What do I mean by growing a story? I mean allowing a story to develop through the process of telling it. This is what conversational storytellers have done since we began telling stories back on the African savanna:
We tell one or more events (real or imagined) to a listener;
We notice (consciously or unconsciously) our listener’s responses as we tell;
Whatever gets a strongly positive reaction is reinforced in our mind, so we’ll likely repeat it next time;
If parts of the story produce weak, puzzled, or negative responses, we try to improve on them—during this telling and/or during subsequent tellings.
We repeat those four actions the next time we tell the story, always responding to listener responses. In time, we get more and more positive reactions, as well as fewer lackluster or negative reactions.
Suppose There’s an Unexpected Response?
What if we’ve told a story successfully 30 times, though, but on the 31st telling get a negative reaction?
Notice, first, that we’re increasingly less likely to get such negative reactions, because we’ve practiced leading our listeners from one expected positive response to the next.
Second, we’ve had lots of practice turning negative responses into positive ones—so we’re likely to be able to fix the problem on the spot. In the case where we fail anyway, we learn from the experience, in time developing even more ways to monitor and respond to listener reactions.
In short, by focusing on our listeners and their reactions, we practice being in synch with them—and, on those increasingly rare times that we fall out of synch with them, we learn additional ways to get back into synch. We grow a story by by responding to our listener’s responses—good or bad, expected or unexpected.
The Basics of Conversational Story-Growing
In the above scenario, there are three essential story-growing processes:
Imagining vividly what we’re telling about;
Telling to live listeners again and again; and
Paying attention to positive and negative nonverbal listener feedback, as well as to occasional verbal feedback.
Many a great conversational storyteller has thrived by using these three processes exclusively (if usually unconsciously). In addition, each of these natural processes can also be purposefully added to or accelerated. Altogether, these three processes are sufficient to create great conversational stories!
Beyond the Basics
And yet there are other processes that matter—especially when telling longer or more complex stories. These are the several processes of:
A. Growing a story’s meaning (that is, its meaning to the teller, which may vary and evolve depending on the situation in which the story is told—and which likely will, in turn, influence the meanings created by each listener); and
B. Growing a story’s shape (commonly called "structure”):
Which episodes or images belong in the story?
How should each episode or image be presented?
How can the teller build and hold the listener’s interest—while leaving the listener feeling fulfilled at the story’s end?
Cut, Glue, Nail and Screw?
When we think of “giving a story a structure,” in our culture, we tend to think in terms of linear, conscious processes. We’ve been taught many such structures in the last two centuries, such as these two famous ones:
I. Freytag’s Pyramid (1863): Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Resolution
II. The Hero’s Journey (1949). Here’s one of many versions described first by Joseph Campbell and then many others (this one has only eight steps):
The Call to Adventure; Refusal of the Call; Supernatural Aid; The Crossing of the First Threshold: Belly of The Whale: Initiation; The Road of Trials; Return
These are definitely interesting ways to think about stories! Unfortunately, they can too easily be used as “anti-growing” forces in the development of a story. Why? Because they are temptingly close to our culture’s excessive reliance on the “assembly line,” in which products of all kinds are reduced to a list of parts to assemble.
The Alternative: Story Growing
Given the schooling most of us have received—plus the landslide of “parts of a story” discussions on the internet and elsewhere—it can be hard to realize that story-assembly is not the only possible approach.
To be sure, alternative approaches don’t spring from the industrial world. Rather, they spring from the natural world. I love the analogies based on gardening, because they recognize the key role of the gardener—who makes a garden by cooperating with the forces of nature!
All this can be summed up in a simple but powerful analogy: creating a story is like creating a "living fence."
What’s a Living Fence?
Most of us who need a fence in our lives (to give us privacy, protect our pets from danger, etc.) build fences. We build them out of non-living materials, such as metal, wooden boards, or vinyl.
But there is another method, usually cheaper if much more gradual: what gardeners call a “Living Fence.” To create a living fence, you guide a living tree, bush, or vine to take the shape of a fence. You don’t assemble it. You don’t build it. But you guide its growth.
As it happens, my wife Pam and I live just one block from a mature living fence formed by a single evergreen tree. (See the photo.) Other living-fence examples include
English traditional hedges,
Vines trained to grow dense and thick, and even
Rows of cactus.
The Trick to a Living Shape
As you can see from the pictures of the evergreen tree near our house, our neighbor built a simple structure and then tied the tree’s branches to the structure as the tree grew. The tree did the growing, but the neighbor did the shaping.
Such shapes are magnificent when complete—but take a while to grow. In return for that patience, the shape-planter ends up with something magnificent and unique. It roughly takes the shape the gardener chose (or fences the area that the gardener decided to enclose), but in a way that the gardener could never entirely predict.
In short, a living fence is a partnership between the gardener and the organic world.
The Nature of Story-Growing
And that’s the nature of story-growing. It’s not about the teller manufacturing a story, but a give and take over time between teller, image, and listener. Story-Growing is not usually based primarily on chance—but neither is it something completely in the control of the storyteller.
To me, this give-and-take between image, listener, and teller is the essence of the storyteller’s art. Great natural storytellers have discovered this again and again, perhaps without being able to describe it completely.
What makes a great natural storyteller, then? Is it some genetic lottery that some few lucky few inherit in their chromosomes?
Nope! Instead, it’s as natural—and as miraculous—as breathing in and breathing out. It’s as simple as guiding a branch along a fence. It’s as durable as a culture and as effervescent as a smile. No one can make it happen, but everyone can participate in creating it.
Story-Growing Is Your Birthright!
In short, everyone can grow stories—as long as you put “processes" above “interchangeable parts" and nature above machines. Everyone can succeed, as long as you are willing to work as a partner with the story, both guiding its growth and being guided by it.
In our natural state as early humans, this wasn’t as hard as it can be now. We hadn’t yet been seduced by the will-o-the-wisp of unlimited control over a story, nor by the one-sided model in which we expect to change our story-listeners without being changed, ourselves.
All that story-growing takes—and, in our current cultural environment, this can be a daunting “all”—is the willingness to both change and be changed. The willingness to both offer and to receive, to touch and be touched, to lead others to a big surprise while also being willing to be more surprised than anyone else.
All that story-growing takes is, then, (adapting the words of classical violinist Isaac Stern) for the storyteller to be “nothing, just a vehicle for the story to pass through—and also for the storyteller to be everything…because through you, the story speaks.”