{"id":2458,"date":"2016-10-17T20:08:10","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T20:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/?p=2458"},"modified":"2017-07-01T15:09:38","modified_gmt":"2017-07-01T15:09:38","slug":"13-takeaways-from-story16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/13-takeaways-from-story16\/","title":{"rendered":"13 takeaways from #Story16"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over 400 people from 17 countries gathered In Bucharest on October 14-15 to expand their minds and fill their souls with wisdom and inspiration shared by our 13 amazing speakers – bestselling <\/span>writers, journalists and poets, visual artists, musicians, audio magicians and story innovators.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what we learned from them:<\/p>\n

1. Seek the universal truth in every story you write.<\/b><\/b>
\n<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cheryl Strayed offered the perfect opening to #Story16 by talking about <\/span>inner and outer journey, exploring the wild as well as one\u2019s inner world and finding the courage to put together our thoughts, notes, and experiences and create something others can relate to.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"cheryl\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You have to have something to say, some sense of the meaning of your story that isn\u2019t just about you, that transcends yourself. I didn\u2019t write \u201cWild\u201d because I thought my hike was interesting to anyone else but my friends or because I thought my love for my mom was more tremendous than anyone else\u2019s loss. But because I felt that the story of my journey would resonate to others and to what it means to be human. In every story I write I try to tap into that deeper mission of seeking truth.<\/p>\n

The interesting thing about writing a memoir is all you have to do is pay attention to your life. Life offers all the metaphors and symbols you need.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>Dare to wander is pretty much the theme of my life, and certainly the theme of my book \u201cWild\u201d. Often when we think about dare to wander we think about the journey, the escape, leaving the past behind. My hike was about that, but it was also about returning to who I was. I think that\u2019s the purpose of the journey, we are born whole and we need to find our way back to that, to being able to trust our intuition, to trust who we are.<\/span><\/p>\n

2.\u00a0Step out from your solo work and grow through relationships.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Second on stage, Wendy MacNaughton shared from her experience in collaborating with others on her projects. She busted the myth of the lone genius and instead dared everybody to go out of their bubble and reach out to those around them, because “it is through relationships, through collaboration, that we grow as humans and as professionals”.<\/p>\n

\"Wendy<\/a><\/p>\n

Dare to reach to other people and start thinking about collaborating. It makes our work more interesting and our worlds bigger.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Sometimes we need to go inside, go through a solo passage and then come out. And sometimes we need to work with other people.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we dare to step our from our solo work, to experiment more, to challenge more, we make things that we never thought we could make. And it gets our work out to an exponential wider audience. And we grow. We grow through relationships.<\/p>\n

3. Keep your eyes open.<\/b><\/p>\n

We live in a world full of stories worth telling. If you keep eyes open, far more complicated and beautiful and surprising things than our imagination wants to accept.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jon Mooallem then talked about accepting complexity and using it to tell better stories: <\/span><\/p>\n

\"ALB_0403\"<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

The universe has a way of scattering the beautiful things we imagine. Once the panic turns off, look for every good opportunity still standing there.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re doing this kind of journalism you\u2019re throwing yourself into a world, allowing yourself to feel lost in it, and miraculously getting found around deadline.<\/span><\/p>\n

As storytellers, we have powerful imaginations, <\/span>we tell ourselves stories that allow us to do our work. It’s a gift, but it’s also a burden. Our imagination can turn against us, it can limit our sense of the world instead of expanding it.<\/span><\/p>\n

We live in a world full of stories worth telling. If you keep eyes open, far more complicated and beautiful and surprising things than our imagination wants to accept.<\/span><\/p>\n

4.\u00a0How to turn stories into music<\/strong><\/p>\n

Colin Meloy feels songwriting stands apart from other writing forms. He shared the process he went through in order to find the voice that was true to himself and a manner of turning stories into music. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"Colin<\/a>
\n<\/span>Songwriting is a lot like drifting, there are no set rules, you have your own voice, you\u2019re following your own waymarks, you are interpreting waymarks and sort of following them blindly and hoping that they\u2019re good and that people will like them.<\/span>
\nTo me writing a novel is like moving rocks from one part to another, it\u2019s tremendous labour, but you know exactly what you\u2019re doing and where it probably should go, but it\u2019s taking a lot of time. While songwriting looks like unemployment, standing couch and playing guitar.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

5. Moderate speech, not thought.<\/b><\/p>\n

Journalist C\u0103t\u0103lin Tolontan and researcher Marina Popescu had a debate about hate speech over the internet and how to communicate with the public when its interaction with journalists is higher than ever before. They drew their conclusions after \u00a0moderating 700.000 comments on tolo.ro<\/a> and gsp.ro<\/a>, together with their team.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"tolontan<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journalism has always needed feedback from the audience in order to find the balance between the public interest and the public\u2019s interests, the former referring to its greater good and the latter to the things they want to find out more about. (Marina Popescu)<\/span>\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the great advantage of written media: not having a camera pointed at people, they are able to express their emotions at a different intensity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tolontan shared some guidelines for moderating comments at gsp.ro, some of which are: moderate the comment, not the commentator; strive not to change the meaning of the comment; moderate speech, not thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

All publishers fear that if you moderate comments, the numbers will go down. But what we found is that they actually went up and the number of comments requiring moderation goes down. Slowly, but it does.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I have learned from this communication is the following: asking those who comment to keep an open mind, we have also become more open and tolerant towards those we write about.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Journalists cannot change people, but they can change the interaction with their public,an analysis of hate speech comments shows. #story16<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Luiza Ilie (@LuizaIlie) October 15, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n