11.3 Narrative Paradigm Theory

If you tell a story, will everyone accept it at face value? Not at all; in fact, when it comes to storytelling, the phrase “everyone’s a critic” is especially true. Like the girl in the previous paragraph, most people are raised on stories of some kind, and continue to absorb dozens of stories a day throughout their lives, whether they be stories they hear at work, news stories, fictional shows and books, or catching up with friends during a social hour. It’s no surprise that, after you’ve heard a few thousand of them, you develop opinions about whether or not a story “works.” Think about these stories:

• A commercial featuring a fake-sounding testimonial from a customer.
• A trespasser who is stopped by the police and claims he is lost (leading the officer to reply, “I’m not buying it”).
• A fantasy series about wizards that resonates with readers so strongly that they easily picture themselves in that world.
• An entrepreneur’s story about her company, Theranos, being able to diagnose a wide range of diseases from a few drops of blood.

The entrepreneur in that last example is Elizabeth Holmes. Before her empire collapsed, Holmes’ story was so convincing that investors poured billions of dollars into her company — proving that not everyone is perfect at evaluating stories. She was arrested for fraud, and the jury in her trial found the prosecution’s story about her actions more convincing than the story told by her and her defense team. Communication scholar Walter Fisher would say that both the investors and the jury were engaging in the same process: trying to figure out if her story worked.

The list of examples also illustrates a curious thing: although bookstores and movie genres usually sort stories into “fiction” and “non-fiction,” the process for evaluating both kinds of stories is the same, and a hiring director listening to a job applicant tell their story is doing the same thing as an audience member watching a film about a talking raccoon in outer space.

What is that process? Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm says that people have two fundamental questions about any story:

1. Does it “hang together”? (which Fisher called narrative probability or coherence)
2. Does it “ring true”? (which he called narrative fidelity)

“Hang together” refers to whether all the parts of the story are internally consistent and make sense within the world of the story. In a nonfiction scenario, this is why the officer arresting the trespasser might repeatedly ask them to say what happened: the officer is looking for contradictions. If it’s a spouse grilling their partner, the spouse will know when their partner is behaving oddly or doing things they never do, so “consistency” expands beyond just the scope of the immediate story into everything they know about the storyteller. In the realm of fiction, this consistency refers to people behaving “in character” and to whether there are plot holes in the story. For example, in the Toy Story movies people have asked: if the character Buzz Lightyear doesn’t believe he is a toy, why does he stay motionless when Andy is around? And in the Harry Potter universe, Hermione uses a “time turner” to save Buckbeak’s life, but later in the series, when the device would be extremely useful, no one seems to remember that it exists.

“Ring true” means that the story matches the audience’s image of how the world works (even if the world is imaginary), and how plausible the actions and consequences are. How do people determine what is plausible? It’s a blend of life experiences, how well a given story matches up with similar stories you have heard, and how the story fits in with your values system. If your high school friend Jimmy tells you his teacher suddenly declared their undying love for him, the first question you’re likely to consider is: “Is that how high school teachers behave?” Your answer depends on your own experiences with teachers and on any stories you’ve heard about teachers getting into inappropriate relationships with students. These will make the difference between whether you reply with “Yep, that happens” or “You’re so full of it, Jimmy!” And the way in which Jimmy’s story aligns with your own values underlies the question: is that how you want the world to work?

As an example, the scene that struck me the most from the 2018 film A Star Is Born is the one in which Jack (Bradley Cooper) invites Ally (Lady Gaga) up on stage and performs a song she sang to him once in a parking lot. As a musician myself, I can immediately spot how unrealistic this scene is (how did Jack remember all the lyrics, how do the guitarists know what chords to play, how does Jack know the phrasing of how Ally will sing the chorus?), so I’m tempted to scoff at it and say “That could never happen.” But on the other hand, it’s the wildest dream any songwriter could ever hope for, so I have to love it because of the values it represents and the emotions that “ring true” in the performers. It’s the same reason that the Cinderella story is so abidingly popular: not because so many young women have seen real-life examples of a Prince Charming carrying a servant girl off to a life of perfect bliss, but because hearing that life works that way, even one out of a million times, gives them hope. It also seems to be the reason that people keep falling for frauds, like Elizabeth Holmes or the romance scams discussed in Chapter 3 — because the stories ring true and fit with how the listeners want to see the world.

The ability to tell a convincing story is a form of power that can serve you well in many contexts. But as stressed in Chapter 3, communicative power can be easily abused, so the TARES test for ethical communication applies to storytelling: is the story True, is the speaker Authentic, do they Respect the audience, is the situation an Equitable “level playing field,” and does it show Social responsibility for the common good?