A Story as the Result of a Question

Our brain makes the connection between stories and questions.

In conversation, stories become the result of a question. Sometimes people ask us, ‘have you ever been in a similar situation?’ Then, our brain searches for any relevant story. More often, it’s our brain that asks the question. As our friend tells us a story, our brain thinks, ‘do I have a similar tale’? Then our friend’s story becomes our introduction.

I am a big fan of using questions to tell stories. I often have a thought to share but need a vehicle, a story, to make it relatable. So I’m always asking myself questions.

I’m currently working on questions for daily reflections or creative exercises. These prompts are under the working title of Funhouse Mirror Reflections. I’ll provide more information on the Funhouse in a future newsletter.

As I continue to develop what Those Stories will look like long-term, I’m asking many questions. One question is, ‘how do I keep instilling actual stories into the process?’ I thought it would be great to engage with you, the audience, in some of these stories. So I’m going to test out a section in this newsletter about questions that might lead to stories.

You can think about these on your own, but if you’d like to share a story or two, I’d love to hear from you. Maybe the story even fits with what I’m doing with Those Stories, and I might ask your permission to use it. I could also create a similar story, changing the names and likenesses to protect the guilty.

As a side note, I am looking for a similar candy in standing to a Rolo. I’m having trouble finding something obscure enough that people wouldn’t come across it every day, but weird enough to have a rule around it. Any ideas? I can hear your snickers…

Below are a few generic questions and my thought process behind them. Feel free to reply to this email, or please enjoy thinking about these stories on your own.

Questioning Those Stories:

Can you think of a time where you misjudged someone, and it had consequences?

It’s a common piece of advice to trust your first impressions, but I am not great at judging people on first impressions. My mistake is that I see real issues as quirky instead of a warning sign. For example, I once thought that someone who collected a thousand shoes in their room had a cute hobby instead of hoarding tendencies and a shopping addiction.

What’s something that you learned way too late in life, and what’s the story about how you found out the truth?

There’s a This American Life episode about this phenomenon. The story’s narrator thought that only people with the last name of Nielsen were surveyed for TV ratings. One woman found out as an adult that an X-ing sign was pronounced crossing and not Zing. 

Is there a story from your childhood that makes you wonder where all the adults were at the time?

I think that I have more of these experiences as an adult than I did as a child. Adults seemed to be around for the most part as a kid, and now they’ve disappeared. However, my entire kindergarten class did flee our classroom and chased an ice cream struck down the street.