Appendix 2: Narrative Training

I ended that book by recommending a form of training I called Story Circles. At the start of 2015, we began the development of our Story Circles Narrative Training program. The training is essentially groups of five individuals meeting for 10 onehour sessions. In the four years since, we’ve completed more than 60 circles involving a range of government agencies and universities.

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To keep everything on track we created a CUEING VIDEO, which can play on the laptop of a member of the circle. It’s exactly 60 minutes in length, and it cues the various smaller segments to start every 2 to 10 minutes during the hour.

The cueing video turned out to be the heart and soul of the training. Narrative needs structure. So does training. If you just pull people together for an hour of blabbing about story structure, it’s not going to work. You’ll get the dominant people taking over as the quieter people sit quiet. You need the cueing video to prevent this. I’ll say more about it in a bit.

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Story Circles is built primarily around the ABT as the central tool, but there are also several other elements. One of them is the Dobzhansky Narrative Template—the tool for finding the one word at the core of a narrative.

In the beginning it was just one of several narrative tools, but over the course of five years we’ve heard repeatedly that it emerges as everyone’s favorite tool. We’ve had several circles tell us, when I’ve interviewed them after their circle completed, that it was the Dobzhansky that provided the most powerful and even surprising breakthroughs on people’s narratives.

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This means that there is no perfect narrative form that will match all the brains in an audience. You have to just give it your best shot and move on. To try and stop things until you’ve got it exactly right would be foolish.