There goes the hand

It's morning, a few months ago, and I'm making coffee. First I set up the coffee mug with its ancient thing-that-holds-the-coffee on top, ready to receive the boiling water. Then I grab the empty electric tea kettle and swing it across the counter to the water faucet to fill it. In the midst of the swing I realize that the kettle will soon hit the mug and send it flying off the counter.

It just so happens that the time that remains before the crash is not enough to stop the hand's deeply rutted movement. The kettle goes to the faucet daily, and the hand knows its way there. But the time is enough to fit in several cycles of internal dialogue. The dialogue goes like this:

Look at that. There goes the hand.
    Yep.
The kettle is going to hit the mug and send it to the floor. No chance of catching it before --
    Nope. Too late.
Why oh why did they think slapping linoleum on a concrete floor was adequate for a kitchen in which people might actually, I don't know, handle breakable items?
    We've been over this before.
Yes, well. You see it's the yoga mug, I suppose?
    I do.
The same one we had to replace last year, after pretty much the same thing happened?
    I see it.
This has to be a judgment on the part of yoga. Do we have the right to own, let alone use, a yoga mug at the rate we've been doing yoga lately?
    I don't suppose so.
Probably a judgment then. Remember the mug that said "Beauty will save the world" and how we were sure we ordered the right size, but we got the wrong size? Didn't we decide that was a judgment?
    We did. Probably happening again.
Do we have any of those little boxes we use to keep broken things from poking the garbage guys?
    I think there is one left on the porch.
If we had put the mug on the other side of the sink this wouldn't have happened. The swing from the kettle base to the faucet is pre-programmed. We shouldn't have put anything in the way.
    Starting tomorrow we will put the mug on the other side of the sink.
You mean another mug.
    Yes. This time we should choose one immune to judgment.
The yin-yang mug?
    Probably safe.

And then the crash came.

The reason I recount this incident is not because it's funny or interesting (about which opinions may vary) but because I find it a near-perfect analogue to what has been going on as I have tried to rewrite my book. The part of me that writes books, like the hand that draws the water, has a programmed path. It has written book-length texts before, and it knows how to do what it does with or without my help. For the past two years, all attempts to change the rutted path of the book-writing apparatus have been simply swept out of the way. The only difference in the two incidents is that in the case of the hand holding the kettle I understood what was going on right away. In the case of the book, I thought I was in control of it for much longer than was healthy.

Round about October I reached the cycle of internal dialogue where I stopped trying to make rational demands on the book-writing apparatus and started observing it. The dialogue went like this:

Look at that. There goes the book-writing apparatus.
    Yep.
It has been writing for two years. All of our estimates have been nonsensical. All of our attempts to control it have been useless. It seems to do whatever it wants to do.
    I see it.
What the heck is it doing?
    Well, what did we tell it to do? What did we say when it started?
Let me think. We said we wanted it to go back to the original book and make it better. A lot better. We said we wanted something comprehensive, a reference work, a "bible" for story work.
    We actually said "bible"? 
We did.
    Oh.
That's the problem? It's writing a bible?
    It is writing a bible.
Maybe that's not all of it. Maybe the fact that it's taking so long is a judgement from story.
    All those who undertake to write bibles of story will be struck down with endless labor?
It does make sense, judgement-wise.
    Probably. So what can we do about this?
Nothing. We set it up that way. We have to let it run its course.
    But we told people it would be done a long time ago. We look stupid.
What if we release versions of the book as it goes?
    That is probably the only thing we can do.
Tell you what. After it writes the next chapter we'll start putting up what we have so far. And the next time we ask it to write, we should choose our words more carefully.
    And choose a subject immune to judgement.
Are there any subjects immune to judgement?
    I don't know.

This conversation took place in October. As a result of it I sent a copy of what I had so far (500-700 pages, depending on formatting) to a few closest confidants. Reviews were encouraging, so I planned to finish the catalysis chapter in a few more weeks, then send it to the next tier of interested parties for review.

Then I hit another snag: the rutted path encountered another rutted path. Writing about narrative catalysis has been like pulling teeth -- my own teeth. My guess is that I am asking yet another "hand" -- the part of me that does catalysis work -- to describe its rutted path. Its reply, constantly, is "I know the path, get out of the way." (And then some curse words you don't want to hear.) It has taken daily cajoling to get the catalytic agent to tell me anything I can write down. And even when it does tell me things, when I reread them later many of them make sense only to myself and the catalytic agent. I have to keep rewriting sections to make them make sense outside the rutted path. So the catalysis chapter is being written, but very slowly. I am lucky if it advances (without retreating) by a page a day. I do think it will be useful when it is done (indeed it may be the best part of the book), but it cannot be rushed.

Hence my plan to let the book out of its confinement when the catalysis chapter is done has also failed. Meanwhile the book has stopped begging to be let out and has started work with a hacksaw. It has forced itself into several emails and threatens to break out of my control entirely. Worse, as I work on the catalysis chapter the other trapped chapters keep up a steady chant of "let us out, let us out" -- all of which hampers my already glacial progress.

So, powerless, I relinquish control. The book will now and always reside in its rightful place at workingwithstories.org. I will put up new versions as the chapters become complete. If you told me I could send you a copy of the book to read, please do read the book and please do help me make it better; I would appreciate it just as much now as I said I would before. If you told me no such thing, you will find the book where it wants to be regardless.

Now we can get back to writing.

You stand now at the bottom of this blog.

As I woke up this morning I realized two things: (a) if I do not feed the blog something soon it will wither away into nothingness, and (b) I have nothing at all to say. This is a desperate situation that calls for desperate measures. Therefore you are about to see me stoop to something low, far lower than I have ever stooped before. I am going to write about pet peeves.

Yes, it's that bad. Still, I seem to be writing, don't I, and I'll bet when I finish writing I'll push that big button that says "publish post." Oh dear. Here we go.

The meek.

Whoever said "the meek shall inherit the earth" was not meek. If they had been meek, they would have known that if the meek did inherit the earth we would say "No, no, you take it" and hand it right back. Or maybe they weren't meek and they did know that.

I am genetically meek, and as a child I loved it when they said this in church. I thought it was a promise. It was only a few years ago that I realized the whole thing was a colossal bait and switch, a trick, a lie.

It's like the trick I used to play on my son when he was two and we had been in the toy store for longer than I could stand. I would say politely, "How many more minutes do you need before we go?" I said this knowing full well that the biggest number he knew existed at that time was eight. So he would say he needed eight minutes, which is to say an infinite span of time. I would then carefully mark out eight minutes on my cell phone, then show him that the requested eight minutes had passed, at which time he would reluctantly go along with what had after all been his own choice. The thing is, I only asked him how long he needed because I knew he would always say "eight." Later when he learned about bigger numbers and could have kept me in the toy store for longer, I stopped asking that particular question.

Similarly, the trick of the you-get-the-earth deal is that they only offer it to you if they are pretty sure you will give it back. There was never really a plan to hand it over, not for real. If you are meek, now you know about this too. Plan accordingly.

Birthday cards.

Are you old enough to have received any of those funny-but-not-really birthday cards that tell you how horrible it is that you are a year older? Do you find, as I do, that they get more irritating every year?

All mid-life crises rest on the critical and sometimes erroneous assumption that they are situated in the middle of one's life. I made the opposite mistake. In my early twenties I developed the idea that I would probably not live past thirty, not because I was doomed but because I was too wonderful for this sub-par world. (Oh yes I did.) When I turned thirty I had to figure out what to do next. The only logical thing was to see every extra year as a bonus. Today when people ask how old I am and I'm part of the way through a year, I round up, just like I did when I was eight and three quarters. It's all extra.

This must be what irks me about the "poor you, you lived another year" cards. When we are children everyone congratulates us on our birthdays and helps us round up, but later everyone pities us and helps us round down. But shouldn't the congratulations get bigger and bigger? If you flipped a coin and it came up heads a hundred times, wouldn't that get more and more amazing? It's only if you knew it was going to come up heads a hundred times that you would count how many times were left. My advice is: don't pretend you know, and it's all extra.

Social network analysis.

I have a love/hate relationship with social network analysis. I like the idea of studying social networks in principle, but every time I read a SNA paper I end up feeling insulted and misrepresented. I now understand why.

What happened was, I went to a meeting several months ago. It was about social network analysis. On getting to the meeting place at the required time, I entered the room and found about thirty or forty people milling around. I did what I always do at meetings: I hugged the wall and watched people. (If you want to invite me to a meeting, make it a three-day meeting. On the third day I will talk.) As I stood there clutching my protective coffee cup, my first thought was, "Wow, all these people know each other already! Am I the only one here who doesn't know everybody? How strange." People were engaged in lively chatter in small groups all over the room. After a few more minutes of watching I suddenly realized that nobody actually knew anybody. All the conversations consisted of people saying, "Hi, I'm so-and-so from such-and-such, who are you?" These people weren't at ease because they knew each other; they were at ease because they liked talking to strangers. They were social.

It was at this moment that I understood why I love yet hate SNA. The people who study social networks are social. They have to be, because if you are not social SNA is a continual insult. My social networks are the size of spiders, not webs. Every SNA paper says one thing to me: failure. The strength of weak ties: the weakness of my life. The importance of hubs: I will never be one. The importance of tipping points: I miss them all. Measures of connectedness: guaranteed low. Failure.

But I also realized another thing: this cannot be good for SNA. People use SNA to try to understand and predict the behavior of everyone, not just the social people. If only social people study social networks, SNA can never be completely useful because it will always contain a limiting bias. It would be as if only men studied women (which was once true, come to think of it).

What SNA needs is a complement: NSNA, or the study of the social networks of the non-social. If there were a NSNA it would contain many elements of interest to the non-social, elements invisible to the social. To begin with, it would not map only human networks: it would map networks of meaning.

For example, take my pond. I love my pond. Year round, I try to visit my pond at least once a week. In the summers (after bug season) I lie next to my pond, and we have long intense conversations about life, the universe and everything. I consider it a family-level obligation to watch its tadpoles hatch in the spring, clear out post-storm debris, and slide on its ice in the winter. I take pictures of my pond in all its moods. In some respects my pond is one of my best friends. It is a hub in my network of meaning. Many other elements of my social network are not people (or not people anymore): they are dead authors, ancient heroes, fictional characters, dogs, trees, gardens, streams, sculptures. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was my best friend for a few years in my twenties.

No SNA survey would ever map any of these connections, because they would only ask me about people. To the non-social this is a ludicrous exercise, like trying to understand people by cataloguing their socks. We non-social people don't connect to people much, but we still connect, and it's still social. People who say they want to study social connections and only ask about connections to people seem to me to be looking for their keys under the lamp-post, where the light seems to be -- to them. We see by the light of a different moon.

Why does this matter? Why should anybody care what the non-social do? Because we non-social people still do things, and those things still impact other people. If your work is about understanding how and why people do things that impact other people, maybe you should think about that.

Upward social comparison.

Social comparison theory studies how people evaluate their own lives by comparing themselves to others. Everyone knows that one of the reasons people keep spending too much and getting themselves into debt situations is that they are trying to "keep up with the Joneses." One of the problems today, as everyone also knows, is that due to television the Joneses are fictional creations that can never be kept up with.

So I was thinking, why don't the television people create a lot of shows about poor people, and we'll all compare ourselves with them, and we'll look around and see all the great stuff we have, and be less inclined to buy more? And that will help us all prosper more, because as everyone knows there are two ways to be rich: to have more and to want less.

But then I realized: if people stopped buying more, the advertisers who fund the television shows would be unhappy. And then there could be no more television shows. So television has a built-in requirement to induce people to socially compare up rather than down. It's a perceived-needs-amplification device. If we compare television to the storytelling of old, I don't think it had that upward-comparison bias to it. At least it doesn't seem to in the historical reenactments of the storytelling of old I've seen on television.

The question I end up with is: is there any way to flip the switch on the thing? Don't worry, I don't expect an answer.

There. The blog has been fed. We must now wait and see whether the pet peeves have killed the blog or revived it. Even poison can heal in the correct proportion.

Peaceful

It's a little thing, really. But I can't stop thinking about it.

Lately my son and I have been totally caught up in a new computer experience called Minecraft. Minecraft is a curious concoction. At its core it is a virtual world where an avatar that represents you walks around in a landscape of voxel blocks: dirt, grass, trees, rivers, caves, blue skies. What happens in that landscape is up to you. Some people use Minecraft to play a game of wits and skill. If you use the game in any of the "difficulty" modes (Easy, Medium, Hard) monsters come out at night and try to kill you as you try to survive and build shelter. But you can also "play the game" in Peaceful or Creative modes, the first in which there are no monsters and the second in which you can't be hurt in any way. In these modes the program is not really a game at all but a huge sculptural canvas.

For the most part we have "played the game" only in Peaceful and Creative modes, because we do not want to fight the monsters. Why? First, anything you practice you get good at, so does it make sense to practice hurting? Second, pretending to fight in a war is disrespectful to the thousands of kids who actually are fighting in wars. (I have in mind a social project that brings some kids who love pretending to fight in wars to spend a few days with kids who are actually fighting in wars. I wonder how much they would like the pretending after that.) Third, are we to take the word of the Minecraft creators that these monsters don't deserve to live? How do we know they aren't defending their homeland from invasion? Just because they look like zombies and skeletons doesn't mean anything. Don't lots of very nice children look like that on certain October nights? Fourth, and lastly, fighting is boring and repetitive. I did have my days playing Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager, but it didn't take me long to realize that destruction is just mostly tedium. Creation is where the fun is, in the wide open spaces of the imagination, not in the dull thuds of weapon on flesh.

So we have used Minecraft for the most part as a canvas and testing bed for imaginary worlds. For this it is an excellent system, because the program not only comes equipped with various building materials, simple machines and pseudo-electronic circuits you can recombine in endless ways, but is also extendable by writing your own Java modifications ("mods"). We haven't built a mod yet but we plan to. The problem is that you have to turn off all the cool mods you have downloaded while you build your own, and we are having too much fun with them to do that yet.

We have been using Minecraft to explore mathematics, logic, programming, engineering, architecture, art, cartography, history, archaeology, and so on. My son builds mostly elaborate contraptions: combination locks, musical instruments, alarm systems, factories, vehicles, buildings, transportation and distribution systems, mazes, automated farms. Here "he" is in front of one of his automated mining and processing facilities. We also enjoy downloading and exploring some of the many amazing creations other people have shared: castles, factories, puzzles, whole cities collaboratively built.

My explorations have been more whimsical and surreal. I've built a lot of symbolic structures: labyrinths, sculptures, temples, pavilions, meeting spaces. I have also built machines, but my machines all have Sisyphsus-like tasks, like a quarry that mines and fills the mine at once.

One joint project of which I am very fond is the creation of a Minecraft version of Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel," which we have crafted in meticulous detail and on which we are writing out the short story on signs the visitor reads as they travel around the library puzzle (which we will eventually upload for other Minecraft users to enjoy). This is both a tribute to Borges and a creation in the spirit of his "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" which is about a man who writes Don Quixote, word for word the same, centuries later. For this reason our Library must not contain one additional word that is not in the short story. Very cool.

I have been enjoying Minecraft so much that I considered writing a post about it here to recommend it, along the lines of the story games post I wrote last year about games that create useful storytelling and sensemaking materials for parents and kids. But a few days ago I thought of something that gave me another reason to write about Minecraft, as a cautionary tale about the stories sometimes invisibly embedded in the tools we use.

What lies within

Deep within this otherwise excellent learning system and fun game is a frighteningly dangerous story. You probably didn't notice it when I wrote about it above. I'll repeat it: "you can also "play the game" in Peaceful or Creative modes, the first in which there are no monsters and the second in which you can't be hurt in any way."

I'll say it a third time. In peaceful mode there are no monsters. Peace is not coexistence with the monsters: it is eradication of the monsters. It is genocide.

If you are using Minecraft in a mode that allows monsters, and then you switch to Peaceful mode, the monsters disappear. It was when I was watching this happen that I suddenly saw the story hiding inside the game. We had created a "behavioral observation world" with blinds from which we observed and discussed the behavior of the various types of monsters. My son wanted to make a change to the blind, so he pulled up the options screen and changed the game mode from Easy to Peaceful. Poof, the monsters all disappeared. It was so much like the eradication of a population, along with its culture and history, that I suddenly realized this was a perfect analogue for ethnic cleansing.

Even when the peaceful mode is set on, any "spawners" that normally create monsters still create something, as my son pointed out; it's just that the things created immediately poof out of existence again. So not only does peace mean all members of an ethnic class are eradicated, any new ones that manage to be born are essentially killed at birth.

That's a zombie in our behavioral observation laboratory, with the flame-filled spawner that made him in the background. I tried to get a screenshot of the little infanticide poofs but could not catch them; they are soon forgotten.

The creators of Minecraft could have called this mode "Alone" or simply "No Monsters" mode. Why did they call it peaceful? A truly peaceful existence would not eradicate enemies; it would transform them into friends, or at least neighbors. The more I think about this the more upsetting I find it. Millions of children, mostly in wealthy countries, are learning that peace can only come about when the people who don't look like us no longer exist.

What bothers me more than finding this story underlying an apparently harmless game is how long it took me to realize this. We discovered Minecraft four or five months ago. Why did I never notice that peace meant eradication before? I probably saw those monsters poof away in front of me ten times before I realized the contradiction between peace and removal.

In their defense I'm sure the Minecraft creators didn't realize they had told this story. Maybe it was a story hidden deep inside another story, one they had been told long ago. It's a story we've all heard before. Maybe we are telling it without knowing it.

I have been thinking about creating a "truly peaceful" modification that changes the underlying story presented by the game experience. In this mode the monsters would still exist; they just wouldn't be after you. They would live out their lives next to you in peace, only responding if you attack them. (There do currently exist some "neutral" monsters that do not attack unless provoked; but in "peaceful" mode they face the firing squad along with everyone else.)

Here's an interesting wrinkle I'm thinking about adding: an "inequality" mode. In this mode the monsters exist and don't bother you; but they have nicer stuff than you have. If you can barely put food on the table, they are feasting. If you manage to build a tiny one-room hut out of dirt, they have a castle next door made of gold. The challenge, the game of wits and skill, is to live next to the entitled monsters without letting the injustice and humiliation of the situation get to you to the extent that you lash out and bring their wrath (they would have superior weapons, of course) against your impoverished people. That would be a great learning experience, and of practical use in adult life, for the majority of people on this planet. That would be a different story hidden inside, wouldn't it?

What my son and I have done about this discovery, besides talking about building new mods for Minecraft, is to discuss the implications of such an underlying assumption and how such assumptions can seep into our perceptions and decisions and actions without our knowledge. We have asked what underlying assumptions lie under other favorite stories, like Wall-E (why did the humans feel no compassion for the earth?), Cars (why did the creators of Cars perfect representations of cars as emotion-filled personifications of people, only to claim that torture scenes in Cars 2 were all right for children to watch because "they are just cars"?), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (why didn't Santa Claus protect Rudolph from abuse until after he proved useful?) and many other of the stories we are told today.

Stories will always be as dangerous as they are powerful and empowering. The biggest challenge never lies in the creation of stories, but in the uncritical, ignorant reception of them by audiences trained to suspend disbelief.

What we see and what we build

So my son and I are reading this excellent book called Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, and so far I have found two elements that just beg to be connected to narrative sensemaking. They are both in the chapter by Denis Cosgrove on world maps.

First, Cosgrove talks about how we think of the words "world," "earth" and "globe" differently than people did in the past. To us, they all mean pretty much the same thing, but this is a new experience in human history.

"World" is a social concept. ... "Earth" refers today to the planet that sustains life; its reference is elemental rather than social.

This is a reference to an earlier statement about how people used to think "earth" meant only the element earth, as in earth, air, fire, water, aether. There was no "earth" concept as a planet, at least among most people. Cosgrove goes on:

"Globe" is a geometric term, another word for a sphere. ... The relationship between the globe and the modern world map is close. ... The modern, scientific conception of the world extends to the whole of the globe and encompasses the whole earth, which is why these three terms are now interchangeable. Any world is a totality and has spatial boundaries, but the coincidence of the world's boundaries with the planetary globe's is a modern conception, a consequence as much as a cause of maps.

I had not realized this before: that before (some) people knew half the planet's land masses existed, they still built globes, but those globes were not like ours. They were spheres built to represent their idea of what must have seemed a much smaller planet. To take one example, the globe created by Crates of Mallus, according to Wikipedia, ca. 150 BC, looked like this:

To me today, this globe looks like a sweater too small for its wearer: there is not enough fabric to cover the space.

The Hunt-Lenox globe, built around 1510, showed South America as one continent, but North America as a series of small islands, nothing more being known about it at the time. The globe belongs to the New York Public Library on whose site photographs can be seen; here is a drawing of it from the Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1874 (the image of which I found in this article).

What amazes me about these early globes is that people built a coherent representation of the world as a sphere even though they were missing part of it. They sewed together the edges of what they knew to be so as to make it into the shape they knew it had to take. This is a perfect analogue to sensemaking: we take what we know and form it into something that represents what must be. We give it coherence and form through our efforts to make sense of it. Imagine what it must have been like to build and use such incomplete globes, then find out about the New World in its entirety. It would be like us finding another earth, teeming with life, hiding behind the moon. How would our sensemaking cope with that? How would we change?

That leads into Cosgrove's second amazing (to me) statement about maps and sensemaking:

The 1972 photograph taken by NASA's Apollo 17 astronauts, unique as an eye-witness photograph of humans' home planet, ... is certainly not thought of as a "map," although it shares many technical aspects with world maps, and has influenced considerably the design of subsequent world maps -- for example the disappearance of the graticule (grid) of latitude and longitude, the "photographic" appearance, and the use of "natural" color on many wall and atlas maps today.

So our maps, our conceptual representations of the world we live in, have changed to more closely match our enlarged experience of the world.

If you are as old as I am or older, and you can remember your first sight of that first photograph of the planet, you can verify this fact. I remember globes and maps with stronger grids and less-natural colors, and I do now own and often look at maps that look more like the "real" earth, as we know it now. I had not noticed the difference! Have you?

To illustrate, this first example is from a 1925 encyclopedia, and the second is from the 2004 CIA World Factbook. I wanted to find a 1960s (or better, early 1970s) example but failed (probably because I was looking on Wikipedia's Wikimedia commons site for images I could legally copy).

Today we don't sew together what we know from maps to create a globe; we take apart what we know of the globe (meaning, today, the planet) to create maps. The grids and false colors that once helped us make sense of what we were piecing together now stand in the way of making sense of what we see. I guess the question is: what are we sewing together now?

I don't know exactly what to make of this idea -- yet -- but it has something to do with sensemaking and narrative. My mind has been clutching the idea, mumbling to itself and and running around in circles ever since I came across it a few days ago. I thought I'd tell you about it because it might spark some thoughts in your mind before my mind gets around to telling me what it wants to do with it.

Nail fungus infection is not a choice of yours.

I'm sorry! I was cleaning out the spam this morning and came across that gem of a title. I just had to use it.

What I mean by it is: here is a report on book writing progress. The book's content is between eighty and ninety percent done (hard to say exactly). The more I write the more I like it, but it is not yet done. Five of my closest colleague-friends, those who may see what I have written before anyone may see what I have written, have received "early-early" review copies of the incomplete book. All others on the reviewer list (and I thank each and every one of them for their patience) will receive the "early" version for review as soon as anybody may see it.

However I will show you the high-level table of contents, in case you have any feedback on the book's structure, and so you can see that I am still writing it. Color key:

• new writing in red
• writing from the blog (cleaned up and improved) in blue, blue for blog
• writing from the original book (cleaned up and improved) in green, green for growth
• parts yet to be finished in shocking purple

The contents:

Part One: Introduction and Evaluation

Chapter 1: Introduction

What this book is for

Why I wrote this book

This book and you

Notes on the book

Chapter 2: Why Work with Stories?

Why work with stories?

Why work with stories?

Why work with stories?

Summary

Resources

Activities

[Summary/Resources/Activities repeat in each chapter, some done some not]

Part Two: Fundamentals of Story Work

Chapter 3: What Is a Story?

The ant and the dove

Definitions of story, stories of definition

A working definition

Chapter 4: What Are Stories For?

Stories are maps of experience

Stories are sounding devices

Stories are elements of play

Stories are packages of meaning

Chapter 5: How Do Stories Work?

Stories in society

Stories in conversation

Stories in use

Stories in stories

Stories in personalities

Part Three: A Guide to Participatory Narrative Inquiry

Chapter 6: Introducing Participatory Narrative Inquiry

PNI definitions

PNI phases

PNI principles

Chapter 7: Project Planning

Mini-collection

Mini-sensemaking

Mini-return

Knowing your storytellers

Knowing your topic

Considering privacy

Chapter 8: Story Collection

Methods of story collection

Asking people to tell stories

Diverse questions for diverse motivations

How many stories to collect

Asking questions about stories

Facilitating group story sessions

Story collection exercises

Chapter 9: Narrative Catalysis

Chapter 10: Narrative Sensemaking

Chapter 11: Narrative Intervention

Chapter 12: Narrative Return

Part Four: Advanced Topics in PNI

Chapter 13: Advanced Introduction to PNI

PNI justified

PNI in context

PNI opportunities

PNI dangers

Chapter 14: Becoming a PNI Practitioner

The essential skills of a PNI practitioner

Breadth and depth in story work

Evaluations of story work

Chapter 15: Advanced Topics in Project Planning

Habits of story planning

Planning projects with the story uses triangle

Planning projects with stories in personalities

Transparency in PNI projects

Resolving tensions between needs

Practical ethics in story work

Chapter 16: Advanced Topics in Story Collection

Habits of story collection

Story collecting venues and story personalities

How not to ask too many questions about stories

When you can't ask questions about stories

Transcribing storytelling

What to expect when you're expecting stories

The story fundamentals questions expanded

Chapter 17: Advanced topics in Narrative Catalysis

Chapter 18: Advanced Topics in Narrative Sensemaking

Chapter 19: Advanced Topics in Narrative Intervention

Chapter 20: Advanced topics in Narrative Return

Part Five: PNI Stories

Chapter 21: PNI Stories from Other Lands

Collecting stories in a poor urban community (Jonathan Carter)

Helping a community market listen to its customers (John Caddell)

Evaluating effectiveness helping youth in foster care (Stephen Shimshock)

Using a specific narrative process to face conflictual situations (Stephane Dangel)

Chapter 22: PNI Stories from My Journey

Incorporating narrative into e-learning

Probing a wound gently

Holding up a mirror

We said, they said

Too much and too little

Contradicting ourselves

Shooting the messenger

The near miss

Discovering the obvious

10-15 more of these stories left to clean up

Appendices

Acknowledgements and biography

Glossary

Index

You could look at this and say, "What? You have so much left to do! All those shocking purple parts!" But of course the introduction, planning and story collection parts would be the longest. The other parts will be much shorter and faster to write, so I do see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel. I am working on the catalysis section now, writing by PNI phase, sorting into basic and advanced as I go.

The "PNI stories" should end up at between 20 and 25 when I'm finished: this will be a sort of (highly anonymized/fictionalized) "folk tale collection" of stories about things I've learned from projects I've done: not "case studies" or "best practices" but more like a trial and error parade. The format is the same as in the previous case studies, but there are just lots of them now. I have notes on all of these stories but about half remain to be cleaned up. Sort of like a nail fungus infection, which is no choice of mine or yours, just something that remains to be dealt with.

Why I am I telling you this? Because the blog was hungry; to let you know I'm still writing; because I wouldn't mind some feedback on the organization of the material; because winter is coming; because I found such an excellent spam title.