Finding New Kinds Of Stories

Those of us who work in the fields of narrative change and impactful storytelling tend to focus a lot on narrative content: we get caught up with the idea that if we just tell better stories, we can change things. And by better stories, we mean stories that feature our favorite issues in a particular light, or that switch around the types of people who feature as heroes, villains or victims, and so on… (But) the narrative forms that have predominated, certainly in Western culture, are no longer capable of helping us adequately grapple with and understand reality (if they ever were). At a very simple level, our most popular stories are individualistic… Instead of imposing our explanatory and organizational shapes onto the world, we may have to listen and wait for new ones to reveal themselves to us.”