Emotion and perspective help frame stories

Key Takeaways

Some stories land in your brain and if the storyteller is lucky or skilled, spread to your heart. Others work the other way. 

There is more than one way to make a story stick in people’s consciousness, and there are a few approaches that NACo President J.D. Clark wanted to impart when the NACo Board of Directors visited Wise County, Texas for the Fall Board Meeting.

“When we lead with our stories — when we’re real, bold and authentic with our stories — we lead with heart, courage and purpose,” he said, as he introduced two of his favorite Texas-based storytellers. One of them focuses on the tighter frame of individual emotions and the other is concerned with telegraphing historical epochs. 

For his part, songwriter Drew Kennedy has no interest in grounding his stories in fact.

“I’m more interested in how someone felt after they went through the event,” he said. “I do not care about a story’s provenance, as long as it makes me feel something. If you’re telling it with passion, there are a great number of things I will forgive, from punched up minor details to outright lies. You might not be able to get away with outright lies in your line of work, but it is indeed a prerequisite of mine.”

He sees a songwriter’s biggest challenge as figuring out what merits a song. 

“It has to be something spectacular, or it has to be something so mundane that you can make it beautiful,” Kennedy said. “To write a song, you can make something extremely complicated, extremely simple, or you make something extremely simple, far more complicated.”

But despite the freedom from fact, songwriters still face pressure caused by scarcity, but that pressure can turn coal into diamonds. 

“The trick with songwriting is your word economy,” Kennedy said. “In prose, if you find a particularly beautiful tree, you can spend 10 pages talking about the tree if you want. In songs, if the song is not about the tree, but you still feel compelled to mention it, you’d better figure out how to do it in one line.”

In contrast, journalist S.C. Gwynne has a longer leash when it comes to brevity, but a different set of constrictions. The former Texas Monthly executive editor is exacting when he comes to grounding his work in fact, including in the many nonfiction books he has written.

“A lot of people think the way to make a nonfiction story really good is to sex it up with things that aren’t true,” he said. “Even friends of mine that still don’t quite get the difference between me and a novelist. A novelist can make up anything they want to; I can’t. I don’t invent dialogue. If I write that a character walks on his porch in the morning and is inspired by the glory of the sunrise and thinks fondly of his dead mother. I can do that because I have it in his diary.”

Kennedy offered insight into how his approach to storytelling could work for counties.

“The story of your place is important to you and your community,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s your past, sometimes it’s what you have going on in your community right now, sometimes it’s what you hope for your community in the future. But all of you have a story that is unique to your town, to your community.” 

“The important thing for a storyteller is to find that thing, because that is the way you can connect with the people around you. Tell your story in a way that makes sense to your people, and I guarantee you, there are other people outside of your community that will hear it, and it will resonate with them as well. That’s the entire trick about songwriting, is taking something that seems huge and making it feel like something you can reach out and put in your pocket and take home with you.”

It's translatable from the everyday work county officials do.

“Your community has those stories,” Kennedy said. “May they be small or large, and more often than not, it is you that is charged with the challenge of figuring out how to verbalize it, how to communicate it, how to let everyone in your community know that you see them and how to let everybody outside of your community, that you see the people in your community,” he said.

“If you lose your community’s story, you lose the anchor that centers the reason why you’re existing in this place to begin with. It is yours to tell, and even if people from outside of your community don’t necessarily understand it, the people inside of your community will. And that is an incredible way to foster community and goodwill in your town. If you are the keeper of your story and you are willing to share it with people.”

Gwynne, the author, shared his conviction of the storytelling technique he employed in his book, “Empire of the Summer Moon,” about the Comanche tribe and a family who was central to the narrative.

He drops the reader right into the middle of the action — in media res (Latin for “in the middle of things”) — as to not make the reader wait “for the good stuff” in a linear story that would have taken decades and centuries to mature.

“The idea completely changed the structure of the book,” he said. He alternated between chapters about the family and chapters about the tribe’s history.

“The story…would never be that far from the family, that intensely human story.”

That structure put him in a dilemma of trying to resolve parallel tracts. “Then in a sudden blinding gin-and-tonic-inspired flash, when I realized that these two parallel tracks actually came together naturally and without any help from me in the person of Quanah [a central character in his book],” Gwynne said. “He is there for the fall, he resolves everything that has been happening.”