Once upon a time: A Short Introduction To Storytelling (SkillSwap session) November 22, 2007
Brighton, England BN1 1EB
Led by Charlie Davies
Why lying is more interesting than telling the truth, why stories about eating badgers are so memorable, why Chinese whispers is an invaluable business tool, how a group of people can make up a story altogether at once with no planning and it still make sense, how propaganda works (with diagrams and simple 'how to' explanations) and why asking good questions is more useful than telling good stories.
If you want to attend:
1) Sign-in on upcoming.org
2) Mark yourself as 'attending'
Added by danny.hope on November 1, 2007
Comments
charliedavies
Someone asked me for a bit more context on the workshop.
You don't need to read any of these things, but if you're interested here's a bit of background:
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My interest in storytelling has emerged accidentally.
My degree was in Modern Languages (hence a lot of dissecting of literary devices...).
I worked as a journalist for about five years (hence a very practical interest in how you make a story that's interesting and compelling to people).
Then, I've done a lot of work around how to build community and popular campaigns through understanding what makes a good story (particularly online - i've worked with activist campaigns - and corporations).
Now, I quite often find myself advising companies on how to analyse what they do in terms of simple, easy-to-understand stories (so instead of doing traditional marketing where you work out what to tell people you are, you do story-analysis to work out what you actually are).
I never really noticed, but people started referring to the fact that I would always explain things in terms of stories.
With some friends, I started an online magazine called Pick Me Up, that was partly based around the idea that good stories could inspire people to do interesting things. These are some of the stories:
http://charliedavies.stikipad.com/home/show/Pick+Me+Up+Stories
And this is a very short explanation of the logic behind it:
http://charliedavies.stikipad.com/home/show/How+to+use+stories+to+build+communities
I once saw a great talk by English Nature's 'Senior Knowledge Ecologist' Ron Donaldson:
http://www.ikmagazine.com/xq/asp/sid.0/articleid.F01322CC-ADC9-4ADA-A415-F99211662F7F/qx/display.htm
and I'm really interested in the theories of propaganda as a form of storytelling:
http://storymind.com/dramatica/dramatica_theory_book/chapter_37.html
AnnaM
Thanks for the info. It will be especially useful as I aimed to attend but instead spent the hour stationary on the A27...
danny.hope
I've moved this event from 8pm to 7pm.