Storytelling is vital to so many things that we do, even our everyday conversations are peppered with stories that we hardly recognise we’re telling. When it comes to having impact from storytelling, we have to find new ways to tell them.
Sometimes that may as simple as using a different medium: if you’re always written, try video; if you’ve always recorded audio, try writing something instead. Diversifying the method can help diversify the way the message gets across.
Other times it’s less about the media you use and more about finding a new way to tell an old story. Of course, we’ve been doing this for centuries – millennia even – if you hold with the idea that there are only seven stories in the world anyway ((A slight over-simplification, I know.)). And think of all the allegorical tales we tell. C S Lewis’s most famous work was a retelling of Bible stories with a lion as Christ.
For me, finding new ways to tell my own story has been a real challenge. Before my transplant it was really easy to help people understand how hard life with cystic fibrosis is, because I would turn up carting my oxygen behind me, skeletally thin, looking like death and all I had to do was saying “CF is rubbish” and people would agree.
Now, I look ‘normal’ so I’m not able to rely on the same visual aids to describe the challenges of day-to-day life with CF. Instead, I have to find a way to describe my experiences rather than show them, or use examples of friends to compare their day-to-day with the changes in my life. I have to be far more clever about the way I tell my story to have impact.
It makes me think more carefully about the way I approach my work, because finding new ways to tell old stories is both the hard part and the fun part of communicating with people. That’s the joy of being a storyteller.