A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (15 page)

“If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”

—BARRY LOPEZ,

author of
Arctic Dreams

W
E ARE OUR STORIES.
We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.

More than a means to sell a house or even to deepen a doctor’s compassion, Story represents a pathway to understanding that doesn’t run through the left side of the brain. We can see this yearning for self-knowledge through stories in many places—in the astonishingly popular “scrapbooking” movement, where people assemble the artifacts of their lives into a narrative that tells the world, and maybe themselves, who they are and what they’re about, and in the surging popularity of genealogy as millions search the Web to piece together their family histories.

What these efforts reveal is a hunger for what stories can provide—context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters. The Conceptual Age can remind us what has always been true but rarely been acted upon—that we must listen to each other’s stories and that we are each the authors of our own lives.

*The answers: Question 1—$136 billion. Question 2—Chess grand master Garry Kasparov.

Write a Mini-Saga.

Writing anything is hard work. Writing a short story is really hard work. And writing a novel, a play, or a screenplay can take years. So go easy on yourself by writing a mini-saga. Mini-sagas are
extremely
short stories—just fifty words long . . . no more, no less. Yet, like all stories, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. London’s
Telegraph
newspaper once sponsored an annual mini-saga contest—and the results showed how much creativity a person can pack into exactly fifty words. Try writing a mini-saga yourself. It’s addicting.Here are two excellent examples to hook you:

A Life

BY JANE ROSENBERG, BRIGHTON, UNITED KINGDOM

Joey, third of five, left home at sixteen, travelled the country and wound up in Nottingham with a wife and kids. They do shifts, the kids play out and ends never meet. Sometimes he’d give anything to walk away but he knows she’s only got a year and she doesn’t.

A Dream So Real

BY PATRICK FORSYTH, MALDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Staying overnight with friends, his sleep was disturbed by a vivid dream: a thief broke in, stole everything in the flat—then carefully replaced every single item with an exact replica.

“It felt so real,” he told his friends in the morning.

Horrified, uncomprehending, they replied, “But who are you?”

Enlist in StoryCorps.

In the middle of New York’s Grand Central Terminal sits a strange-looking square hut. It’s called a StoryBooth, and if you’re in New York, you should check it out. For ten dollars you can book an hour in the booth and record a broadcast-quality interview with someone (your ninety-year-old great-grandmother, zany Uncle Ted, the mysterious guy down the street) whose story you’re eager to hear and preserve. It’s all part of StoryCorps, an extraordinary national project “to instruct and inspire Americans to record each other’s stories in sound.” The effort, the brainchild of MacArthur fellow David Isay, is modeled after the Works Progress Administration oral history project of the 1930s. All the stories submitted end up in the StoryCorps archives at the U.S. Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, where they will be available for posterity. But you needn’t go to Grand Central, or even New York, to participate. The StoryCorps Web site offers StoryKits to help you do it yourself. “StoryCorps celebrates our shared humanity and collective identity,” the organizers say. “It captures and defines the stories that bond us. We’ve found that the process of interviewing a friend, neighbor, or family member can have a profound impact on both the interviewer and interviewee. We’ve seen people change, friendships grow, families walk away feeling closer, understanding each other better. Listening, after all, is an act of love.”
(More info:
www.storycorps.net
)

Whip Out the Tape Recorder.

If StoryCorps is too complicated for your tastes, try a more modest version of your own. Find a friend or relative, sit him down, turn on a tape recorder, and begin asking him questions about his life.
How did you and your spouse meet? What was your first job? When was the first time you were away from home overnight? Who was the worst teacher you ever had? What was the happiest day of your life? The saddest? The most terrifying? What was the best decision you ever made?
You’ll be amazed at the stories that pour out—and you’ll be thrilled to have them recorded for yourself and others.

Visit a Storytelling Festival.

A great way to sample the incredible diversity of stories and storytellers in the world is to visit one of the growing number of storytelling festivals. At these two-or three-day gatherings, hundreds of people—some professionals, some not—take the stage to tell tales. Some of the storytellers at these events are a bit shellacked—in a twangy cornpone kind of way. But you’re almost certain to stumble upon some amazing stories and some fascinating people recounting them. Here are seven of the best festivals.

National Storytelling Festival—
The granddaddy of American storytelling festivals, attended each year by more than ten thousand people.

Where:
Jonesborough, Tennessee

When:
October

More info:
www.storytellingcenter.com

Yukon International Storytelling Festival—
Now in its second decade, this festival features storytellers from the “circumpolar world”—the Yukon, Greenland, Iceland—telling stories under the endless sun of early spring. Some of the participants tell their stories in dying native languages in an effort to keep those languages alive.

Where:
Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada

When:
June

More info:
www.storytelling.yk.net

Bay Area Storytelling Festival—
This weekend of outdoor storytelling is one of the best festivals in the western United States.

Where:
El Sobrante, California

When:
May

More info:
www.bayareastorytelling.org

Digital Storytelling Festival—
A wonderful gathering with an array of speakers and entertainers using computers and other digital tools to craft compelling tales. (See “Experiment with Digital Storytelling” on page 125.) The festival was launched by digital storytelling pioneer Dana Atchley, who died well before his time.

Where:
Sedona, Arizona

When:
June

More info:
www.dstory.com

Cape Clear Island International Storytelling Festival—
Held on Ireland’s southernmost island, this festival attracts an eclectic mix of storytellers from all over the world. Most of the stories are in English, but some are in Irish.

Where:
Cape Clear Island, Republic of Ireland

When:
September

More info:
www.indigo.ie/~stories

Sharing the Fire, New England Storytelling Conference—
One of the oldest regional festivals in the United States, this event draws the best storytellers in the eastern United States.

Where:
Cambridge, Massachusetts

When:
September

More info:
www.lanes.org/stf/sharing_the_fire.html

Get
One Story.

Reading short stories is a fine way to sharpen your Story aptitude, but how can you find the good ones without poring through dozens of highbrow literary journals? One answer: let Maribeth Batcha and Hannah Tinti do the sifting for you with their innovative
One Story.
This publication delivers exactly what its title promises. Every three weeks or so, Batcha and Tinti send subscribers . . . one story. It’s printed as a pocket-sized booklet that’s easy to stick in your pocket or toss in your bag. The stories are usually great. And there’s an elegant simplicity to reading a single story all by itself—rather than jammed between a bunch of other stories or wedged between a ten-thousand-word article about Kazakhstan and a review of the anniversary edition of
Jude the Obscure
in the
New Yorker.
I’ve subscribed to
One Story
for a few years now—and given subscriptions (a mere $21 per year) as gifts.
(More info:
www.one-story.com
)

Riff on Opening Lines.

Call me Ishmael. That’s not my name—but Herman Melville’s famous opening line does offer some guidance for sharpening your narrative capabilities. Begin by underlining a sentence in a book or magazine. Then craft a story that evolves from this “opening line.” Or do your own form of storytelling improv by asking someone else to feed you an opening line—and then use it as a springboard for your story. You can also turn this into a group activity. Ask everyone to write an opening line on an index card. Toss the cards into a hat. Then, taking turns, have each person draw a card and, on the spot, tell a story that begins with the line on the card. In a business setting, apply this exercise to a particular product, service, or experience in your company. How can an opening line chosen more or less at random lead to a compelling tale about your offering? This ad-hoc, story-based approach might help you harpoon the big ideas swimming around on the right side of your brain.

Play Photo Finish.

Instead of using words, turn to pictures for story inspiration. Select a photo (from a newspaper, a magazine, even a dusty shoebox) and fashion a tale about what is happening in the picture. Challenge yourself not only to describe the obvious, but also to tell the “back story,” the part that isn’t there or isn’t initially apparent. Art and photography on display in museums (or on museum web sites) offer another rich source of material.

Experiment with Digital Storytelling.

Story is an ancient art—but like all art, it can be enhanced with modern tools. Digital cameras, inexpensive audio and video editing programs, Photoshop, and CD burners are allowing anyone with a story in their hearts to tell it with pictures and sound. A good place to learn these new techniques is at the Storytelling Bootcamp at the annual Digital Storytelling Festival (see page 122). (I’ve gone through the boot camp myself—and it was worth the time and money.) The Center for Digital Storytelling also has classes and lots of background material
(more info:
www.storycenter.org
.)
For other ways that technology is turbocharging stories, check out the online storytelling community, the Fray
(more info:
www.fray.com
,)
as well as the City Stories Project
(more info:
www.citystories.com
)
and I Used to Believe
(more info:
www.iusedtobelieve.com
,)
a fascinating collection of childhood beliefs.