What Exactly is a “Story”?
Long story shortest: A “story” is how we tell each other about our experience of what has happened to us.
Over the last eight years, I produced an event called Tenx9 Nashville. It’s a live monthly storytelling night for the telling of true personal stories on stage. A few months after I brought it back from Ireland and launched it in Nashville in late 2013, a fella named Greg submitted a story proposal for one of our themes. The “story” essentially read like this: “I went to a conference on climate change. Here are the things I learned”…
During the last decade of doing storywork, I’ve noticed (more than once) that we all don’t mean the same thing when we talk about “story.” These days a lot of people are using that word. It’s the thing. From huge conferences to job titles to campaigns, it’s showing up everywhere.
But I find if you ask people, “How do you define a story?” most of us can’t. We say things like, “Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.” But so do poems, or songs, or science textbooks. Or we define story by what it does: “Stories are entertaining.” But again, this doesn’t get us very far.
I wonder, if I were to ask you right now, how would you define story?
“A story is how we tell each other what has happened to us. Stories are about people and the things that happen to them.”
Me hosting Tenx9 Nashville
Stories are one of the oldest communication technologies we have. For as long as humans have been drawing pictures on cave walls, we’ve been telling stories to each other. Sitting around fires, cooking food, and sharing experiences. It is perhaps our most innate and hardwired way of talking to one another. Lots more on this in the next few posts.
So what is a story exactly? In a nutshell, a story is how we tell each other what has happened to us. Stories are about people and the things that happen to them. This is one reason why storytelling is so natural and captivating to us as humans: we live life as a story. Being alive is to have things happen. And stories are how we tell others about those happenings.
This is why Greg’s submission—the “what I learned at the climate change conference” submission—to Tenx9 Nashville wasn’t a story. Nothing was happening. There was no action. Nothing that needed resolving. No challenge to overcome. No choice to be made. It was simply a list of good and valuable lessons on an important topic. “Great stuff,” I told him, “but not a story.”
In my current work as a storytelling consultant helping organizations and leaders tell impactful stories, this is a mistake I see people make all the time. And if you’re trying to inspire people to do something, these “non stories” aren’t going to deliver.
Stories are always going somewhere. Think of them like a plane. In their most basic form, they start somewhere, rise toward some peak, then descend again, eventually landing. Like planes, stories have clear beginnings and clear endings. They launch and land somewhere. That’s what makes them so interesting—we want to know where they are going to end up! How will the terrain and the passengers be different from takeoff to landing? In fact, at Tenx9, I would often advise storytellers that if the audience isn’t wondering what’s going to happen next within about 30 seconds, you are probably not telling them a story.
So, stories are how we talk to each other about our experiences of living. But why does this matter? That’s next.
