This week’s word cloud/tag cloud based on the week’s entries in A Storied Career:

Collective Storytelling is a blog that serves as a repository class assignments for an unnamed class at NYU (maybe the class is titled, Collective Storytelling?).

The blog tantalizes with brief descriptions of the assignments, and the assignments themselves — but without very detailed explanations of the assignments. One posted idea for a final project sounds like fun:

I think it would be fun to harness the characters everyone in the world knows about — celebrities, as themselves. What I’d love to do (although I don’t have the programming chops) would be to call it “Five Celebs Stuck in an Elevator.” You pick 5 celebs from a list, and then you write a story about what happens when they get stuck in an enclosed space, and how they eventually get out (or perhaps don’t). In my imagination, their lines come out of their lil celebrity heads like speech bubbles [as shown above].

There’s a storytelling convention in TV and movie scriptwriting that I really don’t like.

If a dog — or a cat or horse, but most often a dog — is introduced into the plot, there is a better than 50-50 chance that the animal will die as part of the story.

Occasionally this story convention works, but much of the time, it is quite gratuitous.

Because I feel particularly strong empathy with suffering pets, I immediately steel myself for the possibility that the animal will be killed off by saying (aloud): “Dog’s gonna die” as soon as I see the canine on the screen.

The most recent offense was on my beloved Mad Men. The dog isn’t actually killed, but if you let an Irish setter go outside of a Manhattan office building — even in 1962 — what are the odds? Poor Chauncey.

In the blog The Mythology of Humanity, “jessaslade” recently mused about the purpose of storytelling and listed:

• To achieve immortality, of deeds and for the storyteller
• To explain otherwise senseless phenomena
• To entertain/educate
• To moralize/terrify
• To beta test new versions of reality
• To exorcise* the imagination
• To land a movie deal

(*Is that really “exorcise,” or it it “exercise?”)

It would be easy to add many items to this list, but my tendency is to go the opposite way and reduce the purposes of storytelling to just three:

• Storytelling for change
• Storytelling for identity construction
• Storytelling for sensemaking and learning

I argue that it is possible to fit any kind of storytelling into one of these three categories. Coming soon is an essay in which I defend these as the definitive storytelling categories.

In 1991, my mother came to visit my family in Tallahassee. The first words out of her mouth were, “Elly had her baby!” An outside observer might have thought she was talking about a mutual family friend or a relative. But she was talking about Elly Patterson, protagonist and centerpiece of the newspaper comic strip For Better or For Worse. So familiar and so much a part of our lives had the Patterson family become — not only to our family but to families all over the world — that it seemed just as natural to join in celebrating the birth of April Patterson as it did to mourn the death of the Patterson’s family dog, Farley, at a different point in the strip’s history.

Today the daily storyline of the Patterson family comes to end as Canadian cartoonist and creator of For Better of For Worse, Lynn Johnston, begins a new phase. I believe she had planned to retire altogether and the strip would run in repeats much like the late Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Classics. But Johnston instead decided to start from the beginning, re-telling the story of the Patterson family using her original, more simple drawing style (as she explains here, the current style had become too complex and required additional illustrators). She wanted to simplify. Here’s another article that explains what Johnston is doing.

As I sit here writing this, I feel tears welling up. I will truly miss the ongoing story, finding out what happens in the lives of the Pattersons. [Update: Johnston generously filled this need to know “what happens next” in her Sunday strip on Aug. 31, 2008.] On the other hand, I don’t think I started reading the strip until the two older children, Michael and Elizabeth, were preteens, so I’m looking forward to learning more of the backstory.

I also want to thank Lynn Johnston for all the years of pleasure and peak emotional moments this compelling, engrossing, warm, family story has brought me and my family. I grew up on serialized comic strips — Brenda Starr, Winnie Winkle, Gasoline Alley, Rex Morgan, MD, Mary Worth — another early indication that stories are everything to me. Not many of them are still around, or at least they are not widely syndicated, and I miss them.

It is truly amazing how much of a touching, involving story can be conveyed in four panels in a daily newspaper. Thank you, Patterson Family, and thank you, Lynn.

Here’s this week’s A Storied Career word/tag cloud from Wordle.net:

My mother’s side of my family has long been tantalized by the mystery of what became of my great-grandfather, Walter Scott Fenimore, who disappeared after leaving for work in Beverly, NJ, without a trace in September of 1913, leaving my great-grandmother, Katharine Hathaway Fenimore, after whom I am named, and her four children. My grandfather, H. Haines Fenimore, being the only male offspring, was left to support the family.

Speculation about Walter Scott Fenimore’s disappearance has suggested he was an alcoholic and that perhaps he ran off to Alaska, maybe to prospect for gold.

My mother’s family has always known little of the circumstances of my great-grandfather’s disappearance until recently when my sister Robin began to do some digging and found the newspaper clipping shown here (his middle initial was mistakenly reported as “F.”) that relates that $500 in bail money also disappeared with my great-grandfather. I had never known he has a justice of the peace, similar to a judge of today.

A subsequent clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sept. 24, some two weeks after his disappearance, noted that he had been the “committing magistrate” for the city of Beverly, and “the records of important cases that came before his court are said to be much complicated because of his continued absence.” The clipping mentions a sensational case involving the shooting of a National Guardsman, allegedly by a chauffeur who cited the attentions of the Guardsman to the chauffeur’s wife. It was the Guardsman’s bail money that disappeared with my great-grandfather.

Could his disappearance have been related to that case or another case before him as a judge? Perhaps the story will continue to be unraveled.

Thought it would be nice to have a daily lit quote as an entry:

Here’s this week’s A Storied Career word/tag cloud from Wordle.net, produced during Tropical Storm Fay after four straight days of rain:

The folks at ethos 3 Communications specialize in using stories in presentations, as evidenced by their blog, Presentation Revolution: Revolutionizing Presentations Through Storytelling.

They also offer a nifty 22-page book, StoryBored: How to Improve Your Presentations Through Storytelling, as a free download. The booklet has a fun layout/design and lots of great ideas. Here’s what the ethos 3 folks say about it:

Check out the Ethos3 eBook on how to improve your presentations with storytelling. It will take your presentation to the next level. It has all the tips, tricks, and hacks you need to succeed with your next presentation.