Thaler Pekar offers some great insight into storytelling.
“Your goal is to be as strategic as possible when considering which of those experiences to elicit so as to engage your listener and move them to a desired action. Remember John Steinbeck’s advice: “The strange and foreign is not interesting — only the deeply personal and familiar.”
Interview: Paul Costello – 5/11/10
Michael Margolis will be interview Paul in just a few hours. The series has been great thus far and this one promises to continue that. If you can’t make it, you can listen to via the link above or download it from iTunes.
“Paul Costello is currently engaged in the most challenging narrative project of his life. He is taking his 30 plus years of experience in creating and developing narrative methods of creating community, dealing with change and conflict, etc and applying them to the most intractable conflict zone of the world, the Middle East.”
I am fascinated with the potential of these tools, and those of Location Based Services, as vehicles for storytelling.
“So, to effectively write a story in a particular platform, one has to be aware of the way people interact with the platform and it’s vernacular.
A platform of storytelling that is just now coming into its own as a storytelling medium is Twitter. Twitter’s constraints are evident, as 140 characters only give one so much space to get a point across. However, there is another, less obvious component to tweeting a narrative that is especially important: time.
Unlike movies where the audience can experience the action at their leisure a Twitter narrative gives the author more opportunities to play with the event each installment creates, playing with this phenomenon to spur a different kind of interaction with the text than one can get with a blog. Twitter invites direct response by the audience in a way that other media do not Twitter breaks the fourth wall by inviting the audience to reply, simply by using the platform.
Twitter is not just a journaling of events; Twitter is theatre.”
Here’s another post, this one from Dr. Karen Smith, talking about Twitter as a storytelling device.
“Introducing students to narrative devices is an important lesson in digital storytelling. In an ironic turn, I have also found that “device” goes beyond the linguistic to include the electronic. Your own Twitter posts, for example, might become a type of narrative, especially when you are on a trip and incidentally (or purposefully) using your Twitter account to narrate your journey.”
“Storytellers, like series writers today, always ended their tales with a cliff hanger, so people would return to the coffee house the next night.”
Another Voice Supports Storytelling as a Key Business Competency
Dr. Kathy Hansen writes about an article by Ron Weisinger, principal of development for LINKS Consulting.
“That’s one of the points I attempted to make in my doctoral dissertation — that organizational change is rooted in individual change; thus, individuals not only need change skills but need the ability to tell stories that illustrate their change skills.”
Some wonderful advice in this post.
“Stories, sharing and storing. Life is just that. Moments where we are larger than ourselves.”
Resolving tensions between storyteller and story elicitor needs
Great post from Cynthia Kurtz.
“There is a tension in asking questions (both for and about stories) between what you want to know and what people want to tell you. These are some situations where the tension is greatest.”
“There’s one more post I wanted to do in this series on narrative mode, to write and rewrite a short snippet in a number of different narrative modes, just to show how each would turn out.”
New research offers new perspective on word of mouth
This is a fascinating look at ‘word of mouth’ and its effects on brands.
“The two basic styles of storytelling that tend to be used in WOM are “reliving” and “explaining.” When someone relives an experience, they evaluate it but do not explain why it was good or bad: “It was great. I loved it.” When someone explains an experience, they provide an evaluation but also try to explain why they felt the way they did. “It was great. I loved it. The hotel was right by the beach. The room had a lovely view, etc.”
The two story forms have different outcomes.”
