What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?
I’ve watched at least part of every January 6th hearing, and they all begin with several witnesses swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I always wonder how anyone can make that vow. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not one of those people who believes that there is no objective truth so any old crap you make up is “true.” But the whole truth? What even is that?
With every word you say, you choose to focus on some details and let others pass. You have to. Literally no one wants to hear you spew out a play-by-play of exactly everything that happened and what you were thinking, feeling, smelling at each second, looping back to fill in the details that had nowhere to land in the sentences of your first cut of each event. I guess the curse of taking things literally for a living is that I’d have to talk to a lawyer about whether there was some other oath I could take.
Besides, my experience is that I’ll never know the full truth even behind my own experience of an event. I can consider things that happen and uncover new meanings, both good and bad, that I didn’t see in them before. It’s almost like the Schrodinger’s cat of memories—the events in themselves are just events until I open the box by considering the memory. Then suddenly the meaning emerges.
It turns out that science says that this may be what happens — by taking a memory out and examining it, you change it, a process known as reconsolidation. It’s like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for memories.
When I was in college, I believed that maybe our consciousnesses could travel backward in time like virtual particles. It seemed to me that our curiosity about the events surrounding the beginning of the universe could have supplied the energy to make it happen.
I had a pen pal studying physics at the University of Adelaide (these were the days when it was reasonably safe to post “Mississippi female seeks male” to alt.personals and also alt.personals existed), and he told me there was a team there was pursuing a similar idea, and that there wasn’t really a reason in the laws of physics that time had to only move one way. He went on to get a PhD at Stanford and a job at Fermilab, so I guess he knew what he was talking about. I imagined that one could think of a guardian angel as one’s future self, quietly ensuring the present happened the way you’re going to remember it. It feels like that idea has come full circle in a way.
Ok, so in most cases the above is a good example of what not to do when telling a story (burying your point under a lot of extraneous details that might be interesting but might not do enough to advance your story to justify the reader’s time). But it’s that kind of night and I don’t do drugs. So leaving trippy anecdotes about my erstwhile thought processes in my posts is my way of amusing myself 🍄.
Opportunities for Story Telling
You might think that you don’t write for Medium and have no interest in doing so, so why care about telling stories? Well, here are some places that I have found that thinking in terms of stories makes a massive difference:
- Job Interviews. At some point, I realized there were common threads running throughout my entire work history. Realizing that and mentally pulling out the stories that demonstrate that made me better able to give the “elevator pitch” in response to that first question “so…tell me about yourself.” And then, when they ask follow-up technical and behavioral questions, I didn’t have to think as hard about which stories from my career to bring forward — I reached for the ones that aligned with those common threads into a cohesive story.
- Meetings. In today’s businesses, time in meetings is a very limited quantity, so if you can tell a complete, compelling story in a few seconds, you have a much better chance of being heard. And possibly you can reduce your chances of being interrupted and talked over.
- Emails. I have historically struggled with how to frame difficult issues in email without causing conflict. Since I started thinking in terms of telling a story to engage an audience, that has gotten much easier.
- Public Speaking. There’s a reason TED talks are so popular, and that’s because they often present very deep/difficult material using stories. I’ve noticed that at conferences, the presentations that stand out are not the guy standing up there live coding for an hour (impressive as that is), but the one who almost sneaks technical details into a compelling story with lots of pictures.
- Self-Reflection. The stories you choose to tell yourself about yourself have a big impact on how you move through the world. The stories you would like to have told about you can also change what you do.
Approaches to Storytelling
I find two different ways I start thinking about a story. The first is I have a story I want to tell. Often that’s an understatement — it’s a story I feel compelled to tell. The other way is I don’t yet know what story needs to be told. An example is having something ready to say in job interviews when they ask “so…tell me about yourself.”
Often it’s easier when the idea is banging around in my brain, fighting to get me to stop and write it down. I know the basic “bones” of what I want to say, I just need to find examples and metaphors to bring it to life. In the other situation, I think a lot about “the thing” I want to tell a story about and watch for stories to emerge.
I used to get a little annoyed by some of the Medium posts that came into my inbox every day from people who obviously were trying to hit certain targets for number of articles in a given time period. But then I realized I was jealous. They were able to deeply explore their stories — they could make the same point day after day, with a different story. Then, they were able to take the same story and illustrate different points. What luxury! I could write full-time for several months and probably never get to the end of the articles that are urgently pounding on the inside of my skull to get written about just once.
But I’m fascinated by the idea of this and what it means for increasing my creativity as I write. One of the benefits of being old is that I look back on my life and there are events all over the place. I remember refusing to get near an East German soldier with a bayonet near the Brandenburg gate for a photo, and then later I saw the fall of the Berlin wall on the news from the safety of my family’s kitchen in Mississippi. I lived through hurricane Katrina. I’ve programmed in at least 7 different languages and was influential in many of their communities. I’ve got stories — and each story could be used to illustrate multiple points. And then, obviously, I’m opinionated, and I have lots of points to make.
Years ago, I attended a talk by Frans Johanssen that was based on the book he had just published, The Medici Effect. He proposed that the reason the Renaissance originated in 14th Century Italy was that the Medicis brought together men from many different disciplines. This meant that they could learn ideas that were common in other fields but completely new to them. This intersection of seemingly unrelated ideas generated entirely new combinations, sparking a long period of innovation.
In the same way, you can combine ideas from different parts of your life to come up with something completely new. For example, I recently wrote a post on lessons I’ve learned training dogs that help me as a team lead.
Narrowing it down
So I guess the next thing we need to think about is how do we stick our spoon into the soup made of all the ideas you have generated and come out with something compelling?
What’s the purpose?
I write quite differently according to what I’m trying to accomplish. For example, if I’m writing an email to resolve a hot-button issue, my approach will be almost diametrically opposed to what it will be if I’m trying to stimulate a discussion I feel is long overdue.
Once I understand the purpose of the story, I start to think about which of the various supporting points that my conscious and subconscious mind submitted for my consideration best support that purpose. A very rough unwritten outline starts to emerge in my mind. If I were more organized, I might write it down.
Who is it for?
It’s important to know who you’re trying to reach with your story. I will often have more than one target audience, and I’ll try to think of a specific person I know who represents each. If it’s a persuasive story, I try to hit points that will appeal to (or at least engage) each of those people. My tone will be tailored to the type of engagement I’m trying to get.
Sometimes, I’m deliberately trying to drive people a little out of their comfort zone. Other times, I’m trying to make people comfortable with ideas that might be a little scary to them. Sometimes I am feeling an emotion and I want others to feel it with me. In all these cases, the points I’ll raise and the tone I use will be very different.
What’s the Theme?
I don’t know about you, but I enjoy stories more when they are cohesive, when the narrative moves smoothly from one point or anecdote to the next, without making me stop and retrace to try to figure out how we got from A to B. When you’re the one telling the story, it can require ruthless discipline to throw out that graceful turn of phrase or skip over that anecdote that’s really cool but doesn’t quite fit.
When you’re talking and not writing, this can be particularly tough, since it’s harder to edit on the fly. It’s ok to give yourself permission to just stop talking and leave the story feeling incomplete, rather than adding things that detract from the impression you are trying to create. This also has the advantage of opening up the floor for other people to contribute. I find it super frustrating to be in a conversation with someone who has clearly run out of things to say, but who continues to reiterate the same points because they haven’t yet wound down to a stopping point. I’m sure I do it too. Somebody stop me.
When I start to write, often I find that my points don’t “flow” well in the order I originally planned. If I were the type to write my outline down, I might write each point on a note card, so I can keep rearranging until the flow is obvious, but what I do instead is either take a break so my subconscious can give me a better order, or I write it as planned and then rearrange it via copy and paste. It makes me sad that sometimes points that I’d planned to make never find a natural home in the article, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.
Staying focused
Sometimes it can be difficult to say the things you want and need to say without things that are not helpful creeping in. And I’m not talking about where it’s willful like my digression above, but you genuinely can’t figure out how to convey the actual point without also talking about some things that are just not helpful to the discussion.
An example is the “tell me about yourself” question, which is an invitation to an elevator pitch on yourself. Most of us have been told many times that we should never say anything negative about a previous employer in a job interview, with the justification that the prospective employer will imagine you’ll go off and say negative things about them. Maybe they will, but to me this misses the point.
The point is that this is your chance to sell yourself — to tell an overwhelmingly positive story — and you shouldn’t waste your opportunity dwelling on the toxic circumstances from which your great story may have emerged. The exception is if the interview is all about how much abuse you are willing to take and you’re desperate for a job (and I’ve been there). In that case, it probably won’t hurt your job prospects.
The problem is that often our greatest successes come in spite of or even because of very toxic work environments, and it can be difficult to thread that needle. I’ve struggled with this a lot. Two years ago, I moved back to my home state of Mississippi, and I was horrified to be reminded how important placing blame is in my family. Simple requests to change behavior could quickly escalate into screaming matches because well obviously if what you are doing isn’t working for me, you are wrong and a bad person and so am I for being so critical. So, yeah, we also don’t talk politics much.
And then this familial tendency was exacerbated when, in one of my first programming jobs, I wound up also helping write the instructional content. Our writing standards strongly discouraged passive voice, which is a great way to get to the bottom of technical material. But when you’re talking about a toxic event, verbally pinning down who did what to whom can sound a lot like placing blame. Nevertheless, “no passive voice” has stuck with me as a best practice. No wonder I have historically had problems filing the edges off of emails.
The thing that helps me with this is truly focusing on what was positive about that situation. The job where “ability to take abuse” was top of the list of qualifications gave me a great story about making websites that could be reskinned to look completely different in just a few hours and another one about untangling stored queries no one understood, so they would just copy them and try to add new functionality to the beginning or end. Yes, it feels significant to me that I did so under very trying conditions, but that part of the story is not necessary for the employer to grasp that I have pretty good CSS skills, and I can find my way around SQL Server when I need to.
Once I started reframing my stories like this, I realized that I actually felt better about myself. It turns out that there’s science behind this — the treatment for PTSD involves going through stories of trauma and constructing positive meaning from them.
Jere Simpson, the CEO of Atlas UP, recently gave us a workshop on entrepreneurship (one of our many perks!), and he was telling us how he keeps his attitude in the right place to be able to continue to drive the business forward. He said a lot of it came down to telling himself the right story, focusing on positive accomplishments without making up strengths he doesn’t have. But he does also look for ways that he could make the stories he’d like to be true happen.
Your Most Important Audience
At the end of the day, the person who most needs to be happy with all your stories is you. The good thing is, you get to decide what your purpose is in telling your stories to yourself. You can choose whether it’s important to always think about the boss who gave the project he’d been promising to you for months to a new hire in a humiliating meeting, or whether that’s a blip compared to the skills you developed training up fresh college graduates to replace both of you after he left.
And you can also decide what you want future chapters to look like and take steps toward that now.
