Story Ingredients

The 7th in the Egan Pattern Language

Hear ye, hear ye!

I’m delighted to announce that we have the first seventy-eight patterns scheduled! They’ll be coming out twice a week until at least September, and will rotate between the humanities, the sciences, the arts, math, language, practical superpowers, and… one more category. You can see all of the scheduled posts (and more) in the index.

And now, our featured presentation…

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1. A problem

Being able to tell a good story is one of the fundamental human skills, powerful in business, relationships, or talking to a judge. Heck, it might be more useful than the ability to write a sentence! Yet many people are terrible at telling stories, and it’s rarely taught in schools.

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2. Basic plan

Starting at least in fourth grade, help students figure out what the ingredients of a good story are, and teach a few useful recipes. All the recipes can disagree. None should be given as The One Way to Tell a Story, because there is no one way to write a story.

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3. What you might see

Students playing with stories.

You might see a teacher leading students in watching a Pixar short film, and analyzing what’s happening in the narrative.

You might see them using a recipe to speed-write some of their own stories, laughing at how bad they mostly are… and noticing that a few are actually quite powerful.

You might see a class reflecting on the structure of the stories they hear in class, as part of the rest of their education.

4. Why?

"Things Stories are in the saddle
And ride mankind."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Ode (inscribed to William H. Channing)"

The hive mind of humanity is now spinning stories faster than any one person can keep up, and some of these are stupid and destructive — think of a conspiracy theory like Sandy Hook, or a meta-conspiracy community like QAnon. Or, on a broader scale, think of the narrative of whichever major political party you don’t belong to.¹

Oftentimes we think that the way to steer clear of conspiracies is to ground people in facts. There’s something to this — but I wonder if another technique is to be able to recognize the power of stories. And the best way to do that is to dissect narratives, learn what makes them tick, and learn to spin them yourself.

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5. Egan’s insight

Where do we see this in the human experience?

Our minds seem to have co-evolved with the form of stories. Yuval Harari’s Sapiens makes the case that the invention of stories allowed humans to work in groups larger than shared genes would allow.

How might this build different kinds of understanding?

(What do these funny emoji mean, you ask?)

Recognizing the ingredients of story draws upon the tool of 🧙‍♂️STORY. (You probably didn’t need me to tell you that.) Some of the ways we might think about narrative structure are visual, like the graph on the cover of Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid;² that’s a way of strengthening what Egan calls 🦹‍♂️THE LITERATE EYE.

But the big tool here is PHILOSOPHIC — it’s the 👩‍🔬CRAVING FOR GENERALITY, the desire, after having heard oodles and oodles of stories, to understand what “a story” actually is.

And ultimately discovering that there is no single definition of “a story” that fits every story is a nice way to presage the 😏APPRECIATION OF AMBIGUITY.

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6. This might be especially useful for…

Teachers who need to tell stories

…which is everyone who uses Egan education! This pattern is, thus, something of a boomerang: eventually it’ll teach students, but first it’ll help teachers tell the myriad stories powerfully, without having to work too hard.

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7. How could this go wrong?

This lessens the joy of hearing a story

When you learn how a piece of art works, you (mostly) can’t enjoy it in the same simple way you already have.

There’s a sadness with this. (It’s part of what Egan refers to as one of the tragic losses one gets from a good education.) It’s why, above, I suggested that we wait until students are in fourth grade — which is the first year of the second cycle of how I’m conceiving an Egan education, and about the time that students leave behind the simplicities of Mythic understanding, and begin to layer on Romantic understanding as well.

Can you think of another way this could go wrong… or, um, a way to help avoid that? Become a paid subscriber and join in the comments conversation!

8. Classroom setup

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9. Similar stuff (others are doing)

All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again: flippin’ Aristotle taught his students how to hack narrative structure. (You probably learned his simple theory in high school literature, and we know of it only because his students wrote down notes from his lectures.)

The nine-time Moth-storytelling grandSLAM champion Matthew Dicks has created a wonderful method for telling personal stories, laid out in his book Storyworthy. It’s one of the world’s few perfect books, not a word or example out of place. (Interesting fact: Dicks is a fifth-grade teacher — I’d love to understand how he’s using this method in his classroom.)

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10. Open questions

Q: SHOULD we start this earlier?

Honestly, it’s weird for me to imagine not starting this as early as possible — maybe first or second grade. I hesitate to, only because (1) of the earlier point of “it lessens the simple joy of hearing a story, and really isn’t the world bleak enough already, why did you want to go and make it worse”, and (2) I don’t presently work with kids that age, and so don’t have much authority here.

I don’t know. I’m eager to hear thoughts. (And if you’re the parent of a first grader, and are itchin’ to chat about story, I say, go for it.)

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11. How could this be done small, now?

A confession, of sorts: once upon a time I was a high-priced tutor for the SSAT — a standardized test for getting into private middle schools.³ And, on its very first section, kids were given (1) a random prompt, and (2) twenty-five minutes to turn that into a story.

If you’ve ever actually listened to a child tell you a story,⁴ you can guess about how engaging these typically were.

So I taught them a story structure: a very simple structure. I based it on Pixar’s second-ever attempt at telling a story: “Knick Knack”. (I don’t think anyone would call it “good”, but it does show how the company was thinking about storytelling from its inception. And, I don’t know, I still chuckle near the end.)

The ingredients I isolated:

• A character (by asking “who or what are you?”)

• A desire (by asking “what do you want?”)

• Thwarted attempts to fulfill that desire (by asking for a first attempt that fails, a second attempt that fails bigger, and a final attempt)

• A resolution (by asking how the final attempt succeeds or fails)

• A change in the character (by asking for a false belief at the beginning, and a change in belief at the end)

I turned those into a timed challenge: given a (delightfully) random prompt, can you brainstorm a set of specific ingredients in two minutes? Then, can you go back through and re-brainstorm them (to make them better) in two more minutes?

In other words, it’s a packet for training people to create an outline for a simple, compelling story out of almost nothing in four minutes flat. And wow, it worked! Students’ stories transmogrified from lead to… well, if not gold, then at least bronze.

If you want it, it’s yours!

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12. Related patterns

Story is so fundamental to Egan’s notion of education, his first book on elementary education is titled Teaching as Storytelling.⁵ So I’ll hold back, and just share a few here.

Giving us language to talk about what’s going on in a story allows us a new way to talk about the songs we focus on in A Song a Week°, especially songs like ballads. As students understand different (but still simple) theories about how stories work, it opens up conversation for discussing A Movie a Month°. And it strengthens our Epic Stories° and Origin Stories°, not only in the teacher’s initial telling of them, but when students start Playing inside Stories° and re-tell them themselves.

In years to come, this will evolve into Professional Story Recipes°.

1. Yours is great! Straight-up truth-telling, that.

2. Which, spoiler, tells you the plot of The Silence of the Lambs! Albeit in the most abstract possible way!

3. Forgive me, father, for I have sinned?

4. As opposed to, y’know, doing what the rest of us do: nod, blink occasionally, and start mentally working on your tax returns for next year.

5. Recommended, by the way, for anyone who works with elementary schoolers — it presents many of his foundational ideas more simply than his later works. (For more advice on where you in particular might to start with Egan, I wrote a post about that.)