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Do I even have a story to tell? If I do,
how do I find the right one?
These are the two burning questions we are going to
answer next, and to do that, I’m going to break the answer into two distinct
processes: collecting and choosing.
The first process is
story collection.
Story collection is about generating story
ideas without regard for whether they’re any good or appropriate or useful or
even tellable. Story collection is good old-fashioned brainstorming, but with a
few tools to help you avoid the intimidation of the blank page.
The second process is
story choosing.
Not all stories will work for all
situations. I once had to give a speech at my high school National Honor Society
banquet and, after procrastinating until the last minute, decided to tell a story
about a clogged drain. Don’t ask. But, yes, it was as ill-received as you might
think. I learned the hard way that finding a story is one thing; choosing the right
story is another.
Good story finding is a combination of both collecting and choosing.
Finding the Story, Phase 1: Story Collecting
Have you ever tried to get a story from an elderly relative? I once asked my
grandmother about the Great Depression. I needed to write a paper for a school
project. I sat down with her, paper and pen in hand, tape recorder ready to
capture every last detail of the stories she would no doubt unleash on me.
I asked her, “Grandma, tell me about the Great Depression.” Then I braced
myself, pen ready.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she mused. “It was good.”
And that was it. That was all she had to say.
I remember staring at her. After all, that was the opposite of everything I’d
heard about the Great Depression. Depression was in the title, for heaven’s sake.
It wasn’t the Great Good. Not only was I immediately concerned for my grade
on the paper, I was also super disappointed and frustrated. I knew my grandma
was full of stories. Why wouldn’t she tell them to me?
From my years of working with leaders in the area of strategic storytelling, I
know this is likely where you will get stuck and you won’t know why. You’ll
know you need a story, and you’ll ask yourself, “What story should I tell? What
story should I tell?” And the responses you’ll get from yourself will be much
like the response my grandmother gave to me. Nothing. And you’ll be just as
discouraged as I was.
But it wasn’t that my grandmother didn’t have any stories, and it wasn’t my
grandmother’s fault she didn’t unleash a deluge of stories upon me. It isn’t a lack
of stories that keeps you from being able to find yours but rather the ineffective
questions we use to get them. I asked my grandma a bad question. Getting better
stories, or stories in the first place, requires asking better questions. And when it
comes to better questions, there’s one very important thing to remember: our
stories attach themselves to the nouns in our lives.
The nouns in our lives are the people, the places, the things, the events in our
lives.
When you are struggling to find a story, one key to a better question is to
shift your thinking to nouns. Make a list of people or places or things or events.
And as you write each one down, allow some mental space for the memories
connected to those nouns to come to you.
For example, several years ago I spent an afternoon with my grandfather,
who had just celebrated his ninety-third birthday. Since I don’t often see him and
rarely one-on-one, I was eager to hear some of his stories, particularly from his
experience in World War II. So instead of saying, “Grandpa, tell me about
World War II,” I focused my question on a noun.
“Grandpa,” I asked, “where were you stationed in World War II?”
He said Perth, Australia.
“Grandpa,” I said, “Tell me about Perth, Australia.”
It was as if I had said the secret word that opened a hidden cave of stories.
For an hour and a half, my grandfather told me, in great detail, about his
experience in Perth, a.k.a. stories about his World War II experiences. He told
me about the barracks they slept in. How the rats ran across the top bunks all
night long. He told me about a boarded-up town and the adventures they would
take on the weekends, heading up the coast. All because I switched the question
to focus on a place instead of a general experience.
This shift, of course, works for all kinds of story-seeking endeavors,
including those in business. Particularly if you are often tasked with delivering
purpose stories to align teams. Using the noun approach to find stories gives you
endless access to story possibilities.
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