Advice

Our friend Nigel Duara is delivering a talk in February and was looking for some advice. Specifically, how do you teach the importance of story to an audience of non journalists? Any tips?

Here's his pitch:

The TEDxTalk I intend to give will center on the need for stories.
In news, we often focus on facts. Facts are commodities that we cultivate, we trade and we sometimes use to lead us to more facts. Think about North Korea assembling a nuclear submarine. They begin with next to nothing — no research and development, no blueprints and few, if any, building materials. And yet by barter, threat, bribes and theft, they get what they need. Facts, like the steel and screws and propulsion system, have to hold that submarine together underwater. Errors can be fatal.
But facts alone do not stick with people. Facts, assembled, comprise a report — a bloodless, steely bulk, efficient and deadly but also unmemorable. Reports move markets. Reports cause change. Reports tell you that Verizon gave your phone records to the government, or that there are 27,000 uncapped oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, or that the CIA is spying on mosques in New York and New Jersey. And you'll be upset or aghast or unsettled, and those reports will remain with you for a couple of minutes or a couple of hours or a couple of days. Two years later, when legislation is drafted to correct the problems pointed out in that report, you'll be reminded of that initial feeling. But reports do not stick with you.
What we need instead are stories.
When we tell what happened, we give a report. When we tell why it happened, more often than not, we're telling a story. Stories are muscle and flesh and bone. They go beyond what facts give us and they tell us something essential about ourselves. We, all of us, need stories, more stories, true stories. We need them in business, we need them in law. I include my mother in this, a neonatal ICU physician who has told hundreds of worried couples that their baby isn't going to live. She, too, needs stories to tell them, things that are true and things that are meaningful. Things that give value to a life that ended after 30 minutes or 30 days.
There are the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others. Yes, stories help us make sense of the world, but stories we tell others define what is important, what is meaningful and what will last.
Stories are our connection to each other, to what already happened and what comes next. When we invest ourselves in the choice of telling a story, rather than reciting facts or performing rote tasks, we open ourselves to the possibility of understanding each other.
That idea, that connection, is what assigns meaning to otherwise important moments that don't resonate. Vonnegut said any scientist "who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan." Yes, and the reason is that we must be able to do more than read back the facts of what we're doing. We have to show its meaning.
We can do this in small steps and grand ones. I tell reporting classes, approach each subject with the idea of characters, a plot, a theme. Dialogue, place, atmosphere. True, all of it, every word in every sentence. So how can you, if you're not a journalist, put this to use?
Start thinking in terms of story. Start considering your work, your career, in the frame of the story you are telling other people. Take the facts in front of you and find the theme inside it, the essential dynamic quality of nature that says X causes Y, something happened and then something else happened; something happened because something else happened. That is all. It needn't be journalism, it needn't be graceful or even particularly well-told.
Because we fall first for the story other people tell us. Whether you're buying a car or falling in love, it is the narrative of what we're hearing, the thrum of the string that connects two points, to which we are drawn.
This will make life more interesting, at the very least. You may be a front desk clerk at a hotel. You may work in a cubicle. You may get paid very well to do a job that is very boring. Thinking story will enrich it. And you will make my job easier. Because when I meet people who have stories, real stories they've thought through and are well-considered, I get closer to finding truth.
These things are everywhere around us. Surround us. The New York Times writer Rick Bragg once talked about stepping over a thousand stories on his way to work. Dynamism, action and reaction, is at the heart of what constitutes the granular details of who we are. Ira Glass of National Public Radio was asked to contribute to the radio program, "This I Believe." Cynic that he is, Glass responded that he didn't believe in anything. But, when pressed, he finally blurted out that he believed in dynamism, in not being boring, in the opposite of stasis.
This line of thinking will not make you rich. It will not help you conform. It may do the very opposite. But when we frame our lives, ourselves, in a narrative arc — not some solipsistic self-narration of our career goals achieved, but an adherence to truth with ourselves and our surroundings — we come closer to uncovering what makes us human.

In news, we often focus on facts. Facts are commodities that we cultivate, we trade and we sometimes use to lead us to more facts. Think about North Korea assembling a nuclear submarine. They begin with next to nothing — no research and development, no blueprints and few, if any, building materials. And yet by barter, threat, bribes and theft, they get what they need. Facts, like the steel and screws and propulsion system, have to hold that submarine together underwater. Errors can be fatal.

But facts alone do not stick with people. Facts, assembled, comprise a report — a bloodless, steely bulk, efficient and deadly but also unmemorable. Reports move markets. Reports cause change. Reports tell you that Verizon gave your phone records to the government, or that there are 27,000 uncapped oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, or that the CIA is spying on mosques in New York and New Jersey. And you'll be upset or aghast or unsettled, and those reports will remain with you for a couple of minutes or a couple of hours or a couple of days. Two years later, when legislation is drafted to correct the problems pointed out in that report, you'll be reminded of that initial feeling. But reports do not stick with you.

What we need instead are stories.

When we tell what happened, we give a report. When we tell why it happened, more often than not, we're telling a story. Stories are muscle and flesh and bone. They go beyond what facts give us and they tell us something essential about ourselves. We, all of us, need stories, more stories, true stories. We need them in business, we need them in law. I include my mother in this, a neonatal ICU physician who has told hundreds of worried couples that their baby isn't going to live. She, too, needs stories to tell them, things that are true and things that are meaningful. Things that give value to a life that ended after 30 minutes or 30 days.

There are the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others. Yes, stories help us make sense of the world, but stories we tell others define what is important, what is meaningful and what will last.

Stories are our connection to each other, to what already happened and what comes next. When we invest ourselves in the choice of telling a story, rather than reciting facts or performing rote tasks, we open ourselves to the possibility of understanding each other.

That idea, that connection, is what assigns meaning to otherwise important moments that don't resonate. Vonnegut said any scientist "who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan." Yes, and the reason is that we must be able to do more than read back the facts of what we're doing. We have to show its meaning.

We can do this in small steps and grand ones. I tell reporting classes, approach each subject with the idea of characters, a plot, a theme. Dialogue, place, atmosphere. True, all of it, every word in every sentence. So how can you, if you're not a journalist, put this to use?

Start thinking in terms of story. Start considering your work, your career, in the frame of the story you are telling other people. Take the facts in front of you and find the theme inside it, the essential dynamic quality of nature that says X causes Y, something happened and then something else happened; something happened because something else happened. That is all. It needn't be journalism, it needn't be graceful or even particularly well-told.

Because we fall first for the story other people tell us. Whether you're buying a car or falling in love, it is the narrative of what we're hearing, the thrum of the string that connects two points, to which we are drawn.

This will make life more interesting, at the very least. You may be a front desk clerk at a hotel. You may work in a cubicle. You may get paid very well to do a job that is very boring. Thinking story will enrich it. And you will make my job easier. Because when I meet people who have stories, real stories they've thought through and are well-considered, I get closer to finding truth.

These things are everywhere around us. Surround us. The New York Times writer Rick Bragg once talked about stepping over a thousand stories on his way to work. Dynamism, action and reaction, is at the heart of what constitutes the granular details of who we are. Ira Glass of National Public Radio was asked to contribute to the radio program, "This I Believe." Cynic that he is, Glass responded that he didn't believe in anything. But, when pressed, he finally blurted out that he believed in dynamism, in not being boring, in the opposite of stasis.

This line of thinking will not make you rich. It will not help you conform. It may do the very opposite. But when we frame our lives, ourselves, in a narrative arc — not some solipsistic self-narration of our career goals achieved, but an adherence to truth with ourselves and our surroundings — we come closer to uncovering what makes us human.