“Start positive. You’ll get more results that way.”
It was an ordinary quest story told by a corporate client who faced potential problems with low take-up on a company initiative.
Sure, she saw why people didn’t want to engage: they were busy, and they had too many demands on their time, and they wanted a better work-life balance, and this initiative demanded some short-term commitment for long-term gains. But she also knew that if they spent one to two hours engaging over the course of a month – half an hour a week was all it needed to take – the people she was pitching to would reap real benefits: they would have more time, a better work-life balance, and it was designed to make life easier for them and for the company as a whole.
“All I want to do is to show them that the problems they currently face can be dealt with efficiently and effectively with the new system we’ve implemented, but they’re just not interested. It’s like, ‘More tech that doesn’t work; more time wasted learning the operating parameters of a new system that’s only going to last a few months before it’s upgraded; and that’s going to have glitches in it.’ People just don’t like change!”
How did she expect people to engage with the tragic Quest structure story she was engaging with herself?
“I’m trying to help them, but they just won’t accept my help. What do I do?”
In her story line, she had a problem (as did her company), and the colleagues who were resistant were not fulfilling their role as her friends or helpers. As a result, they were unable to experience the benefits that the initiative was designed to bring about.
In their story line, as she saw it, they had a problem, they didn’t want to accept her help – in fact, they actively avoided it, and were (tragically) making their situation worse for themselves.
The story structure solution which presented itself involved using two story structures. One worked at the time of the tale in the individual audience members’ story lines and followed a Quest structure; the other worked at the time of the telling, during the presentation she had to give and followed a different path – a rather unusual one. It required her recasting the audience’s experience as a retelling of the Cinderella story.
The process that the initiative was designed to bring about was a perfect fit for the Quest structure in the audience members’ story line. They clearly faced problems that my client could help them solve by helping them get on board with the new initiative which would involve a bit of work but would bring demonstrable benefits. That much was clear. It would probably manifest as a looping ‘try, try, again’ triple Quest sequence, as seen in the story of The Three Little Pigs. It’s only after two houses are blown down that the pigs finally manage to defeat the wolf together.
Given the choice, no one would really want to think of themselves as Cinderella. After all, who really wants to experience life spent among the ashes? What many people forget, however, is that the determining quality of the ‘Cinderella story’ (or more specifically, of the Rags to Riches structure) is that it starts with a character in a positive condition.
Why is it that the Rags to Riches structure works, and works so well? It’s too easy to say that you catch more flies on honey than on vinegar. That doesn’t explain why the structure works. As I write, in Story and Structure, there’s an ‘inherent message of hope within the Rags to Riches structure … it’s through connecting to the positive seed from which the story structures unfold that we can find resolution and a restoration of balance.’
My client used the outline of the Quest story to transform the ending of the story she was telling herself and was able to give it a happy ending. Story structures help us track the quality of a story as it unfolds in chronological order in a given character’s story line. But stories by no means need to be told in that way.
By shifting the ‘happy ending’ to the start of the story, and using it to give her listeners the experience of living through an imagined Rags to Riches structure story, could she help them bring about positive changes?
I’ll let you know in the next post!
While I don’t get the chance to engage as much with fiction as I’d like, I’m enjoying James Hall’s The Industry of Human Happiness. Although it’s a detective story, he writes in a very well-informed way about opera, music hall, and the early days of the recording industry. I’m enjoying the book as much for the subject matter as I am for the quality of his writing.
My own research interests at the moment are focused on two things: the first is the relationship of number (quadrivium) and and word (trivium) as seen in poetry. Why is much poetry metrical, and when it isn’t what are the patterns which govern the way it is organised? What makes a work poetic? What makes prose poetic, or poetry prosaic? The second is the story which unfolds through the evolution of ancient Egyptian creation myths.
‘How … is one to explain the fact that the Great Ennead, composed of nine entities at Heliopolis and Memphis, is replaced by fifteen at Karnak?’ asks Lucie Lamy (Egyptian Mysteries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989) p. 11. How indeed!
Which reminds me … the earliest known version of the story of Cinderella (or, more correctly, the section of it that follows the saviour character’s story line which is an essential component of the structure) comes from ancient Egypt.