Kate McDowell on Storytelling

When I talk to people about plot or read books about how to write a great plot, for instance for a movie (1), folks generally assume that plot indicates causality. Events occur in an order, one causing another, as a straight line of dominoes each causing the next to topple. That bad old wolf wouldn't have eaten Grandma if Little Red Riding Hood hadn't strayed from the path, like her mother said, right?  But I don't think causality alone is what fascinates most of us about a good story. I argue that plot operates on a continuum between correlation and causation . This is a continuum that includes both ends. What I mean is that stories actually don't make clear and explicit arguments about causality all of the time. They do sometimes, when they are operating at the extreme causation end of the spectrum, but many times events occur in sequence without an argument about causation. Our minds are drawn to stories because the sequence of events in a typical plot is ...

Telling the story of an organization can be similar to telling a personal story.  As Donald Davis says, one key to developing any story is identifying a central crisis.(1)  Or, as I like to say, look for the trouble and you're halfway to the story. To tell a great story, you have to know how it ends.  Look for the trouble that you've escaped to start thinking about your story.  Understanding how you got out of it will help you craft the middle of the story and the major plot points.  And your final out-of-trouble triumph can be your inspiring ending.  Stories don't have to be inspiring, but most of the time when people are hoping to tell the story of an organization to a new audience, they are aiming to inspire. I'm working on crafting a workshop for a group of non-profits supported by a central organization based in Springfield.  They need to know how to tell the stories of their organizations.  My own thoughts are that you need clarity about...

I have not ever been a conventional academic.  Oddly, this popular book came to me from a highly academic friend whose research into Oscar Wilde's life has dovetailed with an interest in Tim Gunn.  So I read Gunn's Golden Rules:  Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work  by the man himself. Gunn has taught at Parsons, and while many of his anecdotes are about Project Runway, his role on that show is as a kind of teacher.  So this book is really a long story about living as a teacher. It was heartening to me to see that even Tim Gunn must occasionally deal with the scorn of students.  Quote, heavily excerpted: "Two of the best designers... seemed to have disdain for me.  It was a lot of scorn to soak up.  I said to one of them:  'I feel an obligation to each of you, and an aspct of that is to give you equal time in the workroom.  But if you don't want it, we can talk to the producers.'  But they kept having me there, and it beg...

In some ways, these are less storytelling per se and more story play, but it's certainly interesting to see this pop up in the Chronicle blogosphere. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/starter-exercises-for-interactive-storytelling/60303?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en Tomorrow I lead a 3.5 hour workshop for the Leading Forward training on campus for Advancement (read: fundraising).  This is the fourth or fifth such workshop I've developed for them, this one called "Your Leading Story."  Highlights include an overview of storytelling (teller, tale, audience) as a concept and as a practice, ethical storytelling practices, the importance of retelling and listening to the development of a story, authenticity in leadership, and two workshop sessions on "your leadership story" and on using concepts from The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner as a basis for a leadership-focuses presentation illustrated with stories of successful leadershi...

Welcome to the first post of my newly remodeled (one might almost say reincarnated) blog.  In the past two years, since tenure and the coda (below), I've taken a brief sabbatical (Aug-Nov 2013), started a new position (Interim Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, and then Assistant Dean for Student Affairs as of Aug 2014), and found that reorganizing, managing, and growing a team with eight staff members takes much of my creative energy.  However, it's an honor to be in a position to serve our students at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and to work with such an exceptionally professional team. Storytelling has been part of my regular teaching for just over a decade, with a course by that same name and a Storytelling Festival every spring.  Here's the latest iteration of the course description: Fundamental principles of the art of storytelling including techniques of adaptation and presentation; content and sources of materials; methods of learnin...

The tenure track was a very long track, like the extended-play dance remix of a very long song, and now the time has come to sounds its final notes.  In talking about tenure I join a chorus; in addition to the Chronicle forums about Balancing Work and Life and The Tenure Track , lately some people are talking back about the tenure process on the internet.  The first I saw of it was " The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc ," which asserts that you can work  for about 50 hours a week and still have a family life, if you organize everything and keep to a schedule. Organizing everything is basically what I did to get tenure, but I did it my own way and with a lot of reflection up front, in the middle, and in this present coda.  What I've learned more than anything else is that, depending on your productivity style, academic field, and goals, there are so many great ways to do this work.   There are myriad smart, creative, and effective ways to get tenure. Aft...

When I first started my master's program, I was so thrilled that there were any critical studies of children's literature at all that I could hardly stand it.  Now I've been in the field, more or less, since 1997, and there's been huge growth in the scholarship of children's literature, some of it wonderfully inventive, some of it peculiarly intriguing, and of course some not so hot.  It's a delight to be working with a grad student who is contributing some very hot new stuff to the field. And as for me and my reading, well, it seemed appropriate this last few weeks of summer to get back to basics and read a handful of good books for kids and teens. Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas YA fantasy fans have yet another tough assassin heroine to admire and envy, and this time she has a genuine ball-gown-fancying girly streak.  Though it takes her awhile to get back into fighting or gown form after a year in the death camp of Endovier.  Background info is filled i...