Deconstructing a childhood narrative

Everyone has stories that they latch onto. When I was a kid I had a huge number of jokes that I thought were hysterically funny and would tell at any chance I got, to anyone I met. Storytelling though was reserved for people who were genuinely interested. The hit-and-run style of joke telling was a good gauge to see whether people were actually planning to have a conversation with me, or whether they were just passing through.

People who told jokes back to me frequently became my friends. Sharing a joke that went into my own repertoire definitely bought you high esteem. I was something of a funny story collector back then, and I still am, though the repertoire has of course varied significantly by now. There were people who you could just tell were the right sort of people; the ones who would want to hear a funny story. In fact, they might even start you off with one of their own.

This goes back to what I was saying in the previous article, about how my favorite type of story-telling is associational. The kinds of stories that people tell in chains, because the story being told made them think of one of their own in turn. Jokes are actually very much associational stories, because there are several deep veins of joke types, which can be mined fairly exhaustively in an evening, simply by starting with "Did you hear the one about the {topic}?" and proceeding to tell a specific type of joke. To a receptive listener, this is practically an invitation for an exchange.

The same is true of funny stories. I've heard several appellations for the practice of trading stories back and forth over the course of an evening and trying to one-up the previous story with an even more ridiculous or outrageous story of your own. Since kids don't generally attend cocktail parties, my first experiences with these types of storytelling chains tended to happen either in the schoolyard, at an after-school activity, or best of all at a sleepover, or during a long adult activity, which gave us lots of unstructured time.

Storytelling wasn't always the upshot of a long period of unstructured time spent with other kids, there were dares, and confessions and various personal competitions, but in a way, these were also types of stories, they were just being couched differently. Instead of formally 'telling ghost stories' or talking about school we were talking and comparing experiences which is also a form of storytelling. At core, storytelling just comes down to data transfer. I tell you something and then you know it. What you do with it, or how you interpret it is up to you.  Over time, it's the types and themes of the stories we tell each other or ourselves that shape who we are.

And that's where deconstructing the stories we loved as children becomes really valuable. Let's say you really latched onto Goldilocks and the Three Bears. What do we see when we tell a reductionist version of the story? Here's my go at it:

Once a person who needed resources sought to obtain them in a place where it seemed some resources had been freshly abandoned. Upon investigating the resources at hand, some were found more favorable than others and those were the ones that our person chose to use up. Faced with repercussions for removing the resources, which turned out to belong to others, the person chose to run away instead of taking responsibility.

Told in those terms this story is a lot less charming, isn't it?

So let's break down the story into its elements: 

{person in need}

{resources}

{sampling of resources}

{appropriation of resources}

{potential punishment}

{fleeing from responsibility}

{punishment} and/or{absolution}

It's interesting to note that in many versions of this story the elements of {punishment} / {absolution} are left out entirely.

Depending on which version you learned you may have seen this story very differently than the reductionist version I just told. The ending of this story is a vast continuum from 'and then the bears chased her away' to 'the bears caught her and hung her in a tree by her ankles until nightfall' to more child-friendly endings like 'she apologized to the bears and they shared their home with her'. There are endings that are even more violent than hanging by the ankles. Sometimes the bears want to be well rid of the threat to their resources. As far as they see it, the protagonist is a pest who threatens their livelihood.

That the original protagonist of this story was not a little gold-haired girl at all, but actually an elderly and poor silver-haired woman means that depending on when or where you learned this story, it had a very different moral flavor. However, when you look at the bones of the story it looks the same. Old woman, young girl and house-dwelling bears are just trappings to tell an essential story of resource sharing, which is itself as old as food and shelter.

We keep telling this story to children and we keep retelling it to ourselves, but it's unusual that people ask themselves who they are in the story. Are they the bears trying to repel an invading force from the safe space that they've made, or are they the outsider seeking resources they don't otherwise have? I would contend that depending on where you are in life these roles look very different. Many children identify with Baby Bear, who is being protected from the theft of his resources by an outsider. Many parents and caregivers identify with the adult bears.

But when do we identify with Goldilocks/Silverhair? I'd say that we identify with her most closely when we hunger for resources we can't seem to get. Say an opportunity to work in a field that seems inaccessible at our current level of education, or which is for one reason or another difficult to break into. I think we also identify with her when there's a resource seemingly going to waste, which we would ourselves love to use. How many times do we think "Boy, if I had {object/opportunity} I'd be doing {thing which is more impressive than what's being done with it now}." It's not hard to identify with Goldilocks. If we look at modern political movements like Occupy, we can readily see why our modern day protagonists may want to raid comfortable houses, whether they're full of bears or not.

> Tune in next time when we'll tackle story repetition

The process of telling formal and informal stories

Almost everyone grows up with stories. It's hard not to. Even if no one formally reads to you, or if you don't learn to read, there are still urban legends, family stories, schoolyard tales, hearsay about neighbors and more. These are types of story that we tend to discount when we're talking about formal storytelling.

As a fledgling storyteller, I latched on to certain stories that were personal to me; things I'd experienced firsthand that were either traumatic or exciting in some way, and told them again and again. These were the first personal narratives that I was deliberately retelling. I had no idea how important that was at the time, certainly, if I could go back and ask my seven year old self to tell me a story, I have no idea what story I would hear.

I suspect that if asked to tell a story my seven year old self would jump to formal stories instead of personal narrative. Let me explain what I mean:

I was a kid who grew up in a story-telling culture. I had books of stories to read, storytelling recordings where the stories were read out loud, including original stories by modern storytellers as well as stories from various cultures, movie adaptations or soundtracks, and read-along-with-the-recording books. I also had picture books, where I could look at the pictures and make my own stories.

My parents also told stories, both personal stories and family stories, sometimes carefully sanitized for young ears, they also both read to me, regularly. Bedtime stories were a nightly ritual, but we also had stories told on walks, stories about history, stories told over the family albums, stories told to large gatherings where I was present, and my favorite; stories told in late night conversations with relatives or friends, where the stories would come in chains of recollection, with one story triggering the next.

All of these story telling rituals were present in my childhood, and yet, if you had asked me to tell a story I might just as easily have given you a story about a summer camp adventure or a prank I'd pulled or one of the stories learned from a recording. As a child I think I had a very specific mindset about formal stories and informal stories. To my mind, formal stories were ones that were written down or recorded and thus codified, whereas informal stories were ones where the specific details of who, how, where, when and why were known to me, and I could elaborate, or not.

This ability to tell in detail or collapse the story into a smaller form was one of my first initiations into the secrets of how to tell a story to suit your audience.

For child-me the function of formal stories was different than the function of informal stories. Informal stories were an ice-breaker. They were a way to command the attention of a person I wanted to be friends with, or an adult I wanted to impress. Jokes served the same purpose, but in most ways, they were a type of formal story, because they had been learned through memorization.

I think in large part, my ability to tell informal stories came out of my strong sense of play and improvisation. I was the sort of kid who liked to organize friends and put on a show, or create a one-time performance of a song or skit. Frequently I would wind up directing, or even narrating, which allowed me to develop a strong sense of formal storytelling even inside my informal, or improvised activities.


That I was training myself to be a storyteller never really occurred to me. I knew professional storytellers existed, I'd even met a few, but when I thought of 'storytelling' I wasn't thinking of the schoolyard productions I was staging, but of professional performances, on a stage or in a lecture hall, or even under a tree, so long as they were being led by an adult, or an older kid. In other words, performances where you had a strong sense of the performer/audience divide. Even in scenarios where there was call and response, you had a sense of who was in charge, of who knew the story and who was just learning it.

Productions of plays also fell under formal storytelling as far as I was concerned, though my retelling of the play to a friend afterwards would be informal storytelling. You see how this goes. I didn't start really thinking about what I was doing formally until well after I was doing it. It was a long time before I really started to see the intersection of informal and formal storytelling as the point where, through improvisation you insert yourself into the story, whether that's through commentary, heckling, bringing up a point that the storyteller is prompting you for -- possibly in an unexpected way -- or even just interrupting the performance to do something spontaneous.


I distinctly remember being at a pantomime performance when I was quite young, probably under the age of seven, and throwing my floppy cloth hat at the performers, to see what they would do. The panto was in a relatively informal setting and to some degree, the awe of being in the audience had been removed, because it was a forum with natural light, and there was little to no area between the stage and the audience. I was relatively certain of getting my hat back, and I really wanted to see what the performers would do with the found object. And, in fact, upon being thrown the hat the first time, the performers did a little improv which was pleasing, and threw it back. Since I was still young enough not to realize that this had been obnoxious the first time, I did it again. And again, and again, and saw how the novelty of it wore off.


In the context of our topic today, I would say that this was one of my first incursions into redressing formal story telling with an informal aspect. Later, I will probably tell other stories about my childhood interactions with storytelling, but I think this one serves well to illustrate the point I'm making here: Looking at this narrative as an adult, I could conclude several things, perhaps that I was bored by the performance, or that I was, indeed an obnoxious kid, but moreover, I look at that story about myself and realize that what I wanted most of all was to insert myself into the story. I didn't have the nerve to climb up on the stage myself, but I sensed that I could still project my will on what was going on before me, and I did. In some ways, this was the first time I really realized how much power the audience had to change a story when they don't like the way it's being told.






> Tune in next time when I attempt to take a childhood story and review it using reductionist storytelling methods.

An introduction to reductionist storytelling

Here's the challenge: Let's take a familiar story type and reduce it to its base elements, so that it might not be recognizable.

First, let's take out the genders of the characters, also the place where the story happens. Most fairy tales now start: 

Once there was a person who lived in a place --

This is absolute reduction. In some ways it's not even a story, it's just a scenario, rather like our User Stories from the last entry. This could very literally be any story, unless you have a dead, or non-human protagonist, or a story that takes place in a vacuum, in which case the story could start differently, such as 

Once there was a robot who lived in space --

But you see how filling in both the person slot and the place slot suddenly gives the story a character and a feel? It even gives the story a genre of sorts just by replacing those two words. Most people will characterize any story that has a robot or takes place in space as Science Fiction, and for some people that will mean that they stop paying attention.

So how do we tell the story of the robot in space, without saying that it's a robot in space? Having a robot takes away the need to assign a gender, or even a proper name, but these are things that we can use to give character to our protagonist in the first sentence, such as:

Robert lived in a void. 

This might still be the story of our robot protagonist, or it might not. It might be a story about a human. With the new opening line, we don't know that a) our protagonist is possibly non-human or b) that they are living in a vacuum. Though we may be applying a gender or an appearance to that character, we are no longer assuming a genre, after all, the void could be a spiritual void, or a metaphorical one. By opening the story this way we disguise our intention to tell a specific type of story until the reader has found a hook, something that keeps them reading the story, regardless of whatever genre may be revealed later. We'll go back to this idea in future posts when we talk about using specific elements to color storytelling.

Now let's go back to our reductionist story. After Once there was a person who lived in a place -- usually we have either a description of that person, or a feeling that they are having, such as "and she longed for a child" or "she was the most beautiful woman in the land."

So now we have:

Once there was a person, who lived in a place and was a certain way, or
Once there was a person who lived in a place and wanted something.

That's just about every story ever.

Now let's try telling a whole story this way:
Once there was a person, who lived in a place, and wanted an intangible thing. The person went to the local wise person and asked the wise person a relevant question, and the wise person gave them advice. The person went home and implemented the advice and was unhappy. The person went back to the wise person for further advice and received it. The person went home and implemented the advice and was even more unhappy. Finally the person went back to the wise person and the wise person gave them a final piece of advice that reversed all of wise person's previous advice. Person went home and implemented this advice and was happy. Person thanked wise person for the new understanding of their initial state.

This is the simplest way I can think of to tell this story. It's not absolutely reductionist. If it were, we probably wouldn't have the character's feelings stated quite so explicitly as 'unhappy' and 'happy' instead we would have just 'an emotion' or 'a negative emotion', but I honestly think that 'happy' and 'unhappy' are sufficiently reductionist for these purposes, and keep the story at a human level.

Likewise, the outcome of the story is not particularly reductionist, because it explicitly states what our protagonist does to obtain happiness, in this case, it's listening to the advice that reverts the story back to its initial state. The story as I told it also has a moral, which is not strictly necessary, but which fulfills the same criteria as starting the story with 'Once'. To my mind, the moral is a formula for indicating that the story has reached a satisfying emotional climax and is now finished, much like saying 'and they lived happily ever after.' or 'The end.' or 'Amen.' all of which indicate a stopping point in a narrative.

If you recognized the story in this form, good on you! It usually takes more than a paragraph to tell the story I'm thinking of, and I have deliberately pared it down here for maximum neutrality. I am certain that there are several possible stories that take this form. I have deliberately removed the gender and professions of both the protagonist and the wise person, the type of location, the nature of the protagonist's desire, and the sort of advice given by the wise person.

This pretty much destroys the story as a piece of entertainment, but it does allow us to look at the story's bones, or elements.

We have {the person}, {the problem}, {the need for outside help}, {the wise person}, {false advice}, {personal misery}, {good advice}, {reader's revelation of a character's cleverness} and {resolution}. In many versions of this story {person} has a partner. I left {partner} out of the equation because it complicated telling the story, but it is an important element, because in some versions of the story the presence of a partner is what causes our protagonist to seek advice.

Now, as with the example of our robot in space above, filling in any one of these elements with a tangible thing will color our story. The question is, how many of these elements are actually needed before a person can recognize the story? For some people, the presence of a wise person is enough, for others, it's the fact that the main character wants something intangible that gives away which story this is.

But if I'd told you the story as I first heard it, you would have heard it as a story, and if I'd said to you afterward "what's the element that makes this story essentially this story and not some other story?" you would probably choose your favorite element, such as a funny element introduced by the {false advice} or the relationship between {person} and {partner} and {the wise person}. It would probably be hard for you to point to the one thing that made it clear to you that I was telling this story and not some other one. Of course, even with a story reduced to this level, what the reader takes away is still entirely subjective.

And this is some of the point of reductionist story telling. It takes the stories back to their elements and lets you, the listener, decide what they're about, and where they fit in your personal mythology. By letting you fill in the details, in an almost mad-libs style, it allows your hind-brain to tell you what you think the story is about. Reductionist story telling is a deliberate invocation of the phenomenon of using art as subjective self examination.

It also works with groups. Here's an exercise to try with friends: Start by explaining that you're conducting an experiment and you want them to listen to a story. Don't explain anything further. Read them the story above and then hand out paper and pen (handing them out after the telling is important so that people don't write down what you read verbatim) then ask them to write down the story as they heard it without talking about it with the others or with you. When they are done, compare everyone's versions. See who added genders, places, desires, and etc. and you will learn something about that person's internal envisioning of the story. At the end of the process, explain to the group what they did.

Alternately, read the story as written above to a group with the same stipulation that it's an experiment, and then ask them to orally reconstruct the story as a group and see who catches on when other people start adding story elements. Don't correct anyone and try not to prompt them through body language. Ideally, tell the story, and then step out of the room and leave a video or audio recorder going. A whiteboard or paper may be good for this too. Play back the video or audio and see what developed from your story. Look at the notes as well. This will tell you something about who is dominant in the group, and what values are important to the group at large. Do pay attention to asides in the recording, as those are very important too, since they may represent differing views. As before, at the end of the process, explain to the group what they did.

> Tune in next time for more reductionist story telling games.

Using Agile user-story logic to redefine antagonist and protagonist

So a few weeks ago I was sitting in an Agile/Scrum training session and talking about User Stories, and the elements of a User Story and it got me thinking more about traditional storytelling methods than about the kind of business oriented story telling that we were there to do. 

The basic idea behind a User Story is to see a business project, usually software development, from various points of view -- ideally from all points of view -- and frame the experience that those Users most desire in terms of a very short story, generally in the format: 

"I am a {user type/role} and I want to {achieve goal} by {action} and/or {with resource}."

This got me thinking about the various roles that make up traditional stories, since I had just seen Mirror, Mirror I naturally started thinking about fairy tales. 

Snow White is complex to dissect, so I started thinking about stories that have fewer roles, like Little Red Riding Hood (which I will call LRRH for brevity).  

So, if we use the pattern above, at the start of LRRH you have the following active user stories:

"I am a little girl and I want to help my grandmother by traveling through these woods with this basket of nourishing provisions."

"I am a concerned daughter and I want to help my mother by sending my daughter to care for her with a basket of provisions."

"I am an intelligent wolf and I want to obtain nourishment by eating other creatures."

This was where something interesting struck me about the user stories. It is much easier to write a user story for someone with agency; the desire to initially accomplish a goal. At this stage it's harder to write about characters like the Kindly Woodsman, or the Granny, because they don't know that they're about to be involved. As far as we know, at the beginning of the story, Granny isn't expecting a visit from Little Red. The Woodsman is not expecting to have to kill a Wolf or save a little girl.

Of course, you could also say that the Wolf isn't expecting to encounter Little Red, that he's also a passive character. I would argue that what makes the difference is that the Wolf has some agency from the start, in the form of his reputation. There's a reason that the Wolf is often called The Big Bad Wolf. His profile in this story is largely a manifestation of human fear, so he's not so much a character at this stage in the story as the stereotype of The Cunning Animal, but it does give him a position in the minds of the characters, even before he makes an appearance.

This makes the Wolf's character into something of a middle category. While he's not actively a part of the start of the story, in many versions the mother explicitly warns Little Red about the dangers of straying off the path, including the danger of wolves. The wolf doesn't come up by name the way the grandmother does, but he's definitely implied in many versions. Since he has a specific intention, he becomes the story's antagonist by default, because his goals are in opposition to those of the protagonist.

However, the three user stories I shared at the beginning, those of the protagonist (Little Red), the protagonist's mother, and the antagonist (the Big Bad Wolf) are all easy to draw. These characters have experiences that actively change as the story progresses, but their initial user stories don't really shift; Red still wants to succeed in helping her grandmother, even though it's possible that Granny is already dead. And while Little Red's encounter with the Wolf at Granny's house causes her to act in her own interests against the Wolf, the idea that she can still somehow help her grandmother is present in many of the modern versions of the story.

In contrast, the mother becomes a passive character almost immediately. Her active role in the story is over the minute that Red Riding Hood leaves the house. We get the impression that she will become active again when Little Red gets home, but in the meantime, her role stays the same throughout because she is not observing the action.

The hand-off between an active and a passive character is pretty much a function of whether someone with agency is interacting with that character. When two people with agency encounter each other, we have conflict. When one person with agency encounters another person, we have action. These are the things that drive the plot.

Consider the user stories of Granny and the Woodsman before they encounter Little Red and the Wolf: 

"I am an older woman who wants to recover my strength and become independent of outside help."

"I am a woodcutter who wants to chop down trees so that I can support myself." 

These are very simple user stories. So simple in fact that they also carry right through the action of LRRH. When Granny is rescued she goes back to healing, and the Woodcutter comes in, provides a heroic action and then goes back to cutting down trees. A lot of humor has been derived from having these characters deviate from these roles, but when we're telling the basic story, we don't actually question their return to the path of their previous activities. Life goes on as it has. 

In fact, the only lives that are changed are the ones that come into direct conflict. Granny is restored or in some cases, dead, but it's Red who is really changed by what's happened to her. Some people talk about Little Red Riding Hood as a story about loss of innocence, and there's something to that, but it's also a story about what happens when you try to take something unjustly from someone else, in this case, the wolf tries to take Granny's life, and Little Red's and in turn the Woodcutter takes his. Red sees this basic adult exchange; a life for a life,  and it changes her.

Many modern retellings try to give Red her own agency in either letting her kill the wolf herself or in having her ultimately swap her red cloak for the Wolf's pelt, but I would argue that the story's essential exchange of a life for a life is echoed in that gesture. In giving Red the wolf's skin, she is taking on some knowledge of the unknown, and it changes the shape of her consciousness and shifts her skin.

Red's mother might have a pang about sending her daughter out on more adventures , or may start thinking about relocating closer to Granny, but really, in the end, the only one whose User Story is changed is Red. If the Wolf were alive, he'd still be trying to eat people, but Red has now seen more of life and death and the unexpected than her initial User Story indicated, so her fate is wide open. While the experience with the wolf may be the most exiting or tragic thing that ever happens to her, it opens the door to a different story, one that she might not have experienced if not for her meeting in the woods.

> Tune in next time, when we'll start to talk about reductionist fairy tales.

Welcome post

Welcome to In Stories and In Bones. The title of this blog comes from the song One Green Hill by the British group Oysterband and as a title, it speaks to what I'd like to accomplish in this space.

I'd like to build this blog into an environment for deliberately deconstructing stories and ballads, and looking at the tropes we use to underlie all communication. I'd also like to talk about archetypes, story telling techniques, how we write and rewrite the stories we love to tell, and also talk about my theory of reductionist storytelling.

Sometimes I'll present an idea of my own, and sometimes I'll be bringing in guest writers. I hope you'll read and comment and talk about stories, because that's why we're here: Tell stories, write them, edit them, cut them up and make them your own, and then tell them again.