Tag: storytelling

Last Week’s Links

Here are some of the articles I’ve been reading around the web lately.

Protecting Your Digital Life in 7 Easy Steps

Some suggestions for how to make your personal data”more difficult for attackers to obtain.”

What’s the Use of Regret?

Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, contemplates the meaning and function of regret, especially the type that he calls “moral regret.”

How Exercise Might Keep Depression at Bay

For those of us who need yet another reminder of how important physical exercise is:

Exercise may be an effective treatment for depression and might even help prevent us from becoming depressed in the first place, according to three timely new studies. The studies pool outcomes from past research involving more than a million men and women and, taken together, strongly suggest that regular exercise alters our bodies and brains in ways that make us resistant to despair.

Is Grief a Disease?

Common wisdom advises us that there are no right or wrong ways to grieve, that all people handle grief differently and in their own way. This article takes a long look at grief, including a new approach to something called “complicated grief”:

complicated grief is more chronic and more emotionally intense than more typical courses through grief, and it stays at acute levels for longer. Women are more vulnerable to complicated grief than men. It often follows particularly difficult losses that test a person’s emotional and social resources, and where the mourner was deeply attached to the person they are grieving. Researchers estimate complicated grief affects approximately 2 to 3 per cent of the population worldwide. It affects 10 to 20 per cent of people after the death of a spouse or romantic partner, or when the death of a loved one is sudden or violent, and it is even more common among parents who have lost a child. Clinicians are just beginning to acknowledge how debilitating this form of grief can be. But it can be treated.

What I found most interesting here is that this approach to helping people cope with grief involves storytelling:

Grief is a problem of narrative. A story, in order to be told, needs a narrator with a point of view who offers a perspective on what happened. But you can’t narrate if you don’t know who you are… . Plotting out the story restores the narrator and the narrative. Then, you can begin to imagine a new story, a new plot for yourself.

 

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

The Insidious Imps of Writing

One of my own toughest writing challenges has been to shake myself out of the impersonal aridity of academic writing and assume a more open persona. I therefore found this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Mark Edmundson, professor of English at the University of Virginia, helpful. Here’s his advice:

Slow down and make contact with a dreamier, more associative part of your mind.

People Who Write Well Do This One Simple Thing, Psych Study Finds

Forcing yourself to type slower could improve the quality of your writing, a new study finds.

Participants in the study who typed with only one hand produced higher quality essays, researchers found.

journal_writingThe same approach of writing more slowly will also help people who write with pen or pencil on paper, according to the article. However, do not slow down too much, the article warns: “When people slow to below the rate of normal handwriting, their quality gets worse, previous research suggests.”

A creative writing lesson from the ‘God of Story’

Novelist Tim Lott on

… the classic text Story by Robert McKee. The so-called “God of Story” (as Vice magazine dubbed him) has been explaining his theory of how and why dramatic narratives emerge for 35 years, to the fascination of playwrights and screenwriters – his alumni have so far mustered 60 Oscar wins, including, among many others, William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) Paul Haggis, Peter Jackson, John Cleese (who has attended the story seminar three times) and the entire writing staff of Pixar. However, McKee receives a more sceptical response from most novelists, at least, most non-genre novelists like myself.

McKee’s book is the bible among screenwriters and other folks in the movie production business. In fact, the subtitle of McKee’s book is “Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting.” But Lott says that many novelists shy away from McKee’s concept of story structure because they feel it goes against the grain of creativity and produces formulaic work.

Use your life stories to get the job

The use of storytelling in the business world has developed into a hot topic. Here Gabrielle Dolan advises job applicants on how to use personal storytelling during a job interview to move beyond their printed resume and to make themselves stand out from all the other applicants. To demonstrate during the interview that you’re the right person for the job, she writes, “you also need to demonstrate your values and create a connection. One of the most effective ways to do this is by sharing a variety of work related and relevant personal stories.”

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown