Narrative, Story and Plot and Why We tell Stories

Trying to describes what narrative is and what it isn't is complex. It's Oxford dictionary definition is 'an account that presents connected events'. This implies a linear timeline of a series of happenings and that those occurrences are connected to each other. Author Jake Arnott believes narrative is a powerful force. In BBC Radio 4's 'Something Understood' (broadcast on 5 August 2012) he suggests that the instinct to create stories is innate within people and that it is essential to our understanding of both the world and our own life. Narrative enables a person to join everything together and make sense of the series of perhaps random and unconnected events that make up the life experience.

EM Forster furthers this in Aspects of the Novel and explains the distinction between story and plot. “We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. The point about causality is key here.

“The king died, and then the queen died” is a story. 

“The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. 

Or again: “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.” This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. 

However, Arnott takes issue with the notion of causality and argues that Forster's insistence that story, or more accurately plot, is 'mere' causality is wrong. He believes that story occurs without anything having had to happen and that it's not just an order of events. He cites Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' as a play in which nothing much happens, and yet it resonates with a powerful sense of story.

Arnott proposes something that I haven't come across before - this idea that story or narrative can be independent of a series of events. In the programme he describes how a piece of music or works of art can have a narrative and that narrative may just be hinted at rather than formed.

I like this idea of narrative that isn't obvious and it's interesting to think about how narrative can exist without anything having happened.

Related to this, on a vicarious internet search, I found this lovely YouTube video of poet Phil Kaye. In it he talks about the first type of stories that he loved - doing impressions. He calls them 'immediate stories' that happen through changing the tone, pitch and timbre of your voice to give an entire context of belief or feeling. It occurred to me that this is not dissimilar to Arnott's idea of independent narrative.

Kaye goes on to explain his thoughts on the important question of why we tell stories. He describes the often simple intentions behind telling stories - to entertain or make some laugh, to warn, to scare or explain. This last one, to explain, is quite close to what I am researching which is the the telling of stories  in teaching.

 

Kaye suggests that we tell stories to feel alive and we do this because we like to believe our lives are a linear and predicatable set of events, which they can appear to be if looked at retrospectively. However, surrounding the narrative of events are a whole series of what-might-have-beens if, at any point, a different decision had been taken. People like to reasure themselves that they can plot out their lives and perhaps that they can control that causality mentioned earlier but there is whole area of chance surrounding the events that happen to us that makes us feel vulnerable. It is this vulnerability that is the impetus for storytelling, so we can connect with others and feel alive by marking an event.

 

So Kaye concludes that we tell stories to feel alive by making context of our past (events) whilst recognising the vulnerability that exists surrounding the narrative.

 

 

 

 

As Objects Move Around the World, They Gain Stories

Today I listened to BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. The castaway was author and ceramicist Edmund de Waal, whom I knew about through his bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes. The acclaimed book is about his ancestry and, in particular, a series of porcelain figures known as netsuke that he inherited from an uncle who lived in Tokyo.

Beautiful objects - netsuke

It was one of those radio programmes stays in your mind for a while. I think this resonance was for a couple of reasons. First, de Waal is a very personable interviewee and had enjoyed an enviable upbringing from which he pulled some evocative anecdotes. Second, he also had an interesting back story to his adult life in terms of his struggle to achieve success as a potter after he left university, which made one feel sympathetically towards him. Finally, he is an eloquent person with an economical but precise use of words that reveals a clarity of thought, which I find to be quite rare. I think that people usually overdose on information without having the time to organise and reflect on it and are therefore unable to make clear points. De Waal made several clear points, one of which - about the importance of objects or 'things' to people - I found profound.

Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes

The gist of it was this. As things, or objects, move around the world from hand to hand, they gain stories like a "patina". The objects that de Waal refers to are things that someone has made and spent time "thinking it through". The point de Waal makes is that their monetary value is inconsequential (partly because they are not for sale) but mainly because their value is "elsewhere". The value should also include all the patina which are the previous stories and also the story that you yourself are constructing through holding it. So when you pick an object up, you have two things - someone and a material and those two are the beginning of another story that adds to the patina.

De Waal also made another interesting point about the 'pleasures' of persistence and repetition at a craft, which I dwelt on and will try to apply to my cello practice!

However, it is the image of hands holding beautiful objects and somehow imbuing them with a story after story that resonates with me.

Apart from Talking Heads and Philip Glass, I didn't much care for de Waal's Desert Island Discs.

Stories are what make us human. We need to create new containers to tell the stories...

"Stories are what make us human. We need to create new containers to tell the stories." This was said by Dr Ramesh Raskar, a researcher at MIT's Center for Future Story Telling to Stephen Fry in Fry's Planet Word, broadcast in the UK exactly one year ago today as I type this. Dr Raskar was working on a sensory suit that would allow someone to experience the electronically captured movement of another person. Wearing the suit someone would be able to 'relive' the saved experiences of a long-gone grandparent for example - perhaps a relative you never actually knew. So the suit was the new container able to tell someones story to the wearer.

The quote about new containers to tell stories struck me a year ago when I watched the programme and I  have been periodically mulling it over since then. If a sensory suit is a new container, then what forms do the old containers take. Are they redundant and is that why we 'need' new ones?

I suppose that containers could be the oral storytelling tradition around the fire or the written word that replaced it, except that it didn't really replace it. The oral tradition is alive and well. My own city of Oxford is home to the developing Story Museum which focuses on performances, exhibitions and activities to support children's learning through stories. What is teh phenonmenal TED if not stories performed?

Likewise stories in the container of the printed word or books are still being published and sold. My husband alone keeps several bookstores in business.

Husband's book buying habits are out of control

Secondhand sellers now have access to international customers thanks to the Internet. New containers for books could be e-readers, like Kindle, but again they haven't replaced books or magazines yet.

I keep reading on social media that digital storytelling is replacing linear narrative. I'm reading Frank Rose's excellent book The Art of Immersion - how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories. The term immersion describes the way that audiences can become individually and collectively participatory in a narrative using different media, and able to shape and transform the story in a manner that is uniquely afforded by the Internet. For me,  the books sort of builds on Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck - the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, which amazingly was published way back in 1997. Are these (ironically) books both describing new containers for stories - ones that are digital?

I also really like Frank Rose's blog Deep Media - on narrative in the digital age. Deep media is opposite of mass media. Rose has just written his account of a recent New York conference Future of Storytelling - reinventing the way stories are told (clip about FOST below).





In his review of the conference Rose describes an  initiative where data dumps, such as real estate or sports statistics, are automatically transformed into stories by software apps (or bots). The stories render the data much more understandable to readers trying to comprehend performance and trends. So maybe our stories are destined to come from bots and not brains via books in the near future. Strange to think that the quote at the beginning 'stories are what makes us human' can lead to a scenario where ro(bots) are creating the stories.

Finally, I am looking forward to reading Jonathan Gottschall's book - The Storytelling Animal - How Stories Make Us Human which seeks to explain how stories change our behaviour.

PowerPoint used to tell a story

There's been so much PowerPoint bashing over the years (see my earlier post on this), with Edward Tufte and many others criticising the use of the software in business and education. PowerPoint is often accused of creating a focus on format rather than content, encouraging 'lazy' presentations and even being so boring as to cause death (by PowerPoint)!

However, I have just finished a novel in which one chapter is written using only PP slides. The idea of using PP software in storytelling almost seems to contradict the arguments levelled at its use in business and education.

Having an interest in the role of narrative in the lecture, I was really looking forward to reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, and seeing how she used PP in fictional literature.

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

I read the paperback version of the book but apparently in the Kindle version the PP actually launches and you read the chapter as an actual presentation of the slides rather than a series of pages, as you do in the book version (see photo below). The chapter is written from the perspective of Alison Blake, a young American pre-teen, who expresses herself in the graphs and SmartArt of PP rather than traditional prose. Part of the narrative involves Alison's take on her brother Lincoln's actions and communication with other members of the family.

A page from the PowerPoint chapter

I really enjoyed the book, which has been a tremendous success for Egan, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It employs quite a loose narrative structure where a series of short stories are linked through a shared character in each sucessive story, with an arc that comes back to first story.

The use of PP works very well for a single chapter but I'm not sure it could have been sustained for the whole, or the majority, of the book. It works so well because PP forces a different pace of narrative compared with the other chapters. It manages this by focusing on a set of significant moments, rather than the links between events. Egan, herself has said that she found PP very good for inserting visual pauses into the story, which is not something that can be done in traditional prose.

Anyway, Egan is a PP novelist having created PP fiction and has written a blog giving advice on how to tell stories using PP.

What's Still Good About Lectures?

Have you ever noticed that once you focus on something, you start seeing noticing it more? In the past few weeks I've come across two online discussions about what's good about lectures or what makes a good lecturer. These have been interesting to me as a counterpoint to all the literature which generally focuses on what's not good about lectures.

The first of these sources I found very illuminating. It's an abridged transcript of an online discussion from March 2012 amongst academics on the theme What's Still Good About Lectures. It didn't set out to be a discussion on the importance of stories, storytelling or narrative as an ingredient for a successful lecture but it surprised me how much the discussion kept coming back to it. Here are some quotes from the discussion to illustrate this point:

"Lecturing is all about telling a good story".

"My history teacher was great. He didn't 'lecture', he told stories". 

"The best lecturers I have learned from are good story tellers. They knew how to factor in their personal experiences into the content material".

"Good lectures take you on a narrative journey through the material with the message/lesson the lecturer has crafted".

"I enjoy lectures that I relate to in some way... interesting story or illustration that makes the point".

The lecturers here are clearly reflecting back on their own experiences of good lectures and lecturers which shows what a powerful impact narrative and storytelling has and how stories resonate with listeners because they personally relate to them in some way. The discussion could easily just have promoted what contributors themselves do in lectures that makes them 'good'. 

This is sort of what seems to have happened in some of the second discussion on What Makes a Good Lecturer that I came across (and I think I actually participated in at one point) The comments are at The Guardian Higher Education Network May 2012. Here the discussion was less focused (probably because with so many contributors it was difficult to follow the thread) but still one point caught my eye because it came up again and again. This was the role of performance in face-to-face lecturing. I mentioned this in a previous post as I believe the performance element of lecturing has been somewhat lost with the rise in the use of PowerPoint. Here are some quotes that relate to this point:

"Yes there is something very particular and special about the embodied aspect of lecturing. about the nature of speech, and its performance. in a world of increasingly disembodied information, I think this is all the more important, and indeed, all the more attractive for students - if they can drag themselves there".

"A good teacher can take a lecture and use it to encourage reflection, debate and participation. Your post really resonates with my own interest in teacher as performer. If you love lecturing I am sure this must be the best starting point for a great lecture for your students".

But not everyone agrees with the idea of performance and lecturing, seeing it as less important than other factors:

"I would have to respectfully disagree with any equation of good teaching in HE with "theatrical skills". Far more important are rapport with students, congruence (genuineness), caring for students, intrinsic interest in your subject, in-depth subject knowledge. Theatrical skills are not essential, but are very common characteristics of good teachers. During my research one interviewee described "showmanship is like fast-food". This interviewee also recounted stories of a very calm, yet wonderfully inspiring teacher who used subtle humour to great effect, but could not really be described as an "entertaining" lecturer".

I've seen - predominantly American - lecturers engage with their students and throw them regular questions during the lecture, creating a much more interactive environment than the standard British rhetorical performance - beloved as that might be... I think lecturers who went through the British system are often uncomfortable with the idea as it seems too "school" like (and they don't like to have their performance interrupted)".

So what to conclude from this? Well, much, but I'd like to end with another point that came up in the discussions - TED! "Aren't TED talks really lectures?" TED talks certainly employ storytelling and definitely involve performance - are they lectures? 

The following Vimeo clip illustrates the power of stories I think for a business marketing view but the point applies just as much to HE.

What's the Use of Lectures?

After a lot of thinking, discussing and soul searching I decided last year that there was a topic I was so interested in that I wanted to spend a goodly amount of time researching it seriously. Fast forward six months and I have submitted a doctorate application to a university and am awaiting a decision. I am pleased and excited for several reasons. First, because I actually managed to find the head space and time to do some reading and thinking about my topic. Second, because I went beyond my usual procrastinating to actually writing down my thoughts and creating what I think is a reasonable proposal. Third, because I was organised enough to marshall my qualification transcripts, examples of other written work, references and my CV for uploading into my online application before the deadline. In fact, I think I should get a qualification just for getting the application in. Most of all I am excited because in doing all of the above I realised how much I want to do this research. For the first time in a long time I am  interested in something for its own sake and it feels great.

My research topic is the result of being influenced by two books - yes real books! The first one is a classic research text, first published in 1972. It's by Donald Bligh and is called 'What's the Use of Lectures?'. The second book was published much later in 2010, it's by Nancy Duarte and is called 'Resonate - present visual stories that transform audiences'. These two books are the ingredients behind what I want to look at which is whether the university lecture has a narrative or story structure.

Two books that have influenced me

Bligh's book, which has been republished many times in the forty years since 1972, details the plethora of research that has been carried over many years to show that (in a nutshell) the lecture as a teaching method is only effective at the transmission of factual information, and even at this it is no better than other teaching methods. In essence, this book and many other sources describe how unfit for educational purpose the standard university lecture is.

My starting point in thinking about the lecture was a growing dismay at the poor use of presentational technologies, such as PowerPoint, by lecturers during their teaching sessions. I include my own lectures in this.  Imagine the experience of the average fresher sitting in the darkened lecture theatre on week one of their degree waiting expectantly for their lecturer to deliver the very first lecture. The average student will experience between 250-300 lectures, probably most using PowerPoint, before they emerge after three years with their qualification.

When Bligh wrote his book, PowerPoint and Keynote were a long way off. So imagine that not only are lectures not an effective method of teaching, they may have actually been made worse by the use of new technology. That's not progress.

Stories, storytelling and narrative have long had a role in education, including higher education. Stories and narrative help with meaning making of experiences. Duarte's book describes how story structures are found in many great speeches, presentations and artistic performances and how they are fundamental to communication. So if a company wants to inspire change in its employees or if a politician wants to elicit loyalty in their followers, they use narrative to connect with their audiences, create support for their vision and effect change in people.

Here she is talking about her 'Resonate' approach.

My starting point on this was wondering if Duarte's ideas could be applied in a higher educational context to the humble lecture? Surely the goal of education is to inspire, move and change people. Perhaps narrative and stories offers a way forward for the much maligned (probably PowerPoint-based) lecture.

I hope we shall see.