelines, she offers guidelines in a chapter called Rules of Journal Writing.

My favorite chapter includes 20 Writing Prompts and also offers Inspirational Quotes

Finally, Starfire provides a small collection of links to The Journal Writing Community.

Download the guide here. (Look for a box with the book cover on the right side of the page; enter your name and e-mail address to download the PDF.)

Personal Branding is Dead?/Long Live Personal Branding

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Through a blog post from my colleague Karen Katz, I learned that Mitch Joel had declared personal branding dead. Though his headline was “Personal Branding RIP,” he actually said personal branding as a concept has lost its way — and, as I didn’t realize until later, he made this statement back in February.

The kinds of criticisms Joel leveled at the way some individuals brand themselves could be addressed through storied branding. For example, he says that “Those that were doing it well, were doing it authentically and with true passion.” Given that one of the best ways to express passion and authenticity is through story, it’s possible those Joel admires are telling their stories well in their branding messages.

However, Joel asserts that “we’re moving ever-closer to the point where most individuals are expressing their Personal Brands in ways that make them look more like sterile and plastic TV news anchors than original thinkers. … there is an ever-growing group of those who come off as fake, insincere, and simply out for their own personal gain. In short, they seem and feel like plastic and taste like vanilla.”

A major part of Joel’s critique — as well as that of the many commenters to his post — is that people are not being themselves in their personal branding.

But as one commenter points out, Joel’s argument suffers from a lack of examples — a lack of stories, if you will — of both those who are communicating their personal brands well and those who are doing it poorly.

By contrast, Josh Hyatt, in an article in the Aug. 16, 2010, Fortune, offers stories of folks who are branding themselves well and those who’ve made mistakes. The specific thrust of these case studies is folks who are striving to build a “brand within a larger brand,” in other words, within their employers’ brand. This set of stories about personal branding is a bit unusual — and refreshing — in that Hyatt barely quotes any experts on personal branding and simply presents the stories.

Among lessons learned by the protagonists of these stories:

  • Be sure the values expressed in your branding align with those of your employer.
  • Choose discretion over self-promotion.
  • Be sensitive to changing priorities.

But getting back to Joel’s post and the many, many comments it received … Most of the critiques lodged against current personal branding could be addressed with storied personal branding:

  • Commenter Martin Lessard cites Tara Hunt, who substitutes “personality” for personal branding. The implication is that expressing your personality is the best kind of personal branding. One of the best ways to express your personality is to tell your story.
  • Ryan Henson Creighton observes that “we wear social masks to hide our personality warts (and in some cases, our real warts … know any Facebookers who use their baby pictures or high school grad photos as their profile pics?) … People are too afraid to look foolish, to appear selfish, or especially to posit an opinion that later turns out to be wrong.” Ulp, guilty as charged. I often use childhood photos of myself in profiles. Although I like them better than adult photos of myself, I don’t think of myself as so much hiding as paying homage to my dad and the wonderful black-and-white photography he did. I’m also wary of expressing my opinion, not so much out of fear — in our very politically polarized society — of being wrong but out of fear of offending someone. I do not have enough courage of my convictions. I like Creighton’s parting words: “Be ugly. Be wrong. Make mistakes. Show your warts. Generate healthy and helpful debate. And be brave enough to admit your mistakes…” In other words, tell your story.
  • The comments to Joel’s post contain an undercurrent of disdain for all the “experts” who write didactic posts on such topics as how to Twitter properly and how to blog properly. Paul L’Acosta writes: “Twitter asks “What’s happening” and if John Doe wants to say “I’m eating ice cream. Man, this thing is cold!”, JUST LET HIM DO IT!” I so agree. Every time I see a blog post telling folks how they should be doing social media, I read it as the author saying, “This is how I do social media, and you should do it this way, too.” Indeed, Ryan Rancatore notes, “some of the strongest personal brands out there today have been created unintentionally and organically by people who’ve never heard or cared about the term.”
  • Ramsey Mohsen cites a wonderful Joseph Campbell quote: “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” You can express who you are through story.
  • Scott Scanlon offers his report, Personal Branding is a Joke.
  • Will Burns asserts, “The word “brand” should be no way near the word ‘Person’ (or any derivation therein) ever. It cheapens our humanity.” Perhaps “storytelling” is less cheapening.
  • Kevin Dees says, “The people who follow me .. don’t see me as a ‘name’ or ‘brand’, basically something you buy from the store. They see me as an experience or a memory or someone they can relate to…” Experience/memory = story.
  • Dennis Van Staalduinen argues that “brand is by definition IMPERSONAL.” Not when it’s storied, I assert.
  • By way of promoting his company’s “platform for folks to build their brand with,” Josh Fendley cites Kevin Dugan, who uses this platform for his personal brand. It’s a clean, attractive site that nicely aggregates Dugan’s social-media presence. But I get no sense of who Kevin Dugan is or what his story is.

So, how do you create a storied personal brand? Just a few possible resources include:

A Broader Spectrum of Business Novels

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I recently recapped the “business novels” I’ve covered here on A Storied Career and then received an e-mail from Omar Adams with a link to 50 All-Time Best Business Novels.

I thus realized that perhaps I need to more specifically define the kind of business novel I’ve written about here. I write about novels that employ a story, parable, or fable to convey business principles or lessons. Of course, there are plenty of novels in business settings, but most aren’t explicitly trying to teach a lesson. On the list Omar shared with me, “my” kind of business novel is called “Business ‘Parable’ Novels, written by well-known business experts and consultants, aim to illustrate principles of success.” Interestingly, not one of the titles in this category has appeared in my previous entries about business novels.

Other list categories include Tales From The 18th and 19th Century; Novels With Philosophical Perspective; Stories of Personal Crisis, Disillusionment, and Sometimes Redemption; Business Novels With A Touch of Romance; and Business Novels With Mystery and Suspense. All worthy categories and examples of storytelling, but perhaps not applied storytelling.

Here are the parable-type novels from the list Omar shared:

The Goal Written in a how-to, piecemeal style wrapped in narrative fiction, Eliyahu Goldratt’s novel is able to delineate his philosophy through the story of a man who tries to build his marriage and business.

It’s Not Luck This is the sequel to Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. Alex Rojo, the main character, must figure out the most profitable way to sell his companies while trying to manage his personal life.

Getting Naked Patrick Lencioni tells the story of fictitious consultant Jack Bauer. He learns to use the “naked service”model for his business, which changes his life forever.

Critical Chain Eliyahu Goldratt continues his series of business novels, building on the Theory of Constraints. This novel again questions the theories of conventional management.

Necessary but not Sufficient This is another novel by Eliyahu Goldratt about the Theory of Constraints. It discusses many of the pressures and challenges of high-tech companies.

The Deadline Consultant Tom DeMarco uses creativity with deep insight to deliver this story commenting on the principles that affect software development. Mr. Tompkins, the main character, divides his company into eighteen teams and force them to compete with each other and a deadline.

Selling the Wheel Business novel bestseller Jeff Cox uses a narrative approach to give advice on how to best sell a company to customers. Told from the point of view of Max, this story tells how four different types of business men help him reach success.

The Small Business Billionaire Frank Mills is struggling with his restaurant when a robbery takes place. Fortunately, a young millionaire comes along to give him advice.

The Cure The widget company Essential is on the verge of losing clients because of incompatibility between its employees. Will the three main players join forces just in time?

Under the Gun Jack Griffin is a young entrepreneur satiated with the sudden success of his company. However, will the same things that brought about his success bring consequences later down the line?

The Time Seller This hilarious quick read talks about selling time in a bottle.

Miller’s Bolt Jim Manion is a good worker, but he doesn’t seem to be appreciated by his co-workers. Fortunately, Peter is willing to help save his career.

Jack’s Notebook Jack Huber’s daydreams about starting his own business as a professional photographer. Unfortunately, he’s not too experienced–until a mentor comes along.

The Venture Michael DiGabriel’s video production group has been downsized. They decide to build their own production company while learning a lot on the way.

The Squeeze This novel tells about the struggle of a small family-owned Midwest manufacturer. Fortunately, he learns about sustainability.

Meanwhile, I came across yet another one, The Ginger Bread Man, “the story of a young man who leaves a faceless job in a cubicle to pursue the personal craft of baking. He faces several everyday challenges that help him follow his heart and grow into a life he truly enjoys. At its root the book is about learning who you are and finding joy in a career that suits your skills and personality. … The Ginger Bread Man is about our quest to live up to that creativity in our daily lives. … The book also contains several discussion questions suitable for book clubs and classroom use.” (The several typos in the book’s Web page, corrected here, concern me a bit about the book.)

A Passion for Writing? Time Management and Purposeful Living

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I recently read of someone’s passion for writing, and it gave me pause. Writing is integral to my existence, but do I have a passion for it? When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade, when I wrote a story that was published in the school paper. The fact that my father was a writer was a key influence. Since I moved out of the retail and clerical realm, virtually all my jobs have had writing as a key element. I’ve written eight books and countless articles. But do I have a passion for writing?

I would have to say that my relationship with writing goes beyond passion. It’s simply part of my identity, part of who I am, something that is in my DNA. I often say writing is like breathing for me; it’s just something I have to do.

And that brings me to time management. Ever since our big move to Washington state, I’ve had a barometer of how “busy” I am. It’s an e-mail list I belong to that contains queries by reporters. Expert sources can publicize and promote their expertise by responding to appropriate queries. I receive e-mails three times a day from this list. Since we left Florida, I have deleted every one of these e-mails without reading it.

As I wrote about here, I’ve also often felt too busy to give this blog my best effort. I could rationalize by saying I come nowhere near making a living from this blog; the money I earn from the advertising it carries amounts to pocket change. Yet, if I truly had my druthers, I would spend the bulk of my days researching material for and writing for this blog.

My best friend is an expert at time management, and her favorite rule on this subject is “Do what you love. Don’t do what you hate.” What could comprise better time management than spending our time doing what we’re passionate about and avoiding what doesn’t make us happy?

Still, living in a rural woodland is pretty labor-intensive. My husband does a lot more work here than I do simply because he has skills I don’t have. But I have plenty of regular chores, as well as house-finishing activities that are within my skillset. The beauty of nature here also beckons, saying, “Come outside. Enjoy the beauty. Go for a bike ride or hike.”

In the end though, applied storytelling is my passion. Writing about it goes beyond passion. I must constantly strive to balance the have-tos of my life with the activities that stoke my passions. Today, I rededicate myself to doing what I love.

What’s your passion, and do you spend as much time on it as you want to?

PS: NPR recently ran a story on why writers write.

Yet Another Story Formula for Job-Hunting and More (Plus: Transferable Skills Stories)

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Every time I come across someone’s suggested story formula, I ask myself whether the structure could be applied in job-search stories. Most of the time, they can, and I’ve written about many of them.

Here’s another one posed by Marc Stoiber on MediaPost, along with my italicized comments on how each step could apply to a story told in, say, a job interview:

Foreboding — a vague sense that something isn’t right: You begin to sense a problem in your workplace that needs attention.

Triggering event — a moment that causes us to act: The problem comes to a head, and you decide to take action.

Epiphany — the curtains draw back and we see clearly: You figure out the best action to take.

Reconciliation — we act to bring reality in line with our vision: You take action to solve the problem.

Transformation — we grow based on the experience: You improve your workplace and develop yourself as a a valuable contributor.

Return and responsibility — we bring our new wisdom to daily life: You apply what you learned as a result of solving this problem to your everyday work life.

Meanwhile, on Glassdoor.com in an article called The Myth Of Transferable Skills, Liz Ryan complains about job-seekers who submit meaningless lists of their “transferable skills” in job-search communications (resumes, cover letters, applications, and more). “People are not actually ambulatory sets of disembodied, abstract skills,” Ryan writes. “Describing ourselves as packages of skills is about the worst way imaginable to get a hiring manager excited about us.”

Ryan protests that hiring managers have no reason to trust job-seekers when they say they have certain transferable skills. A hiring manager’s concept of a given skill could be very different from that of the candidate claiming to possess that skill. The hiring manager has no way of know how a claimed skill will manifest itself in diverse situations. Lists of skills a cliched. “Everyone claims the same ten, done-to-death skills (Communication, Negotiation, Teamwork, Organizational, Writing, Leadership, Technical, Administrative, Customer Service and Process Improvement),” she writes. “We won’t make our mark sounding like every other skill-toting job seeker in the pack.” Perhaps worst of all, lists of transferable skills lack context.

The solution to all these issues, of course, is to tell stories that put transferable skills in context and describe how the job-seeker deployed them. “We need powerful stories to convey our power, battle-tested and concrete, to the person who’s reading our resume,” Ryan says. Further:

Stories, in contrast to skills listings, are loaded with context. We’ll tell the reader about that business dragon we slew (a cost overrun in Production, or a drop-off in attendance at our teleseminars) with plenty of detail about the situation we faced as we brought that dragon down. That’s when our job-search pitch has power! … Trumpeting our fabulousness sans context, proof or relevance is a waste of time. Use your stories, instead, to make it clear how you’ve made a difference for your employers in the past.

I talk about transferable-skills stories and give examples in my book, Tell Me About Yourself, starting here.

Many a Truth is Spoken in Fiction

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Fiction is not atop my interests here on A Storied Career, but today, I’m dipping into two fiction-based story projects that have implications for storytelling outside fiction. Both of these are also mashups of fiction and social media.

Erik Hare has launched a fiction project called Mythnology, which he explains here. Here are some excerpts:

Many kinds of truth are best explored through fiction. … Mythnology is set up to be a novel written in blog form. … Each chapter, after the first three, is available only by subscription. I hope to develop a community of subscribers commenting and asking questions which help guide this process through to its completion. This should be a lot of fun as the process of writing a novel (really a novella) becomes a kind of performance art, as the ancient art of storytelling has long been. … The title Mythnology is a combination of Technology and Mythology. One is based on a system of faith where the other has a core of truth in it. … I happen to believe that myths, or stories that illuminate a grain of truth at the core of them, are the strongest connections between people. If a strong society is all about connections between people and people or people and ideas, our faith in technology is certainly going to test us in ways we probably do not understand very well yet. The ancient art of storytelling, or the crafting of myths, is how we usually fill the gaps.

Role Pages is “a fictional, in-character, role-playing social network where you can be anyone that you can imagine.” Here’s how the site works:

Our members include vampires, werewolves, demons, psychics, aliens, and elves. Sign up for an account, and tell the story of your own unique character by uploading pictures, videos, and written accounts of their adventures. You can also role play with our eclectic members, and participate in the creation of elaborate multi-player interactive stories.

Exploring fictional approaches can be an effective way to work through our storied realities.

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