The first of this page, the part that explored three dimensions of story, is now part of chapter 2, “What Is a Story,” of the book Working with Stories.
The rest of the page is not in the book, so I’ve left it here for archival purposes.
FFP as a whole
The way I see these three dimensions coming together is in a metaphor about cells. A story is sort of like a cell in our bodies.
- Internally a cell has all sorts of complex structure (including possibly other organisms-that-were such as mitochondria living their lives inside of ours). This is like story form.
- The cell membrane is not simply the border of the cell; it is almost like a brain in its detailed control of transport and communication. This like story function.
- If we zoom out our microscopes and look at the larger tissues of the organism, we see cells embedded in the contexts of their tiny destinies, some never moving and some traveling vast distances. We see them come together, form things, move apart, die. This is like story phenomenon.
What is life? It is all of this. What is story? It is all of this.
Form-function-phenomenon is an aspective distinction, not a partitive one. The dimensions do not divide and exclude but interpenetrate and augment. They cannot and should not argue. They should only present and represent. This is wonderful because it’s exactly what stories do, and it’s why they have such a central place in human life. Stories are among our most aspective elements of thought and conversation. They deserve an aspective framework of understanding, don’t you think?
FFP and differences of worldview
You are likely to have encountered some forms of FFP already as you have explored the meaning of story. You are most likely to have encountered people saying that story is defined by only one or two of the three dimensions. This is not because they are blinkered, wrong or malicious; it is because they are people. The reason good people disagree on what makes a story isn’t that some are right and some are wrong. It is that they are looking at different parts of the elephant.
Everyone gravitates to one or two of these dimensions of story more strongly than the others, and that gravitation colors the way they think about stories and what they think makes a story a story. I was trained in ethology, so I think about cognition (and mimicry and trickery and riots and things like that) a lot, so I gravitate to a definition based on story function. I have paid some attention to the other dimensions, and particularly like story phenomenon, but I still gravitate to what I know best. Other people come at story from other backgrounds and personalities, so they experience different things, so story takes on different shapes to them. You most likely find one of these three dimensions most “true” when it comes to your own person experiences with stories.
What I am saying is that your definition of story is a story about you and your life. This means that no definition of story can be truly complete without considering all of these dimensions in the same way that no story of humanity can be complete without including the story of every single human being.
Pluralistic nonsense? A story is everything, thus nothing? I have to accept an outpouring of emotion as a story even if nothing happens in it? The touchy-feely folks have to accept a surprising chain of events as a story even if nobody feels anything as a result? Not exactly. We don’t need a melting pot of story definition, just some respect for multiple perspectives and maybe some interfaith dialogue. If you live and breathe cognitive science, read Theatre of the Oppressed. If you dream in community therapy, pick up a book on screenwriting. If you design perfect characters, read up on expert systems or indigenous knowledge. Travel broadens the mind.
What does this mean in practice? Should everybody use every story dimension in their work all the time? Not exactly. Different dimensions of story have different practical utility in different
contexts. That’s a good thing. While we should all practice moving outside the story dimension we know best, it is not always the best course of action to include every story dimension in
the specific contexts in which we are working at any one time.
- Reaching an audience? Sending a message? If your stories do not have strong arcs of story events and characters in conflict, they will not prove memorable or motivating. If you want to approach stories in that context, read McKee and Bal.
- Creating a narrative knowledge management system? Learning from your mistakes? If your stories do not present dilemmas, discoveries, surprises and solutions, they will not increase your understanding. If you want to approach stories in that context, read Schank and Klein.
- Bringing together a community? Writing to your grandchildren? If your stories do not resonate and connect in context, they will not achieve a lasting positive impact. If you want to approach stories in that context, read Boal and Bauman.
And all combinations thereof and so forth and so on. The particular combination of goals in any story work will determine the particular combination of story dimensions it can most fruitfully use to the best effect. The more we develop our agility at handling various combinations, the stronger our ability to carry out effective story work.
Where FFP came from
A word about how these dimensions arose. The Knowledge Socialization group at IBM Research, of which I was a part, was formed in 1999 to address issues of organizational narrative in ways that would help IBM and its clients and customers (external and internal). In the first few months we spent a lot of time talking about what sorts of projects would be most useful and doing mini-projects to explore possibilities. I was also reading everything I could get my hands on about narrative so that I could become more useful. XML was just beginning to take off at the time, and the group’s manager suggested building an XML specification to describe stories for use in organizational story bases. I’m a natural organizer and am never happier than when I have hundreds of similar-but-not-quite-identical things to put into little piles. So I set to work.
How to begin deciding what metadata people might want to collect about stories? The idea of classifying and deconstructing stories is not new. Aristotle proposed three fundamental elements of which all stories are composed. In 1916 Georges Polti proposed that all stories could be classified into thirty-six dramatic situations (including such categories as “The Slaying Of A Kinsman Unrecognized” and “An Enemy Loved”). People generate and exchange metadata about stories every day, in discourse, memory and anticipation. In fact, people telling stories often include explicit metadata (“metanarration”) about the story or the storytelling situation to prove that the story is worth listening to—”I’ll never do that again” or “That was an incredible experience.” [That last is from the seminal 1967 paper by Labov and Waletzsky, now available online.]
So I came up with this question: What are all the questions anyone could possibly ask about a story? From that I landed on: What are all the questions anyone has ever asked, or recommended asking, about stories? The idea was to arrive at a global list, a narrative Key to All Mythologies if you will, from which one could draw set of questions for particular contexts of use. (The Key to all Mythologies was the lifelong endeavor of James Casaubon in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, an endeavor that ended badly when he died without having found a suitable successor to take over his work.)
This was my original list of fields to consider, in rough order of the degree of attention paid: narratology, folklore study (comparative and contextual), professional fiction writing, professional storytelling, case-based reasoning, narrative organizational study, narrative inquiry and analysis, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, knowledge management, knowledge representation, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, literary theory, journalism.
Having decided on this list of fields, I found out (by asking and by following webs of citation) what were considered the seminal books and papers in each field. And then I looked for instances of metadata—questions, categories, segmentations, classifications, analyses. There were many of these, and many of them overlapped in scope and meaning, both within and between fields. Everything that didn’t start out as a question I reframed as a question. I found that looking for story metadata is like breathing: it’s everywhere. Story touches so many fields that finding new pockets of academic and popular literature with something to say about story became nearly a monthly occurrence. The problem was not to find story metadata; the problem was to make sense of the huge mass of it and reduce it to something tractable.
This was all done by hand on sheets of yellow notepaper. After I felt I had reached a feeling of satiation in every field I had intended to cover—this took nearly three months—I stopped writing things down and started cutting things apart. I snipped the sheets of paper up into smaller pieces, usually with one question apiece but sometimes with a few very closely related. Then I played with the slips of paper. I began to assemble a composite sketch of possible metadata through a sort of implicit consensus. I allowed the structure to emerge slowly, continually checking and adjusting to take account of new perspectives. At a few points I reiterated the design by taking apart the whole structure and putting it back together again.
The number of questions topped out around 400, and they formed slowly into three large groupings at the top level of a hierarchy several levels deep: form, function and phenomenon.
Exploring story work using FFP
I have used FFP many times over the years to make sense of the many explanations, opinions, definitions and arguments to be found about stories and storytelling in human societies. So my advice is, if you want to confront the deluge of information that awaits you when you consider stories, try understanding it in this way.
Here are some fields you may want to explore in your search.
- primarily story form
- narratology – Meike Bal’s book Narratology is good
- professional fiction writing
- professional screenwriting – of course Robert McKee’s Story is the authority here
- professional live storytelling
- primarily story function
- narrative in knowledge management
- scenario planning
- case-based reasoning
- knowledge representation / information retrieval
- primarily story phenomenon
- folklore study
- oral history
- narrative in cultural anthropology
- narrative community therapy – for example the Dulwich Centre
- narrative in community activism – for example the Theatre of the Oppressed
- mostly story form and function, less so phenomenon
- literary theory
- narrative analysis
- mostly story function and phenomenon, less so story form
- narrative inquiry (participatory and otherwise)
- organizational storytelling / business narrative
- narrative medicine
- narrative therapy / counseling
- narrative psychology
- narrative journalism
- narrative in law – some universities have started programs in this area; see the book Minding the Law
- narrative policy analysis – see Policy Paradox and other books
- narrative in foreign policy – see Thinking in Time and other books
Best of luck on your journey! Send me a postcard and tell me what you’ve seen. I am interested in every traveler’s view.