What is a Story?
OK, so we've talked about the solving part of Solving Stories. It's a play on words where solving can be used as a verb, or as an adjective.
So, let's move on to the stories part. What is a story? After all, if we're going to be solving stories, we should probably have a working definition for what a story is.
And that's a problem. A huge problem.
Organizational and knowledge management researchers K. Dalkir and E. Wiseman summed up their frustration by writing, ‘‘Storytelling suffers from one of the major obstacles still encountered in KM [knowledge management]: namely, reaching agreement among practitioners and scholars about what storytelling is and what it is not’’ (Dalkir and Wiseman 2004 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41948945).
Stories are everywhere. We have all heard stories, read stories, and told stories. Most of us come in contact with stories on a daily basis. So why is it so difficult to define what a story is?
The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances.... Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting... stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society.... All classes, all human groups, have their narratives.... Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. (Barthes [1966] 1977: 79)
In other words, ‘‘We live in stories the way fish live in water, breathing them in and out, buoyed up by them, taking from them our sustenance, but rarely conscious of this element in which we live’’ (Taylor 1996).
Some of the most important realities are the most difficult to perceive or define. Much of our difficulty in defining what a story is can be attributed to the fact that we are literally immersed in stories, and as the old Chinese proverb says, "If you want to know what water is, don't ask the fish."
Humans have been attempting to define what a story is since the we began to exist, and we will be redefining the meaning of story until the end of time. As I continue to explore the subject, I will post my discoveries here on my blog, and will try to link to the various attempts at defining "story" from this post.
Links: