Finding Ourselves in Stories and Narratives
Author: Wendy Elford Issue: 2023-09-20
Finding Ourselves in Stories and Narratives
by Wendy Elford
A setting for future sharing
One of the boons of having done higher studies is that you get to be exposed to a lot of really neat thinking and even get close to the people who did that thinking. These people become almost friends. Some of the ideas sink into you and become friendly and useful. So I’m going to write a series of posts which highlight ideas we might use as a community if we choose to. Little points of leverage we might point back to, debate or weave into our current projects.
Differences between stories and narrative
There are plenty of writers who debate the difference between stories and narrative, some of them quite well known and others not so much. To make things even more confusing, we get other phrases or terms like short forms like vignettes, micro narrative and anecdotes and more formal ones like myths, legends and parables. There are still more examples you might share with me around a virtual campfire.
The first distinction I took in was from H. Porter Abbott of Cambridge fame: narrative as retelling, a reconstruction, and stories as flow forwards in real-time. The tricky bit about this is that the story therefore includes all the details of every moment which means when it's retold it takes as much time to tell as it did to live through. This has a messy effect of needing us to use narrative strategies to cut some corners, to leave out bits and pieces to make things time efficient and to find elements to distort to create focus for more effect. You might say that narrative has creative distortions, deletions and omissions. I found a little ease in the idea that storytelling is then a very useful blend of the story bit and the narrative bit.
What I learned more than a decade later from Arthur W. Frank is more useful: the idea that stories are more personal up close lived experience that give us the bits and pieces for us to weave into a bigger, deeper narrative for ourselves. Big N Narrative we trip across in our communities and the world of text works in just the opposite direction. It’s a larger, more formed or chunky weaving of bits and pieces of stories of lots of humans and it could be present at the level of culture or in an organisation or in a family. We, the single human, then take bits and pieces of the narrative consciously or not and bring that back towards us as we set up experiences that then become stories for us at a personal level. The personal narrative is in tension with the big-N Narrative. To use a metaphor, it’s a little bit like an ecologist wandering through a big nature park and collecting images and maybe samples of some flowers, a couple of species of trees and some sketches of the features of the landscape. The story is what is collected out of the much bigger picture and it may become the entire experience told and retold later as if nothing else was part of what happened.
A third point is that there is a difference between oral and written instances of storytelling. The idea behind this is that you can never step into the same river twice because the river has changed and the person you are stepping in as has changed. Oral storytelling (narrative or retelling of the story) will be in a different situation each time you tell a story. There will be different instances of place and time constraints. Different props in the storytelling environment get a different reaction. The audience, from number to mood or any other measure – is not exactly the same audience. The story teller changes which bits they leave out, the assembly and action vary from the last time it was delivered. When there is a written culture, it might seem like the words and meaning are fixed. There may be a much heavier burden on the reader to make their own meaning when, from the practical perspective, the writer appears to have left the room. When re-read, a book often gives different meanings. Maybe the writer is still there!
A finishing reflection – perhaps stories and narrative are just a lively day to day conversation and a big part of the stuff of life.
Related:
- Wendy Elford (author)
- 2023 (year)
- Topics: Media and Communication, Narrative and Storytelling