Writing on The Findings Report

20 Minutes of Storytelling

Sun, 07 Dec 2014 15:08:39 +0000

20 minutes.

That’s what is required. Set an alarm on your phone to sound in 20 minutes, then start writing. Your mission: to write as fast as you can and to tell a complete story. It needs a beginning, middle and an end.

What the world needs now: love-actions

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 11:03:10 +0000

Not long ago, I sat in a half-empty wine bar with a friend, listening patiently as she described a relationship that had been steadily deteriorating. This was not our first conversation on the topic, nor was it the first time I heard her say, “I just don’t feel in love anymore.” Maybe it was the wine or maybe I had just heard the story too many times, but something drove me to interrupt her and ask politely, “have you done anything to love lately?”

Telling a Story Without a Literal Narrative

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:14:30 +0000

In his thought-provoking book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall constructs a compelling case that we are all natural born storytellers. We can’t help it. It is part of our brain’s wiring. It is how we comprehend the world. Even when we’re not trying, we’re always constructing stories.

I come back to this fact of life often, especially when someone says they can’t come up with a story; when they tell me they have writer’s block or they just aren’t creative enough to put a story together. That’s bunk. Each of us has been piecing stories together without much conscious thought since we were infants.

The 2 Critical Story Skills They Don't Teach in School

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:49:00 +0000

In schools across the world we teach young people many skills and bits of knowledge; like how to read and to write, how to solve quadratic equations, or how to calculate the atomic weight of Hydrogen. We arm our children with the most powerful concepts we can imagine in our overly analytical minds, so much so that we stress ourselves out and stress our children out in the process. However, I’ve noticed that we don’t spend enough time teaching our children two critical skills that are essential to life. We don’t teach them how to tell a story and we don’t teach them how to listen for one.