Getting to the heart of the matter through stories

If you’re like many global development professionals, you spend much of your days sitting through meetings, writing and reading endless emails, and keeping track of the constant pinging of your phone. Consider, then, the opportunity you have when writing a story about your organization’s work. It is a chance for you to reconnect with what inspired you to work in development in the first place. Your own inspiration can, in turn, galvanize others to support your organization. Therein lies the primary purpose of telling development stories: to inspire people to action, maybe through social media, or by signing up for your organization’s newsletter or making a donation. But how do you tell stories that will inspire readers? Actually tell a story Take a minute to think about one of your favorite stories; maybe it’s a fairy tale or a novel or a movie you’ve watched several times. What happens in the story? Now put aside the specifics, and you’re likely to find the fundamental elements: a protagonist, a problem, a struggle, and an ending. Many stories in the development sector, however, are really just project descriptions with a human face. The impulse to put a lot of information into a story is understandable; you want readers to know about your work. But it’s counterproductive if you end up boring your readers. “Solar power project in ABC village benefits 500 people” is not a story, it’s a project description. A story to illustrate that project might be, “In ABC village, women don’t go to the local toilet at night for fear of being harassed or attacked; they advocate for solar power to be installed, and new lamps light the way to safety.” In this example, you see the basic elements: a beginning, in which the people and the problem are introduced; a middle, in which the action or struggle takes place; and an ending, in which there is some resolution, whether good, bad or mixed. Stories take countless forms, and you don’t need to be bound to one structure or storyline. But if you keep these basic elements in mind, they will help you make sure you’re truly telling a story, not just rephrasing a project description. Flesh out your characters In many development stories, readers might get introduced to a character or protagonist — someone who has benefited from an organization’s work. But then our protagonist is dropped part-way into the story, to make way for a description of the project. In such stories, the protagonist is really no more than a beneficiary, a poster child, or, worse, a victim. Instead, flesh out your characters — you might have more than one — and let the reader see their humanity. This means, for one thing, giving details about their lives. That solar-power project? Show us around the village and take us into the homes of your characters: What do the women talk about, what games do the kids play, what could villagers do at night if only they had the light? Follow your characters throughout the story; the story is about them, not the project. Let your readers hear the voices of the people you are writing about. Use quotes to convey your characters’ feelings, experiences, and actions. How scared a woman was when walking at night, or how powerful she felt when she spoke up. Use only your most interesting quotes; for the rest of the story, either use your own words or paraphrase those of your characters. Consider addressing some of the complexities that inevitably arise. Maybe one of the women in your solar-power story says she’s especially afraid of people of a certain race. Or maybe the project creates divisions among the new haves and have-nots. Depending on the purpose and nature of your story, you might choose to elide some of the complexities; however, addressing them might be a better way to engage your readers in the hard work of development. Show the bigger picture It is important to show the human heart of social problems, but at the same time, you don’t want to ignore their political aspects: The people in our solar-power story are poor not because of bad luck or personal failings, but because of things like war or structural racism or the legacy of colonialism. One way to meld the personal and the political is to put your characters’ lives in context. Alternate between anecdote — the words and actions of your characters — and information — why the village lacks electricity and how women are harassed. To set the scene in our solar-power example, you might quote a villager who talks about a war that destroyed infrastructure and made gender inequities even worse. You might also cite a few choice statistics, quote some government officials, or discuss, without jargon, the work of development organizations. You might also tell a collective story of development. Social change is made usually not just by one person, but by many people in a community or a movement. Even your organization, as big or successful as it might be, does not create change alone. It doesn’t diminish your work to recognize the larger context in which it takes place, or who else is involved. In doing all this, you are linking people’s personal experiences to larger development issues; that’s not only more interesting, it’s often also truer to the work of development. Consider the ethical issues A lot of times when we tell development stories, we are doing so to raise money for our organizations. There are always questions of social power involved: What story is the writer telling? Who gets to speak? How will the story benefit the people or communities that it is about? These are tough ethical questions. Answering them will help us do development better, always collaborating and learning and being guided by the people most directly affected by inequities and injustice. Not coincidentally, pondering these questions will also help us write better stories. Stories that convey all the love, passion, pain, and struggle that are a part of development.