Where I’ve Been and What I’ve Learned

Where I’ve Been

As you can tell by my blog archive, I haven’t been writing for quite a few months now. Let me fill you in.

Over the summer, I had an internship at The St. Louis Science Center as an Exhibition Design Intern. This was on-top of my newly-started, full-time job at Lipic’s Engagement (formerly Lipic’s Recognition), and saying I was extremely busy would be an understatement. For obvious reasons, I decided to put my blogging on hold until my life slowed back to a normal pace once again.

While it took some time, I have finally returned to a point of equilibrium and am now ready to make up for my months-long absence.Therefore and without further ado, I officially dub November 10th through November 16th as, “Meredith’s Extreme Blogging Extravaganza,” where I will write everyday for the entirety of this week.

To start off this monumental occasion, I’ll talk about something that veers aways from my traditional ramblings about art and design.

Where’s the Inspiration?

Back in May, I was given a stack of articles to read to familiarize myself with exhibit design concepts and ideas. Among them, was a article from the American Alliance of Museums from 2012, entitled Telling Tales: A Conversation with Andy Goodman. By the title alone, I could tell where this article was headed; it was going to talk about storytelling.

From my experience design classes, I knew a strong narrative was vital to any experience. Stories help lead participants along and tie all the elements together. It helps to create an emotional connection, which in turn leads to action. Nine times out of ten, people want you to do something with an story or information they present, so a good story and a good connection is extremely important.

With such a high value placed on stories, it struck me as odd that, in all my classes, I had never been giving tips on how to write a good story. Of course, I taken writing classes to teach me the proper grammer and punctuation. But a well-placed comma will not inspire anyone. I knew nothing about moving someone to action. 

Luckily for me, Andy Goodman was ready to help. Goodman is a former screenwriter for movies and television, who created a consulting firm to help non-profits focus their message. Over the years, he came up with ten laws of storytelling, which are presented below. Keep in mind, the article I pulled these laws from were aimed at non-profits. There will be references to this, but the principles stay the same for whatever story you want to tell.

Andy Goodman’s Immutable Laws of Storytelling

1. Stories are always about people. Even if your organization (a) is devoted to saving flora and/or fauna, (b) toils in the dense thicket of policy change or (c) helps other organizations work more effectively, humans are still driving the action.
2. The people in your story have to want something. A story doesn’t truly begin until the audience knows precisely what the protagonist’s goal is and has a reason to care whether or not it is attained. So within the first paragraph or two, make sure it’s clear. 
3. Stories need to be fixed in time and space. If you help your audience get their bearings quickly, they will stop wondering the where and when or your story and more readily follow you into the deeper meaning within.
4. Let your characters speak for themselves. When characters speak to each other in the story, it lends immediacy and urgency to the piece. Audience members will feel as if they are the proverbial fly on the wall within the scene, hearing in real time what each person has to say. Direct quotes also let characters speak in their idiosyncratic voices, lending authenticity to the dialogue.
5. Audiences bore easily. Human being are hard-wired to love stories, but in this, the Age of Too Much Information, people don’t have time to wait for your story to get interesting. Within the first paragraph or two, you have to make them wonder, “What happens next?”
6. Stories speak the audience’s language. According to national literacy studies, the average American reads at a sixth grade level.
7. Stories stir up emotions. Even when you have mountains of hard evidence on your side, you have to make your audience feel something before they even glance at your numbers. Stories break though the white noise of information that inundates us every day and to deliver the message this is worth your attention.
8. Stories don’t tell; they show. Intellectually, your audience will understand a sentence such as, “When the nurse visited the family at home, she was met with hostility and guardedness.” But if you had written this instead, “When they all sat down for the first time in the living room, the family members wouldn’t look here in the eye,” your audience would have seen as picture, felt the hositily and become more involved in the story.
9. Stories have at least one “moment of truth.” At their essence, the best stories show us something about how we should treat ourselves, how we should treat other people, or how we should treat the world around us. We have always looked to stories to be containers of truth, and your audience will instinctively look within your story for this kind of insight.
10. Stories have clear meaning. When the final line is spoken, your audience should know exactly why they took this journey with you. In the end, this may be the most important rule of all. If your audience cannot answer the question, “What was that story all about?” it won’t matter how diligently you followed rules one through nine.

To learn more about Andy Goodman or his storytelling, check out The Goodman Center.

Even if you are not a writer, I hope you found some nugget of information that you can apply to your life. After all, your life is the most important story of all.