I’ve addressed this in little blips and pieces throughout the website, but it’s worth taking a longer look at. Why am I so fixated on this storytelling thing?
Because it works. We know that people remember stories more than facts and figures. One of my colleagues refers to this as the NPR model. A good NPR story—about tsunamis in Southeast Asia, let’s say—will start with a personal interview, maybe with a rice farmer or banana plantation owner in Sri Lanka. As the farmer talks about his lost livelihood, the chaos and terror that drowned his rice and maybe his family, you turn up the radio, listen more carefully. You might begin your next sentence with, “I heard such a tragic story on NPR today…” The figures matter, and in this case, they are startling. But will you remember the desperation in the Sri Lankan rice farmer’s voice, or will you remember that the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 struck 11 countries, killing more than 250,000?
I think that stories are just about everywhere, and one of my hopes with this blog is to capture as many as I can, in as many ways as I can.
