PNI Practice
These posts are about fine points of PNI Practice: tips, ideas, advice, and so on.
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Story collection habits
Once in a while my six-year-old walks up to me with a tool he has found around the house and says, “Mommy, how do you use this?” My response is always the same: “Give it to me and let me use it, and then I’ll tell you how to use it.” For a while he… Read more
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One interpretation or two?
This topic came up in our Swimming with Stories group call the other day. Swimming with Stories, if you didn’t know, is a Ning group whose primary purpose is to coordinate monthly phone calls where we trade ideas related to story listening. Anyone working in this area is welcome to join us. So anyway we… Read more
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Resolving tensions between storyteller and story elicitor needs
Here’s another question-from-a-correspondent going-into-the-book post (thanks correspondent!). The question is: how do you write questions so that people don’t latch onto the “right” answers instead of telling you how they really feel? Tensions between needs There is a tension in asking questions (both for and about stories) between what you want to know and what… Read more
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The best questions about stories – more
This is a follow-up post to “The best questions about stories” with a few more thoughts. I said in that post that I’ve observed four dominant factors that make questions about stories work. Since then I thought of two more factors (and also at the end I have a little more advice on reducing the… Read more
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The best questions about stories
This is another “came up in conversation” post, based on several recent conversations about asking people to reflect on stories they have just told. At this point I’ve seen people ask questions about stories (and then watched the responses come in) more than a few dozen times, and some fairly predictable patterns are starting to… Read more
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Transparency in story listening: when to say what
In a conversation the other day the issue came up of what to tell people about a story project in the planning stages. That got me thinking that I have not yet written about the issue of transparency in story listening projects. What should you tell people when you want them to tell you stories?… Read more
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Spam, spam, verbs and spam
Honestly, I don’t know how people do this blogging thing. My thoughts are not blog thoughts. They are not many and short, they are few and long. Every time I try to write a short snappy post it turns into an extended essay. I wonder if blogging can work for all types of thinkers. While… Read more
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From the Island of Misfit Story Ideas: Narrative divination for sensemaking
I’m working on that promised post about preserving natural storytelling (note to self: never again end a post with “the next post will be about…”). It’s stewing. In the interim here is another visitor from the island of misfit story ideas. As before this is something I’ve been playing with in my mind for a… Read more
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From the Island of Misfit Story Ideas: Universal Story Translator
(This is the first in a series of posts on misfit ideas for helping people work with stories. I think they have potential, but they have not yet found anyone who wants to fund their completion. I’m posting them here to see if they can find good homes with people who need them.) The idea… Read more
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How can one remain neutral while acting as a story curator?
Recently Thaler Pekar asked me this excellent question. This is the answer I gave her. Once I was on a train listening to conversations and I overheard a young woman asking an old man about her upcoming marriage. She said she was afraid of making a mistake. I was lucky enough to hear his answer.… Read more