1. UNIVERSALITY: All people at all times have used stories to communicate important cultural values from one generation to another. Stories have universal usage. And even though some people might disagree, it could be argued that man is a storytelling animal rather than (or primarily) a tool-using animal. I think we would be very surprised to find a people totally devoid of story telling.
“In my experience on the air, I have found that the best question for bringing a lofty or difficult conversation back to a usable place for the listener is: ‘What do you mean when you say that?’ The more thoughtful answers almost always contain a story. And the most vivid personal stories have the most universal reach, elevating our sense of others and of the humanity we share” (Krista Trippett, “Word Craft: Rules for Discussing The Meaning Of It All,” The Wall Street Journal, 20-21 November 2010, p. C12.)
2. FORMS: Often the stories people tell are anecdotal and personal, and in that way, family members come to understand their place and importance within the family; their relationship to others within the community; and their culture within the context of the world community. Stories can be quite informal and unsophisticated, as in a scribbled note to one’s spouse “to pick up the dry cleaning.” On the other hand, stories can be quite formal and elaborate, as in novels such as, War and Peace, or, Gone With the Wind. And though one might be reluctant to admit it, even such things as legal depositions are stories in their most elemental essence. Stories, then, come in an array of styles, structures, and modes.
3. TYPE: Since stories come in this astonishing variety of forms, it is sometimes difficult for an auditor to tell the difference between a story that is purely fictional and one that is purely nonfictional. One is apt to encounter stories that blend smoothly from one pure form to another without the disjuncts that might signal their prosaic and distinctive origins. We might observe, though, that fictional forms are frequently characterized by names and circumstances that are obviously concocted by the author. We seldom confuse those concocted fictional elements with the realistic descriptions that we might find in nonfiction works. Often bland character names and insipid character settings tell us that we’re dealing with fiction; whereas, a person with the name such as Waldemar Schlachtenhaufen might sound so real that no fiction author would tag his character with such an unwieldy name. Yet, we recognize that a skillful storyteller can so mix those elements that we can never really tell for sure whether he is “making it up” or if he is faithfully narrating a circumstance that actually took place. Some recent docudramas on television show this very technique: the intermixing of fiction and nonfiction, with very uneven results.
4. FACTUAL CONTENT: It is quite a different matter, however, with works of nonfiction. We almost always know that a piece of nonfiction is, in fact, nonfiction because of the structural elements of the work. Nonfiction frequently deals with subjects with high factual content and relatively low narrative content.
5. FAULTS: Some auditors, however, have the inability to properly locate the proper context of the story, and to make sense of it. Instead they wildly misinterpret the story by assuming that the story is about A, when it is actually about B. This is a fault of misallocation of context.
Other auditors have the inability to correctly interpret vital story elements in such a way as to understand the full meaning of the stories. Here, the auditor has the inability to correctly place the context because of a personal deficiency of judgment or understanding. We might term this a fault of misinterpretation of events.
For example, years ago I told a story to some tavern patrons about a state policeman who was following a semi. The truck driver stopped his rig from time to time, and got out and walked around the trailer and beat the sides of the trailer with a baseball bat. After the policeman saw the truck driver do this several times, he walked over to the truck driver and asked him what he was doing. “Well,” the driver said, “I’m hauling a load of canaries and I’m overloaded. So I have to get out of the truck every now and then and hit the trailer with a baseball bat in order to keep them flying.”
One of the persons listening to that story was a woman who “didn’t get it.” Even after the others tried to explain the story to her, she still didn’t get it. Everyone thought it was hilarious that she “didn’t get it,” and they began to tease her for weeks on end about the story. One day, as she sat there with a dreamy and pensive look on her face, her expression suddenly brightened as she finally realized what the joke actually meant, and she began to laugh. We asked her what she was laughing at, and she told us that she finally understood the joke. That revelation was even more hilarious to the assembled crowd than the original joke. After that she would be reminded daily to “keep her canaries flying.”
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