Dave Pollard's essays and reviews of literature, the arts, and science.

	May 14, 2008

Ten Qualities of a Powerful Story Photo by Patti Digh. I'll let her tell the story. Recently, the best presentations I've heard, and the most compelling business proposals, the most persuasive books, and the most effective blogs and blog posts I've read, have all featured very powerful stories. The word story (and the word history) come from the Greek root meaning "learning by enquiry". Stories were, at one time, interactive events, interrupted with questions from the audience. When we tell bedtime stories to our children they still adhere to that tradition. When we read a story we are engaged in an unspoken conversation with the author, asking her/him questions, filling in the blanks. I've been thinking about the best (and worst) stories I have heard, the cleverest jokes (a form of story), the most engrossing short stories and novels I've read, the (disturbingly few) good films I've seen this past year, to try to discern the qualities that make great stories so powerful. I've come up with these ten qualities: Personal, relating direct observation: A story can be in the third person, but it must still be from the personal perspective of the narrator, someone who was there, describing what happened as it happened. In that sense, every good story is really told in the first person. Conveyed naturally through dialogue and description: A great story does not need sentences that contain phrases like "he thought" or "she wondered" or "they believed". The audience needs to be there, a witness to what is said and heard and done, not told what is in someone's head. Tight, sequential, graceful: No words wasted, every word counting. And no flashbacks please; it's hard enough focusing on things in the right order. The essence of grace in storytelling, I think, is to let the story be told through you, to flow through you. You are just the medium.  Credible, transporting and real: Great stories have details, things that force you to take notice. Lots of sensory information, at least some of which should be subtle, specific. The clothing people wore, the way their faces looked, the sounds and smells and how things felt to the touch. So the audience gets transported there, they are there. Momentum and flow: Drama or conflict can give the story momentum (you want to know what happens next), but there are other devices to achieve it. many jokes (and fables) use repetition in threes, for example, where there is a pattern that leads you to anticipate what comes next. Surprise and serendipity are great, but there must be a flow to interrupt before the interruption has meaning. Characters you care about: This is especially hard in a short story. This is perhaps why sequels are so popular -- you already care about the character, so that work is already done. You can make characters charismatic and amusing, or have them face a struggle that is undeserved. But somehow you need to have the audience care about what happens to them. They must be sympathetic. Successful or famous or beautiful is not enough. Entertaining, funny, and/or imaginative: The story needs an imaginative spark even if it is a factual retelling. The imagination can be in your perspective, in what you as narrator notice and focus on that others miss, in your inference about what's important or what it means, in how you tell it or embellish it credibly to make it amusing. Space for the listener to personalize: Great stories leave enough untold that the audience can fill in the details and make the story their own, really feel themselves as part of the story. Metaphoric and educational or informative: Great stories not only amuse, they teach. They can teach directly by showing the audience what they missed not being there, or they can, more powerfully and subtly, teach them something about themselves by metaphor, by how the audience remembers or can imagine themselves in a similar, analogous situation, with sudden new insight about what it meant, or what they could or should have done. Told with passion and joy: For the audience the care about the story, the narrator has to show that s/he cares about it. Tone is important. What else? What other qualities do you think are essential to a great story? Category: Stories and Narrative 1:42:49 PM  trackback []  comment []

	May 10, 2008

Saturday Links of the Week -- May 10, 2008 Photo of an electrical storm that formed in the plume of the erupting Chilean volcano Chaitén. Photo (c) Terra Networks taken by Carlos Gutierrez for UPI. Thanks to Our Descent Into Madness for the link. Is EndGame's Inevitability Beginning to Dawn on Us? -- Another brilliant essay by my friend Joe Bageant suggests that we're all getting chronically depressed for a very good reason -- a Dark Age is imminent. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. How to Ground Yourself -- Forget anxiety drugs and behavior mod: Recalibrate yourself. Thanks to Lugon for the link. Meditation for Beginners -- At last, a simple, intuitive approach to meditation that doesn't seem harder than it should be. I've ordered the book, and it's also available on CD. Thanks to Beth for the link. Ideas by Podcast -- CBC has put some of the best episodes of its once-great Ideas program on podcast. Thanks to Christopher vanDyck for the link. How Not to Do Intentional Community -- A guilty Wall Street millionaire environmentalist has created an IC for millionaires, by destroying and 'privatizing' wilderness. As Food Emergency Deepens, Big AgriBusiness Fights Change -- The NYT muses: "The developing world needs to develop its own ability to feed itself. For that to happen, American farmers will have to be weaned from American food aid. There is more that Washington must do. Especially with corn and oil prices as high as they are, the time has come to put an end to subsidies to transform corn into ethanol." Finally they get it. Still, no one else is listening. Nicholas Stern Says He Underestimated Climate Change Dangers and Rate -- "Emissions are growing much faster than we'd thought, the absorptive capacity of the planet is less than we'd thought, the risks of greenhouse gases are potentially bigger than more cautious estimates and the speed of climate change seems to be faster." Investigative Journalists Still Face Death and Worse Every Day -- "As long as I live, I will continue to write and writing will keep me alive." says Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro (45), laureate of this year’s UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize. Thanks to Barbara Dieu for the link. Ontario Finally Acts on Animal Cruelty -- After two federal governments knuckled under to the factory farm and pharma labs, the Ontario provincial government has had the balls to advance a reasonable anti-cruelty law. Let's hope it passes. The Last Lecture -- If you haven't seen/heard this yet, don't miss it. Thanks to Matt for the link. Thoughts for the Week: from Barbara Dieu (in answer to my Big Question "Where Do I Belong?") -- You belong to yourself man! from Patti Digh: Maybe life is very simple. Very, very simple. And to make it more interesting we complicate things. We seem to love to impose laws (marriage laws, for example) that do nothing more than allow us to abdicate our personal responsibility. 10:12:13 PM  trackback []  comment []

	May 9, 2008

Friday Flashback -- The Power and Danger of Metaphor From an article I wrote in September 2004: Metaphor is a comparative device used to assert substantive equivalence or similarity between something that is somewhat complex and abstract, and something that is much simpler or more concrete. Examples: Business is war or sport; business is 'organic', information has an 'ecology' A leader is a country or a company ("Russia says...", "The White House responded...", "ExxonMobil believes...") Collectively, the documents of an organization are its 'corporate memory'. The change needed in human culture and behaviour is a metamorphosis from today's larval stage to the future butterfly adult stage. America under Bush is like a family that has been repeatedly brutalized by a drunk father. Ideas and beliefs and behaviours can spread like viruses, 'infect' others and even lead to 'epidemic' change. We use metaphors to make difficult concepts easier to understand. We misuse metaphors to oversimplify and to distort. George Lakoff describes how the inability of our brains to conceive things that are not manifested, directly or metaphorically, in the 'real' world, explains the attraction and necessity of metaphor: When Mark Johnson and I [studied] the cognitive sciences in detail, we realized that there were three major results that were inconsistent with almost all of Western philosophy (except for Merleau-Ponty and Dewey), namely: The mind is inherently embodied. Most thought is unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. The differences [when you approach philosophy from a cognitive science perspective] are differences that matter in your life. Starting with results from cognitive semantics, we discovered a lot that is new about the nature of moral systems, about the ways that we conceptualize the internal structure of the Self, even about the nature of truth... We are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of out bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit. Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world. Read the whole article. 10:14:40 AM  trackback []  comment []

	May 3, 2008

Saturday Links of the Week - May 3, 2008 Flickr Photo Download: Nancy White graphs Peter Block’s Presentation Haven't been browsing much during my three weeks away, so this week's list is the articles that have been sent to me or have showed up in my RSS feeds since April 5: Love, Conversation, Community: Hands-on Survey of Intentional Communities: Three activists made a 7-month journey through 11 European intentional communities, to explore the question of whether intentional communities can actually make a difference or are just people running away from the 'real' world. Peter Block on Engaging People in Community: Nancy White graphs (see graphic above) Peter Block's process for finding and inspiring passion in partners in your communities. And more thoughts on convening from Block, from Holger Nauheimer's blog: Leadership is about convening capacity. Substitute curiosity for advice. There are no answers. Everybody who offers you an answer wants to sell you something. Transformation is based on a platform of relatedness. Ask groups not to report their findings but what strikes them. Aussie Intentional Community Profiled: Jindibah reveals how it has learned to achieve consensus and resolve conflicts quickly and amicably, largely by teaching members to know themselves better. Dave Smith on YouTube: My favourite serial entrepreneur summarizes the key points in his book To Be Of Use. Preconditions for Collective Change: Geoff Brown lists 9 factors that are needed to convert collective agreement into collective action. And he follows it up with a great round-up from some of the world's best blogs. Ben Zander of the Boston Philharmonic on Leadership: Interesting speech on why people would rather be members of an effective team than its 'leader'; thanks to Jon Husband for the link. May 10 is Pangea Day: Get together with the whole world and watch; thanks to Patti Digh for the link. Narrative and Storytelling: Nine Productivity Tools for Writers: Nine free apps for writers compiled by Dustin Wax; thanks to my colleague Greg Turko for the link. Preparing for Civilization's End: Carbon Con: Why carbon offset schemes don't work. A Billion Hybrids On the Road: How we get lulled into believing we're making a difference in CO2 emissions when we're not. When Governments Prevent Citizens from Suing Corporatists: The Bush regime is trying to protect its corporatist friends from liability for their atrocities against citizens and consumers by granting blanket legal indemnity for negligence and fraud, industry by industry. A Compelling Argument for Canceling the Olympics Permanently: It's become a political, corporate-sponsored freakshow, with money, drug use, bribery and fraud determining the winners. Female Victims of the Cycle of Violence: Central American girls willingly suffer horrific abuse just so they can belong -- to a gang of killers. Michael Pollan Urges Us to Grow Our Own Food: The famous sustainable, responsible food champion says foods from personal 'victory gardens' not only taste better and save energy, money and the environment, but help us become more self-sufficient as well. Making Everyone an Environmentalist: Alternet provides 8 reasons we will all soon be environmentalists, like it or not. More Chinese Poisons: A blood thinner used for dialysis and other medical purposes all over the world is tainted with toxins from -- guess where -- China again. Another Condemnation of the US Institutional Education System: Uncompetitive, obsolete, and sinking fast. Climate Change: Just Do Something. Nukes are No Answer: It's not if, it's when the next Chernobyl will hit. And in the meantime, taxpayers will foot the bill in subsidies and guarantees for hundreds of insanely expensive, dirty and dangerous nuclear plants. As Arctic Melts, Land Poisons Become Water Poisons: Mercury and other toxins are entering the arctic food system through melting permafrost. April was, Apparently, Animal Cruelty Month: Canadian Seal Hunt 2008: Another year of carnage, carefully hidden from public view, courtesy of the Harper government. Torturing Animals for Botox: Lots of better ways to test chemicals exist, but US regulators prefer antiquated, brutal methods. The Cost of Factory Farms: Subsidized CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) not only inflict horrific cruelty on animals, they cost taxpayers a fortune, and the externalized cost we'll pay in the future is massive. PETA Offers a Million for Humane Meat: PETA is offering a million dollar prize to anyone who can invent a way to clone meat commercially in test tubes. Web 2.0: Will Video Demand Collapse the Internet?: A British study suggests Web infrastructure is inadequate to support wide-spread use of video; thanks to David Jones for the link. Thoughts for the Week: Richard Conniff suggests we stop calling what we pay for government services 'taxes' and start calling it 'dues'. And David Abram explains The Ecology of Magic. 7:38:49 PM  trackback []  comment []

	April 29, 2008

What Are You Afraid Of? Joe Bageant makes the point in Deer Hunting With Jesus that the working class of the US (and perhaps of the world) are largely driven by fear. In explaining how and what they think he makes clear what it is they are afraid of: Fears of the Working/Poor/Uneducated Class: Unemployment: Not having, or losing, a job; not having enough; losing their home -- When you live close to the edge, destitution is never far away. Authority: When the authorities (the boss, the government, the police) treat you like you're nothing, you learn not to trust them. Illness: When you can't afford to be sick, and can't afford to look after loved ones if they're sick, and you know what it's like to be uninsured or trapped in a crappy long-term care or nursing home, the thought of illness is chilling. 'Evil' People: Evangelical preachers teach you that people are either good or evil, and that foreigners and liberals (who never give you the time of day) and people without 'family values' and people who aren't 'like' you are satan's pawns, and must be vanquished. Being Ripped Off: The uneducated are prey for scam artists, and know how people can use money, coercion and influence to take advantage of them. Crime: Most of the victims of crime are in poor areas, because that's where the people desperate enough to be criminals are, and where law enforcement is most lax. Losing Hope: When you're constantly struggling, you can't lose hope; when your country is mired in a hopeless war and the news is all about layoffs and crime, it's easy to do so. In Lakoff's terms, these fears explain the conservative worldview pretty well. If you're driven by fear, and these are things you fear, the 'strict father' approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff describes makes a lot of sense: Promoting strict-father morality in general (good vs evil, rules to be obeyed, strict rules on right vs wrong) Promoting the virtues of self-discipline, responsibility for one's own actions and success, and self-reliance Upholding the morality of reward and punishment (including preventing interference with the pursuit of self-interest by self-disciplined, self-reliant people, promoting punishment to uphold authority, and ensuring punishment for lack of self-discipline) Protecting moral people from external evils and upholding the moral order (legitimate authority) That got me thinking about the rest of us. If we're not part of the working/poor/uneducated class, what class do we belong to? Joe defines "working class" as those people who have no power/control over their jobs: what they do, when they do it, at what price, and how vulnerable they are to layoffs not connected to their work performance. The rest of us, other than the tiny elite of super-rich and super-powerful, he calls the "catering" class -- because they cater/pander to the elite in return for a higher level of wealth and control than the "working" class receives. So I guess that means that I (and I suspect the majority of readers of this blog) are members of the catering/affluent/educated class, most of whom, in Lakoff terms, are liberal-progressives with the 'nurturing parent' approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff describes: Empathetic behaviour and promoting fairness Helping those who cannot help themselves Protecting those who cannot protect themselves Promoting the virtue of fulfillment in life Nurturing and strengthening oneself Are we, too, driven to this worldview and these approaches to living by our fears? I'd like to believe we are less driven by fear than those in the working/poor/uneducated class, but I'm not so sure. In one sense, we have more control over our lives and more assets to protect ourselves with, and more marketable talents. But perhaps because we have more, we have more to lose, so we are equally driven by fears. What are those fears? Having not done the kind of research that Joe has, I can only speak for myself, but I have a sense that my fears are pretty common among those I know. My recent period of self-reflection has made me a bit more aware of what my fears are, and they are: Fears of the Catering/Affluent/Educated Class: Recession: Because we own more, we are more vulnerable to declines in value of our assets, and because our work is so tied up in the modern global interrelated economy, a recession that makes our skills less valuable and basic survival skills more valuable threatens us more. Responsibility: By virtue of having more control and say in our world, more authority, we also have more responsibility. But, although this is a controversial thing to say, I think we're afraid of this responsibility, afraid of not being able to discharge it well, of letting people down. We long, many of us, for a simple, responsibility-free life. The idea that this is civilization's final century is horrific not only because of the loss and suffering, but because of the guilt of what we might have done to prevent it. Living in the Real World: Affluence allows us to cut ourselves off from the real world, to live in communities (and cars) where we are cut off from the rest of the world, to live inside our own heads, where it's safe and secure. A brutal 'real' world where the majority love to hunt, accept cruelty and violence as normal, hate others, and are enthralled by movies and YouTube videos that show torture, rape and murder is terrifying to us. Intimacy: This is probably a consequence of the fear above. Intimacy involves emotional vulnerability, and those of us who have been cocooned emotionally most of our lives and who have experienced, at least once, the anguish of being emotionally hurt when we have opened ourselves up, quickly become afraid to repeat the experience. War: We know war never solves anything, never has a winner, and always makes things worse. Yet we see it everywhere, becoming bloodier all the time. Machetes used to kill neighbours in Rwanda, torture, rape, burning of villages, massive theft by gangs and enslavement of children in Darfur -- we find these things unfathomable and unbearable, contrary to our notion of humanity. Letting Go: I think educated people find it harder to just accept, to abandon themselves and their ideas, to let go of what control they have. We are inherently more anal than those who live close to the edge, by their wits. Contrary to all logic, Colombians are more happy than Americans, perhaps because they don't worry about things they have no control over. Those are the things I am afraid of, anyway. I suspect my fellow educated liberal-progressives will protest that they don't fear most of these things, but my observations suggest most of us do. Or maybe I'm just judging my peers by myself. What do you think? Joe talks about the "class war" that's brewing in the US and, perhaps, everywhere. I think these different fears explain much of the basis for this "war". It's not so much we hate each other, as much as that we don't know each other, we fear (and are driven by) completely different things (and each class to some extent epitomizes the things the other fears), and hence we can't communicate with each other. And we don't socialize between these classes enough to begin to understand the divide and start to bridge the gap. The chart above, that I explained in my Fire & Ice article, shows (in bold) the qualities that are increasingly prevalent among Americans, especially the young (who are, mostly, children of the growing working class). My sense is that working class fears drive the propensities in the right quadrants, while the catering class fears drive the propensities in the left quadrants. What's more, I think the disappearance of the US middle class (and consequent growth of the working class) explains why the 'median' profile of Americans is now in the lower right quadrant, and moving lower and further right, while the 'median' profile of Europeans, where the middle 'catering' class is faring somewhat better, is still in the centre-left. And, for those who, in wondering why with all my new-found self-knowledge and opportunity to do anything I want to do, what's holding me back, what I'm afraid of -- now you know. Category: Our Culture 10:14:28 PM  trackback []  comment []

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