Lost in a book

Here is a strange little story related to the post I wrote about two weeks ago in relation to reading novels on e-book readers. Having finished reading Little Dorrit and having slurped up both movie versions (each best in its own way), and having gone through the customary refractory period (for respect and reflection), I was now ready to read another novel.

I looked in the Dickens collection on my e-book reader. While watching the film adaptations of Little Dorrit, I had noticed two film adaptations of Bleak House on Netflix. I love book-film combinations, so Bleak House seemed a good choice for my next reading adventure.

As I began to read, a curious sensation stole over me. The people and places seemed strangely familiar, like things I'd seen in a dream. I was sure I'd never read Bleak House before. But might I have read something like it?

With each page the feeling grew. I found myself recognizing little visual particulars in some of the scenes -- a man in a coach, a girl standing in front of a fence, a rag-and-bone shop, a bare attic room, birds in cages, twisting staircases. I became convinced that I must have at least started the book before, because why else would these images seem so familiar? But even as I kept recognizing fragmented images, I could not guess at what might possibly come next, or even whether I had read what came next. I could not guess whether the characters I saw were central or peripheral to the plot. I asked myself: Who and what is Bleak House about? What is its point? What does it mean? How does it end? Did I read the whole thing? I had no idea. It was unsettling, uncanny, even frightening. It was like one of those dreams where you are frantically trying to call home but can't remember your own number.

I've now come to the conclusion that I must have read Bleak House within the past two years, since that is how long I've had my e-book reader. But I still can't recall reading it or anything about it. It's all new to me, even though it's familiar. By the way, it is highly unlikely that I would have read a bit of the book and stopped; that's not how I read. I would have finished it. I always do.

You know what it feels like to be in pain, right? Have you ever felt the other sort of pain? The pain that says to you, not "ouch that hurts" but "hey stop doing that"? The kind that tells you something has broken inside? The kind that, if you are paying attention to yourself, stops you from getting more seriously hurt? I remember the first time I felt that sort of message-pain. It was when I was in the high school band. I had carried my sousaphone for hours and hours one day, and the pain in my shoulder went from "ouch" to "hey you" status. I knew I needed to put down the sousaphone or damage my shoulder, so I obeyed the command. I've felt that sort of pain only a handful of times since, but I know it when I feel it. Probably you do too.

When I was reading Bleak House, apparently now for the second time, I felt the same kind of sensation. It was not exactly pain, but it was a message coming from somewhere in my brain. The message was: "I cannot do what you would like me to do. Something is broken in here. Would you please stop doing what caused this?" I felt that I was getting a tiny glimpse of what it must be like to lose your mind. The machine was breaking down.

I read Nicholas Nickleby when I was a teenager, and I can still remember its main characters and plot, if indistinctly and based more on emotion than fact. And I of course do remember that I read Nicholas Nickleby. I was upset before because I couldn't remember Chekhov's short stories. But those were short stories, and there were more than 200 of them. I can accept forgetting them, or at least some of them. But forgetting an entire novel? The thing is nearly a thousand pages long. It must have taken weeks to read, in the bits of free time I have available. How can I retrieve no memory of it? Are e-books really that bad? This is not looking out of a little window at a vast landscape and remembering only the window. This is forgetting the entire journey.

Here is one more little piece to this story. Last week I was writing to a colleague about the issue of managing motherhood and career, and I wanted to send her a funny scene about a mother who is enthusiastic about helping people in Africa but ignores her own children. I could not recall where I'd found this. I could only recall an image of a Victorian parlor filled with tumbling children and scattered papers. My best guess was Edith Nesbit's Five Children And It, so I went poking about in that book, and then in all the other Nesbit books I've read (note, all on the e-book reader). It wasn't in any of them. I began to think I'd seen it in an old movie, or it might have been in something I read about Edith Nesbit herself (who famously wrote books for children while ignoring her own). I finally gave up and didn't send anything.

Can you guess what I found in Bleak House? The scene I was looking for. In a book I had forgotten I'd read. If someone had said to me, oh that scene is in Bleak House, I would have said, Bleak House? I've never read that. The scene was in my memory, and connected to the motherhood-career theme. But it was completely unconnected to any sense of an overall story or reading experience related to Bleak House, which apparently is not to be found anywhere in there. If my memory is a library, the Bleak House book never got bound. Its pages lie scattered in rooms and shelves and tucked into other books far from where it (I find myself having always to add "apparently") entered the library.

I'm still reading Bleak House on the e-book reader, as a sort of experiment to see if at some tipping point I will suddenly remember the rest of the story and the Bleak House book will fly together and bind itself in my mind. But this may be the last e-book I ever read. After a scare like this, it's back to paper for me.

I can't help but wonder how many other people might have broken their reading machines without knowing it. Could this be a larger problem? Could we be breaking the reading machine on a societal level? Now that's a scary thought.

[Update: It's now the next evening, and I've just come from reading another chapter of Bleak House. In it I found a ghost story with such rich imagery that I could never have got past it without tucking it away somewhere. So my new reconstruction (as of this evening) is that I must not have finished Bleak House. I'm wondering if I tried to take it up in the post-Dostoyevsky mourning period, when nothing seemed good enough, only to cast it off. I would never do such a thing except under extreme conditions of literary grief. My response to this discovery was partly "Oh crap, I made such a big thing of forgetting this whole novel and now I find out it's not true, I must look awfully stupid" and partly "Ah, this deepens the problem, and how sage I must look because I've now shown I was able to convince myself of a lie!" So choose which you like best. I'm for the sage one. If I can convince myself equally well of having read a book and not having read a book, it still doesn't bode well for the future of e-book reading. In my bathtub anyway.]

What to expect: topics

Yes finally it's a blog post related to the book. Does anyone remember that I said I was setting aside October to finish the rewriting of Working with Stories? Well, folks, October laughed. So many tasks came up unbidden that I was barely able to spend a few days on the book. But I did make some progress, slowly, in between things. After three attempts I managed to satisfactorily cluster the themes of about 250 stories gleaned from my notes from around thirty group sessions for storytelling and/or narrative sensemaking. The general outline of topics goes like this.

There are dynamics between the session facilitator and participants.

• People understand your goals, or they don't.
• People understand your methods, or they don't.
• People understand your instructions, or they don't.
• People understand storytelling, or they don't.
• People are motivated to participate, or they aren't.
• People feel it's safe to tell stories, or they don't.
• You understand the people well, or you don't.
• Things run smoothly, or they don't. 
• You get along with people or you butt heads with them.
• People work with you or pursue their own agendas.
• You find unexpected opportunities, or you don't.
• People try too hard to do things right, or won't try at all.  
• The timing is perfect or all wrong.
• You understand your own personality and skills and limitations, or you don't.
• People vary in their interpretations of what you ask them to do.
• People vary by personality in how they respond to your instructions.
• Groups and roles vary in how they respond to your instructions.
• Topics vary in what you can ask about and how you can ask.

There are dynamics among session participants.

• Storytelling has natural dynamics.
• Group conversation has natural dynamics.
• Group sensemaking has natural dynamics.
• Rooms with a few small groups of people in them have natural dynamics.
• People vary by personality in how they tell and listen to stories.
• Groups and roles vary in how they tell and listen to stories.
• Topics vary in how people tell stories about them in groups.

Running a storytelling or sensemaking session has physical requirements.

• The room works well, or it doesn't.
• Recording stories works well, or it doesn't.
• Getting people to come to the session works well, or it doesn't.

That's 28 topics, and I plan to start going through them a few at a time here, with most what I write ending up in the Supporting storytelling part of the book. This week I have only managed to put up the list itself, but next week I plan to start summarizing my experiences and giving some advice on each topic.

If you think there is a topic I should cover about collecting and/or working with stories in group sessions and you don't see it here, please tell me via comment or email.

E-books, narrative context and the future of reading

Here is today's set of desultory thoughts, this time about where technology and narrative come together in e-books.

The end of the line, or, a unique opportunity

About two years ago I found that the time had come to read the works of Anton Chekhov. (Oh God, she's on about literature again -- No! It's about technology! Computers!) Ahem. The trouble was, there is apparently no comprehensive published English version of all of Chekhov's 200+ short stories. Instead, several compilations overlapped, and to read the entire set I would have to buy some stories three or four times. I calculated that to buy the entire set with the repetitions would cost about $120. But all of the earlier translations of Chekhov's work are available for free on the internet. The books would cost almost as much as an e-book reader. The perfect opportunity had come to enter the e-book revolution.

So I bought a Sony Reader. Since then I've read not only all of Chekhov's works on it, but also a few dozen novels and plays as well as three entire Star Trek series in transcript form. The reader has paid for itself three or four times. It's a nice device, small and light, easy to read and use. It holds its charge fairly well and can even be used in a hot bathtub with the addition of an AquaPac protector. I have loaded about 200 free books onto it, most from the excellent manybooks.net. Many more are to be had there and elsewhere. (I use the also quite good calibre to manage my holdings.) I don't travel much lately, but I can imagine it would be wonderful to travel with the next hundred novels you might like to read in your pocket. "It's my new best friend," I told my husband.

But the bloom of friendship has faded. I have become increasingly unhappy with the reading experience I get from my e-book reader. Because I wanted to read some authors whose works are not available for free, I've been bouncing back and forth between the e-book reader and real books for most of the last two years. It has taken all that time to understand what is wrong with reading on the e-book reader, but I've finally figured it out. It has to do with the stories of stories.

A warning: I am going to talk quite a lot about what I do when I read books, on the e-book reader and elsewhere. I know everyone reads books in their own ways, and I don't mean to say that I am somehow magically representative of all readers. This is very much my own view based on my own experiences. But it still may be useful and interesting, if you like reading or e-books.

What happens when I read a book

When I read a real physical book, I connect the story told within it to the story of my life using the physical book as a sort of recording device. Here is where I nearly dropped the book into the bathtub; here is where I carried it to the living room and read it half the night (that's the non-water-warped part); here is a jelly stain from breakfast; here is the place where I lost it for a week under the mail; here is the place I copied a paragraph out to put on my blog; here is the spot I marked to read out to my husband; here is where I grasped the book so strongly during a tense moment that I broke part of the spine; and so on. Some of my favorite books have forests of sticky notes coming out of them at all angles; some have small and large dog-ears; some obligingly fall open to the same spot every time. Each book becomes a record of my reading, a story surrounding the story inside it. The changes I make to a book as I read it, sometimes more than once, remind me of what the book means to me.

In my parents' library is a series of books handed down from my paternal grandfather, who was also a great book lover. In each of his books he wrote the dates on which he read it. When I was a child I would read those books and think about how I was following after the grandfather I had never met, reading his story along with the stories inside. Every time I think of Zane Grey or F. Hopkinson Smith or E.D.E.N. Southworth or the other authors of books he left behind, I remember those days in the library, touching his writing and thinking how those books connected our stories. It may be why I treasure my own library so much.

In my own library, one of my favorite things to do in odd moments is to let my eyes run over the books on the shelves. As I glance at each book I recall not only the story contained inside it but also the story of my reading it: how I felt when I encountered each surprise and disappointment and elation, and what was happening in my life when I felt those things. I remember why I read each book, what came before it and after it, what it meant to me at the time. Looking at a shelf full of books I've read becomes a way of remembering life itself. Around the time I was reading Jane Austen and George Eliot I made the dreadful mistake of clearing out some books, and I feel sometimes like that year of my life is missing from my memory because I don't have my milestones to mark it. Some books recall several periods: my copy of Naguib Mahfouz' Children of Gebelawi has been read several times, as has Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, and those books greet me as old friends should. I know some people journal their book reading, and I wish I had started on that back when, but it seems silly to start now, halfway through my reading life (if I had the time for it). I use the books themselves as my journal.

Now before I am attacked as a profligate book-waster, let me say this: I am fully aware that dog-earing books and reading books in the bathtub are flaws in my character (that's what husbands are for). I'm aware that I shouldn't presume everyone else has these ruinous habits, and I'm aware that many people read library books and return them in pristine condition, as they should. However, even when I treat books with more care, I still use them as connective tissue. I was certainly ginger with my grandfather's books, and I remember them well. I didn't own the copy of Hans Christian Anderson's Fairy Tales I read yearly as a child, but when I did buy a copy of the book as an adult, I made sure it looked a lot like the one I treasured in my school library, so the memories would have somewhere to settle down. If you read mainly library books, imagine visiting your favorite shelf in your local library, with all its familiar smells and rustlings. Do you not visit your memories as you run your eyes over the books, then select one and peruse its headings and sections and beloved little flaws? Does each book not tell you the story of your time together?

Peering through the porthole

Now, to the e-book. It has no context, or rather, its context is reused with every book read on it, so it has no context. Just now I'm reading Dickens' Little Dorrit on my e-book reader, and every time I pick up the thing I think "Ah, I'm reading Great Expectations. It's Pip. How nice to -- wait -- it's not Pip, it's -- what am I reading?" It is not until I've read a few lines on the page that I can put myself into the right context.

I have tried to articulate the feeling I get when I read on the e-book reader, and I've settled on something like this. It's like I'm in a submarine or time-traveling pod or supersonic spaceship or something, and I'm looking out at the world through a tiny porthole window. The world outside the window keeps changing because the submarine or pod or spaceship keeps moving, but the window always stays the same. I remember the window, but I can't keep track of the changing world outside it because the frame of reference never changes. The window seems more real than the view.

You might ask, if reading on an e-book reader is like looking through a tiny window, aren't all experiences on computers like that? Yes, but it depends on your real estate. In my work I use four screens with about five million combined pixels, so if it's a window it's a big one. (General advice to programmers, writers and other detail workers: if you want to be more productive, get more real estate. It's magical.) In my screen world I maintain different lands with different meanings in the story of my work. Here is the e-mail train station where I speak to people in hushed conspiratorial tones; there is the gleaming future world of here-you-are-there-you-are Skype sky-ports; here is the musty file cabinet with its higgledy-piggledy heaps of past mistakes and triumphs; there whirrs the gears-and-levers programming environment; the accusing calendar lives here; and so on. I lay out my screen world in a way that helps me remember the stories that play out on it, and I never vary its meanings. If I have to temporarily put the e-mail on another screen, I can hardly read it: the train riders wander in the sky-port looking for the gaslights among the laser beams.

When I use a laptop I also get the peering-through-a-porthole feeling, but the e-book reader is even worse than that. At least on the laptop you have some semblance of a landscape, with the seaside docks, the icon peaks, the soaring menu ridge and the great desktop hinterlands. But on the e-book reader, there is only one space, it is always filled with words, and the words are about anything and everything. There is no there there.

This would not matter, except that it leads to something. I cannot remember Chekhov's short stories. I keep searching my mind, and the only one I can find any remembrance of at all is "The Lady with the Little Dog", because I saw a picture for the compilation with that title on Amazon.com. Yes, I'm saying that I can only remember the book I didn't buy. That doesn't seem right. In fact I realized with growing concern that I can't bring to mind any of the stories I've read on the e-book reader, at least not in the intense, deeply connected way I usually remember books I've read. I read The Idiot once on the e-book reader and once in a paper book (for the new translation). Where do I look to ponder The Idiot? The paper book. The story lives there. It was on the e-book reader for a little while, but it left no trace when it left. It was just a window.

All this makes me wonder whether my investment in the e-book reader was indeed valuable. If I can read lots of books for free, but I can't remember any of them, was it such a good idea? What is the value of a book you read but can't remember or connect to your life? Isn't that why we read? To make sense of our own lives?

Perhaps I am unique in being such a thoroughly visual thinker; but surely I am not the only person on the planet who has had such a porthole experience with e-books or who has had trouble remembering books read in this way. If that's true (and let's pretend it is for the moment) it has implications for the way we all remember and weave together the stories we read on non-paper devices.

Connecting stories with their stories

So, I've been thinking. What would an e-book reader look like that did not sacrifice narrative context? What would take me through the porthole and into the world beyond? How could I get the convenience of the e-book reader without losing the connected narrative of the real book? What are the essential elements of narrative connection a real book provides that an e-book reader does not now provide but could?

To start with, e-book readers could connect narrated and narrative events by preserving the story of the story. Stories are made up of narrated events: things that happen in the story. The story of you reading a story is made up of narrative events: things that happen as the story is told. You feel emotions; you are surprised; you are disappointed; you notice things; you ponder. When I read a physical book, I build the connections between narrated and narrative events by repeatedly looking at the book, the picture on the cover, my progress through the book, and my physical location and circumstances as things happen within it. I use the context of my reading at the moment of the narrative event to keep in memory the connection between it and the narrated events it depends on, so I can find it again. This is similar to people remembering where they were and what they were doing when they heard that Kennedy was assassinated or Reagan was shot or the Challenger exploded or 9/11 happened. People remember events partly by remembering context, and we do this when we experience stories as well.

To give an example, recently I was reading Dickens' Great Expectations. A significant moment in the story of my reading, not only of this book but of this genre, was as I will now describe. It grew upon me that when Dickens switched from describing Pip's humble childhood as the poor adopted son of a blacksmith to describing his "coming up" as a newly-financed gentleman of society, the writing style changed. I could be wrong, but I got a strong sense that Dickens felt more at ease describing someone of his own class and was able to take on both a more jocular tone and a more authentic one. I felt a loss of stiffness in his writing as he arrived at his social-class home. This sense was strengthened later, when the narrated events returned to the blacksmith's home and Dickens wrote a chapter that made me cringe. He jarringly carried the jocular tone into a rural funeral and poked fun at the local color when hushed reverence would have been more appropriate. I felt almost ashamed for his mistake and thought he must have realized it also. But since most of Dickens' work was published in segments, there must have been little he could do even the next month after the chapter was published. My guess is that Dickens got carried away with his satirical description of the funeral and didn't realize he was carrying the disdain of Pip's new higher-class world with him as he went back into the poor village. This was a significant moment in my understanding of Great Expectations, of Dickens' work, and of the work of all the social-causes novelists of Dickens' day. My mind immediately flew to the work of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy. Poor people didn't write novels about poor people, and that has implications I had never noticed before.

If I had read Great Expectations in a physical book, I would remember that entire realization, with all its manifestations intact, every time I looked at the book on the shelf, and more so when I sought out the pages where the realization took place. However, because I read it in my e-book reader, I can only remember it now because I just read Great Expectations two weeks ago. And my sole visual tag for the realization is: bathtub. It was in the bathtub. That's all I remember, and it's not much to go on, and it will be soon lost, written over by more "it was in the bathtub" memory fragments. I'm sure within a year if you tell me about it I will be surprised. I don't think I like that.

How could e-book readers help people build stronger connections between narrated and narrative events? As I mentioned above, my books come to tell a story of how I read them, and I read that story along with the book years later. If we put aside the fact that I shouldn't be ruining books in this way, we can examine what constitutes that larger story and how an e-book reader could do something like it.

To begin with, water marks show me whether I read the book in the bath or out of it (which is telling in itself). Places that fall open tell me that I either loved a spot and copied it out, or lost or abandoned the book open. It could be either, but I always remember which it was on seeing it; excessive loving looks different than abandonment. Places where the pages are ripped, marked or in disarray are places where the book had an accident (child colored on it, dog walked over it, coffee fell on it) or I had an accident with the story (it upset me, like the time I threw Anna Karenina across the room on finding that Tolstoy had betrayed my trust).

Dog-ears are also great story-of-the-story recorders. Little dog-ears mean "here is where I am" while big dog-ears shout "OH MY GOD!". The distance between dog-ears is also a recording device. If a long series of pages has no dog-ears, it either means I loved that part so much that I put aside other things (possibly sleep) to take it in, or that I hated the part so much I flew over it quickly to get to what came after. Sections with lots of dog-ears either mean I was very busy at the time and read it in snippets, or that it was so dense with meaning that I read and re-read every paragraph trying to tease out the meaning. Some books that slowly revealed critical elements have special very large dog-ears, or even sticky notes, that I kept returning to as I pondered "did he really mean that?" or "was she getting at this?". Books with dog-ears in both the main body of the text and the "notes on this text" section had enjoyable explanations of minutiae. Where the dog-ears appear in relation to chapters is also telling. If they appear only at chapter ends, it usually means I found the book so compelling I was probably telling somebody "I'll stop at the end of this chapter, I promise." When the dog-ears are not at the end of chapters, it means I could bear to turn away at other times, which means either that the book was not that compelling, or that I had no spare time that week. In short, the pattern of dog-ears on a book recalls the story of its reading at a level of detail that allows me to access the full story of the story.

This is where I think e-book readers could excel and even surpass physical books if they tried. There is an endless parade of useful data an e-book reader could capture, process and present; and as it happens, that's what computers do best. Suppose you look at a book on your e-book reader that you read a few years back. Suppose you can see: which parts you read fast and which slow; where you paused or paced back and forth between pages; which pages you went back to over and over; where you veered off the book to check something on the internet and how long before you returned; what words you looked up the meanings of; in what position you held the reader at each moment (were you looking up at it? down? sideways?); the humidity and temperature and amount of ambient light in the room; whether you gripped the tablet tightly or left it lying down; when you referenced the table of contents; when you looked at the cover picture and with what degree of detail and for how long; how gently or jarringly you put down the reader (with reverence? with disdain?); whether you carried it with rhythmic motion in your bag; whether it flew on an airplane or rode on a train; whether it sat in a drawer untouched for months; whether you read it out loud; whether you copied out text to post to the internet; and on and on through many nuances of the way people read and carry and converse with books.

Imagine if, while reading, you could tap a word or sentence to make a mark that meant "this mattered" but without the distraction of having to articulate it in words. Gestures could form a conduit between narrative and narrated events. Say you could tap a word or sentence or paragraph and the e-book reader could record how you tapped it. You might blot it out, cross it out, highlight it, drum out an exactly-so song on it, give it a gentle caress, slap it, stroke it, touch it gently, or poke it in anger.

We handle our physical books in all these ways, don't we? Have you ever caught yourself stroking a page when someone was hurt, as you would stroke the cheek of a crying child? Have you ever poked at a passage or slapped at a page that offended you? Have you ever thrown a book across the room or slapped it down on a table? Have you ever held a book to your cheek or cradled it in your arms? Have you ever patted or petted a book? (If you have not yet done any of these things, reader, you have not yet read a book.) Why can't e-book readers record our reactions in the same way real books do? An e-book reader is too strong to show marks of caress or violence, but many of our new technological devices can tell if we shake them or stroke them or hold them upside-down. Why shouldn't an e-book reader use that information to help us record our reading story? It would go some way toward building connections between events inside the story and events in our lives.

And do you talk to your books? Do you say "HA!" and "ooooh" and "oh come on"? Do you argue with your books? Do you chastise the characters? Why can't an e-book reader capture that and tell you the story of it later?

Here's a funny thing: it looks like the Kindle designers have got this exactly backward. Here is a bit of their promotional material:

The most elegant feature of a physical book is that it disappears while you're reading. Immersed in the author's world and ideas, you don't notice a book's glue, the stitching, or ink. Our top design objective was to make Kindle disappear—just like a physical book—so you can get lost in your reading, not the technology.

But a physical book doesn't disappear while you're reading; it holds and records your reading. That's exactly what is wrong with e-book readers, not what is right. Clearly these people need to talk to more readers.
 
What about deliberate bookmarks and notes? My Sony reader has bookmarks, and you can take notes on some of the newer e-book readers. I like both of these features, but there is something wrong with the way they are implemented. They are not enticing. They are hidden and easy to forget about and pass over. They don't tell the story of the story. When I make notes in a real book, I use sticky notes, because they stick out and draw my attention, even years or decades later. Sticky notes are bookmarks, annotations, and historical records combined. If the notes on an e-book could somehow stick out -- perhaps as little ticks or tabs on the book's event-studded story-of-the-story timeline -- I would surely be intrigued to find out what I wrote then, as I do when I see a book with sticky notes of different colors sticking out of it.

But I rarely add sticky notes to fiction. I annotate things, but I don't annotate people. It feels wrong to put sticky notes on the people in stories. It feels disrespectful. I'd rather touch them or speak to them than stick bits of paper on them. I wonder if the e-book reader designers are thinking of non-fiction? I wonder if they have really considered the narrative experience? Would an e-novel reader be different than an e-book reader?

A sense of character

There are two other useful analogues in the things I do with physical books that I haven't mentioned yet. (And here I pause to repeat my warning at the start: I am not the world's readers, so take this for what it brings to you, not more.) While I am reading a book I frequently peer at the cover. I love doing this so much that when I'm buying a book, if there are multiple editions available (there often are for older books), I look over the different covers and choose the one with the most memorable picture. I remember gazing at Madame Bovary over and over as I absorbed the events in the book. Granted, the pictures on the covers of most old books have nothing to do with the book and come from a painting of the same time period, but if some knowledgeable editor felt I could get something out of gazing at the painting they chose, I'm willing to trust them.

Whether it has a great cover picture or not, the physical form of each book -- its paper, its print, its fonts, its chapter headings -- becomes imbued with the book's character as I read it, and that character places it within a society of other books. When I look over my shelves of books I visit the stories and remember them and the stories of how I read them. My books are segregated by subject matter (fiction, physics, gardening) but not within that, simply because I have no time; but in my dotage I will probably arrange them in elaborate ways. I've heard of people who arrange their books by character, placing next to each other books that will "get along." Being a contrarian I think I may do the opposite. I already have Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian next to D. James Kennedy's Why I Believe. But in general the placement of books on shelves is another device we book lovers use to record the story of our reading, this time at the level that arcs across several decades of our lives.

How could an e-book reader facilitate the recording and telling of the larger story of a life's reading? Again, there is abundant information for the reaping. My e-book reader could show me: when I read each book; when I re-read it; what I read before and after it; which books took me a long time to read and which were eaten up quickly; which books have the most notes, dog-ears, pauses, back-and-forthings, dictionary look-ups, text copyings; which books I never finished; which I read out loud; which I read on a train, on a bus, in the air, in the kitchen, in the bath; how many books I read of each author; which authors I read all together and which I read intermingled with others; how the genres mapped out over time; which books I left and came back to; which books I cradled gently and which I threw down; which covers I stared at over and over and which I barely glanced at.

All of this information could be shown on the bookshelf inside the device, instead of a simple list of title, author, and genre. In addition, if books were represented by, say, little book-shaped icons, I might be able to shift them about and group them in meaningful-only-to-me ways that change over time. I might leave a book out on my virtual nightstand, or I might hide one in my "nasty books I hated" cupboard, or I might copy one into my "great gifts for the nieces" box, or I might leave one out on my virtual kitchen table so I'll remember to mention it to my neighbor the next time I see her. Why can't an e-book reader manage all this? No reason it can't.

The future of e-book reading, or at least the future of mine

So, will I abandon my e-book spaceship, escape its tiny porthole and walk freely in the world beyond? Meaning, will I go back to buying only real books? I don't know. I have a strong urge to buy all of Chekhov's works on paper and read them again so I can experience them differently. But for the same price I can buy a Kindle, so here we go round again. What the Kindle appears to offer me at this point is a middle path, where I force myself into regular note-taking to bridge the gap between device and need using my own rules and practices. If I can learn to read books in a new way, perhaps I can make an e-book reader work even though I am looking through a tiny porthole.

But I'm not satisfied with such stop-gap measures. I want a better spaceship. One that doesn't confine me. One that won't make me nervous, wondering what to do. One that makes me feel like I feel when I'm with books. My new spaceship should be made of glass, maybe, and it should talk to me. Yeah, and ask me questions and say "Something getting you down?" and "What did you think of that?" and that sort of thing. And if I say, years later, "Do you remember when we went to the desert planet?" it should say "I sure do" and launch into a funny story about our trip together and all the things we learned there. Which is all a way of saying that I hope someday e-book readers will mature enough to provide reliable support for the meaningful interweaving of stories into our lives that is the reason we read books in the first place.

[Update: Another post about this topic here.]

Selection and development

I was looking at the blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos and followed a link to Owen Barder's wonderful presentation titled "What can development policy learn from evolution?" I enjoyed the clear, thought-provoking presentation so much I wrote a comment to the post. However, the comment turned out to be much too long for manners, so I am posting it here instead. Readers, you may want to look at Owen's blog post and presentation to understand the context.

Selection as a design tool

First, I wish Steve Jones [an evolutionary biologist excerpted in the presentation] had been a bit more careful in his terminology, because the process he was talking about was not natural selection but artificial selection. There are important differences. One is that people can control and even design artificial selection. The people who created that soap nozzle [which Jones used as an example of evolutionary design] chose how many generations to create, how many progeny to create per generation, how to create the variation (which was certainly not perfectly random), and how to tie their selection to fitness for the task at hand. They also could choose to stop the selection at any point and veer off on a totally different tack. Because artificial selection is artificial, it can be incorporated into deliberate design in ways that makes it much more valuable to human ends than natural selection could ever be. So a "roomful of scientists" is exactly the group that can use and control and benefit from artificial selection.

It follows from this that selection is not the only good way to solve wicked problems; it is one tool in the designer's toolkit, and many of the tools work together. I've had some little experience with this myself. In a previous career making educational software, I designed an artificial selection process for "breeding" plants in simulated 3D space (to teach botany and to help artists populate 3D worlds). An essential element of the system was the ability to "reach in" and stop the evolutionary process at any point, make some changes, restart it, and essentially incorporate it into a larger design process. This relates to the point I've often made in my writings, that in human life self-organized complexity does not exist apart from human-made structure, and that it is pointless to pretend we can or should leave structure entirely behind. The greater utility is found in intelligently managing the two sources of order (organization and self-organization) to create something neither could create alone.

Getting to the main point about development and evolution, to my mind there are three main issues to consider in applying artificial selection to problems of development.

My fitness, your fitness

One issue is that selection must be strongly tied to actual fitness in order for the process to work. In human societies fitness depends on perspective, and there may be conflicting ideas of what deserves to reproduce and what deserves to die. Aid that makes donors want to give more money is not always aid that works; aid people will accept is not always aid that helps them; aid people will admit works is not always aid that works; aid that works once is not always aid that will work again; what helps in one place may harm in another; my solution may be your problem; and so on.

This is somewhat like sexual selection, in which male peacocks grow larger and larger tails and become more and more vulnerable to predation. They are more fit overall because they are also likely to sire more offspring. In natural selection (which envelops sexual selection) the balance between death and reproduction irons out all details with a heavy hand. But in human affairs there is no such equalizer. If what matters to you is vulnerability to predation, you may see peacock tails as a disaster. But what if I see things differently? Who decides what is most fit and should reproduce? What happens when people can't agree on that? Does it just go back to power and money again? If it does, what have we gained?

Even something as apparently binary as death is not so simple when you consider human affairs. If a cockroach is dead, it's dead. When you move into the plant world where organisms are modular things get more complicated. I have the stump of a maple tree in my yard that has been rotting away for more than ten years; but every year it reminds me that it is not yet dead by putting up new maple stems (which I ruthlessly "kill" wanting the sun for gardens around it). Is the maple tree dead? Yes and no. (And here I simply must quote the irreplaceable Billy Crystal in The Princess Bride: "It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead.") In the same way, it might be hard to say whether development projects are alive or dead. What constitutes death, and who decides that?

As with death, reproduction also gets difficult to determine when you are setting up an artificial selection process related to human endeavors. Reproduction in biological evolution seems simple from the outside -- either the place is swarming with babies or it isn't -- but even there things are sometimes difficult to parse. In many species "maiden aunts" take care of the children of siblings, or of their parents, and thus promote kin selection to the detriment of their own reproductive success. Is this reproduction? Yes and no. When I was in graduate school in the 80s the concept of "sneaky fuckers" was all the rage (yes, that was the technical term) and it led to what is now a widely accepted understanding that reproduction in many species has various complementary modes, some of which involve deception and counter-intuitive means to the popular end (such as looking like a female in order to get close to the females). So even in nature reproduction is not as simple as it may seem.

In the soap nozzle example of artificial selection, control over reproduction was easy: one nozzle was carried forward to the next generation, by human caveat. But in selecting development projects, what would reproduction mean? A project would get more money? Or an aid group would? Or an aid worker? Or an approach? If an approach got more money, how would the system enforce adoption of the winning approach? What if groups or approaches got more money by "sneaky" reproduction, meaning, getting money outside of official channels? Would this be considered valid reproduction? If not, how could it be stopped? If so, what effect might it have on what is selected and how development evolves?

Mourning the soap nozzles

The second issue I see is that natural selection embraces death but people do not. If you are designing an artificial selection process to create a better soap nozzle, nobody mourns the lost soap nozzles. So it's easy to make strong decisions about what lives and what dies. But when you are trying to help people, it's harder to work in that critical death element. Everywhere you put it, it bounces off or morphs into something else.

I would suggest that to plan a successful artificial selection process for development policy, what dies and what reproduces has to be carefully chosen and agreed upon, and you need to be prepared for such definitions to change over time. This issue was mentioned by other commenters [to Owen's post] who said evolution was "unforgiving to the weak" and that "you have to work against the political forces that resist calling a failure a failure". It hinges on values. You need to find some soap nozzles you can throw away without anyone rushing to defend them or mourning their loss. Artificial selection in development won't work if projects or funding sources or field units or institutions must die, because people will fight to keep all of those things alive. You might say approaches can die, but people get very attached to approaches. You might say ideas can die, but again, people fight for ideas. What can die? What can be selected out? It's a hard question, but you can't proceed without getting past it.

What you select selects you

The third issue is the issue of scale and awareness. If mice in a particular valley are falling prey to a particularly clever cat with exceptional night vision, mice halfway around the world don't hear about it and tell each other stories about night cats. But people do. This is both an enabler and an obstacle in planning artificial selection processes. Say you design a system where only projects that meet five carefully chosen criteria receive more funding. You have set up a system of artificial selection, with fitness tied to particular characteristics of individual elements in the system. Fine. What is the probability that in a few years' time every single project meets those criteria? What is the probability that some of those projects will fail to produce positive outcomes for those they mean to help, or even hurt those they mean to help, even though they meet the criteria on paper? What happened? People were aware of the selection and reacted. 

This change-it-and-it-changes-you-back situation reminds me of the folk tale where the devil gives somebody three wishes, and it seems wonderful until the person gets the wishes and realizes how the devil can deliver them in a devilish way. In one movie that repeated this old story (Bedazzled), the main character wanted to be very rich, and he became very rich -- and a drug lord about to be attacked by rivals. Unlike mice, people become aware of global patterns and change their behavior, appearance, tactics, even sometimes their self-definition to suit the new criteria. So I would say that artificial selection, when it applies to people, has to include a recursive element that operates on itself. Which forms of variation and selection deserve to die, and which should reproduce? And again, who decides?

Watch out for those sharp edges!

I'm not saying you can't apply artificial selection to development. I'm saying it's a tool whose power and danger have to be equally respected. This is partly because it will be operating on top of several layers of biological and sociocultural evolution that can't stopped to create an "all other things being equal" experiment. (Some argue that biological and cultural evolution have become so intermingled in human life that they cannot be considered separately.)

Artificial selection has been responsible for many of the best things humans have done, but it has also been responsible for some of the worst. So it's not a solution without its own dangers. Feedback loops can be positive as well as negative, and even with negative feedback the wrong things can feed back. Both natural and artificial selection are replete with stories of events going "off the rails" with disastrous consequences. As I've mentioned on this blog before, I'm concerned about people believing that complexity science and evolutionary theory present panaceaic solutions to human problems. If you think complexity is a uniformly benevolent force, Google the term "ant mill". There are some videos of this phenomenon on YouTube. They make my hair stand up. It's smart to be aware of complexity and evolution, but it would be as much of a mistake to look for simple or easy solutions in them as it is to look for simple and easy solutions in rigid centralized planning.

Selection and narrative

Now of course I have to make a plug for the complex solution I've been working on for the past ten years: stories. Stories are unique vehicles of human communication, packages of thought and belief and value, tiny simulations of life itself, that we use to make sense of our lives together. I've helped lots of organizations and communities work with raw, personal stories to create new feedback loops that bring difficult-to-articulate values, beliefs and experiences where they most need to be heard. I've helped people use narrative techniques to pump up diversity of thought through exposure to new perspectives; to facilitate selection through self-organizing participation; and to connect variation and selection to fitness functions relevant to the community through the crystallizing lens of sensemaking.

I sound like an evangelist, and I suppose I am one! My bias is that narrative work is particularly well suited to enabling well-informed, self-reflective creation of artificial selection processes in human societies. If there is any chance of people meeting the goals you set out in your presentation, I humbly submit that stories are likely to be involved. The reason I wrote (and am now expanding) my free book on this subject is to help people use narrative methods for exactly these purposes.

Readers, I recommend Owen's excellent presentation, and I wish him the best in his important work!

Depth and breadth in organizational narrative

Last night I finished reading The Pillars of the Earth, a historical novel by Ken Follett about the middle ages. I wanted to read the novel because I enjoyed the miniseries, which I fell into watching on Netflix purely by chance (all right! it was because I saw Matthew MacFadyen and Rufus Sewell in it). I generally hate movies about fighting (b.o.r.i.n.g.) and skipped over the clash-and-gore battle scenes, but I enjoyed the rest of the miniseries very much. Everyone said the book was ten times better, so I had no choice but to read it. (It is ten times better.)

Depth: 1 cm

When I started reading Pillars, my first thought was "now I remember why I read historic novels instead of historical novels." The subject matter might have been medieval, but the delivery was pure 21st century. That means: a painful lack of detail. Here is the monk Phillip leaving the monastery where has been raised since he was orphaned at five.

His farewells were tearful. He had spent seventeen years here, and the monks were his family, more real to him now than the parents who had been savagely taken from him. He would probably never see these monks again, and he was sad.

He was sad? He was sad? That's all we get? When I read that sentence I put the book down in disgust. But the next day there it was again, and I had paid for it, so I took it up again.

Depth: 100 cm

By a funny coincidence, the book I had read just before Pillars was Dickens' Great Expectations. I was struck by the fact that in it another Phillip (Pip) also left the only home he had ever known. Here is how Dickens described it.

It was a hurried breakfast with no taste in it. I got up from the meal, saying with a sort of briskness, as if it had only just occurred to me, "Well! I suppose I must be off!" and then I kissed my sister who was laughing and nodding and shaking in her usual chair, and kissed Biddy, and threw my arms around Joe's neck. Then I took up my little portmanteau and walked out. The last I saw of them was, when I presently heard a scuffle behind me, and looking back, saw Joe throwing an old shoe after me and Biddy throwing another old shoe. I stopped then, to wave my hat, and dear old Joe waved his strong right arm above his head, crying huskily "Hooroar!" and Biddy put her apron to her face.

I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I had supposed it would be, and reflecting that it would never have done to have had an old shoe thrown after the coach, in sight of all the High-street. I whistled and made nothing of going. But the village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-post at the end of the village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, "Good-bye O my dear, dear friend!"

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before - more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe with me then. [He asked Joe not to go to the coach with him.]

So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in the course of the quiet walk, that when I was on the coach, and it was clear of the town, I deliberated with an aching heart whether I would not get down when we changed horses and walk back, and have another evening at home, and a better parting. We changed, and I had not made up my mind, and still reflected for my comfort that it would be quite practicable to get down and walk back, when we changed again. And while I was occupied with these deliberations, I would fancy an exact resemblance to Joe in some man coming along the road towards us, and my heart would beat high. - As if he could possibly be there!

We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

The depth of Dickens' description, with its conflicting emotions and layers of individual, interpersonal, societal interactions, feels like velvet in comparison to Follett's threadbare description of Philip's "sad" day.

Depth: 1000 cm

But to tell the truth, I had been reading Dickens with a sense of desperation anyway. Ever since Dostoyevsky I've been wandering in a wasteland of superficiality. My advice, if you love depth and have not yet read Dostoyevsky: wait until you are pretty sure you have less than a year left to live. Because reading Dostoyevsky spoils you for reading anybody else, ever. Everything else seems like dime-store fiction in comparison. I have nothing left to read, but must read. Yes, Proust, James, Lawrence, Tolstoy, Balzac, Chekhov, Eliot, Austen, Gaskell, Sand, Gogol are deep, but they are deep in a more irritatingly repeating way. Dostoyevsky is a universe unto himself; these others are just solar systems. You get to the end of them too quickly and meet them again on the way back. Take D.H. Lawrence: when I read the words "he was annihilated" for the umpteenth time, a little "enough" switch flipped in my mind. I had got to the end of D.H. Lawrence and was on my way back. With Dostoyevsky you never come back; you just travel inward until you fall into the black hole in the center.

Anyway, those who are still reading this (we few, we happy few) will not mind if I pull in an example from Dostoyevsky. In The Idiot, a mountain with its waterfall is used as Prince Myshkin's image of his youthful home, and this image is brought back over and over to symbolically portray a critical point of his identity and of the entire novel. Here is the prince at the start of the novel, explaining his old home to newly met relations.

There was a waterfall near us, such a lovely thin streak of water, like a thread but white and moving. It fell from a great height, but it looked quite low, and it was half a mile away, though it did not seem fifty paces. I loved to listen to it at night, but it was then that I became so restless. Sometimes I went and climbed the mountain and stood there in the midst of the tall pines, all alone in the terrible silence, with our little village in the distance, and the sky so blue, and the sun so bright, and an old ruined castle on the mountain-side, far away. I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be grander and richer—and then it struck me that life may be grand enough even in a prison.

Later, overwhelmed with the contrast between his simple, idealistic view of life and the complexities of social intrigue, he wishes to return to that image.

At ... moments he felt a longing to go away somewhere and be alone with his thoughts, and to feel that no one knew where he was. Or if that were impossible he would like to be alone at home ... and to lie there and think—a day and night and another day again! He thought of the mountains-and especially of a certain spot which he used to frequent, whence he would look down upon the distant valleys and fields, and see the waterfall, far off, like a little silver thread, and the old ruined castle in the distance. Oh! how he longed to be there now—alone with his thoughts—to think of one thing all his life—one thing! A thousand years would not be too much time! And let everyone here forget him—forget him utterly! How much better it would have been if they had never known him—if all this could but prove to be a dream.

Finally the image returns to reinforce the novel's central theme, of the incompatibility between the prince's Christ-like simplicity and the hardened pragmatism he finds in the world around him.

An old, forgotten memory awoke in his brain, and suddenly burst into clearness and light. It was a recollection of Switzerland.... He climbed the mountain-side, one sunny morning, and wandered long and aimlessly with a certain thought in his brain, which would not become clear. Above him was the blazing sky, below, the lake; all around was the horizon, clear and infinite. He looked out upon this, long and anxiously. He remembered how he had stretched out his arms towards the beautiful, boundless blue of the horizon, and wept, and wept. What had so tormented him was the idea that he was a stranger to all this, that he was outside this glorious festival.

What was this universe? What was this grand, eternal pageant to which he had yearned from his childhood up, and in which he could never take part? Every morning the same magnificent sun; every morning the same rainbow in the waterfall; every evening the same glow on the snow-mountains.

Every little fly that buzzed in the sun’s rays was a singer in the universal chorus, 'knew its place, and was happy in it.' Every blade of grass grew and was happy. Everything knew its path and loved it, went forth with a song and returned with a song; only he knew nothing, understood nothing, neither men nor words, nor any of nature’s voices; he was a stranger and an outcast.

Now that's depth. If you lay this series of quotes beside the quote from The Pillars of the Earth, it's like watching a minnow swim next to a whale. And pretty much every event, every perception, every emotion in Pillars is minnow-sized. They never get much bigger than that.

Breadth has its own depth 

So, is that the end of the story? Contemporary fiction is shallow, thus useless? No. As I read The Pillars of the Earth my opinion of it went up and up. Yes, the individual descriptions of emotions and actions and reactions are radically simple all the way through. There is an overarching theme of sorts, but there is no single image that holds it all together. What Pillars does instead is heap up hundreds of simple small descriptions into great mounds of narrative that eventually become nuanced in aggregation rather than in detail. The minnows gather into shoals, and together they move like whales. The book holds together perfectly and the main characters resonate, even though the details are so sparse as to exasperate detail lovers throughout. The breadth of the story becomes almost as satisfying, in its own way, as depth in another story. It takes a bit of work to encourage the coalescence, but all good reading should challenge the reader in some way. (I'm not sure if you'd call this literature, but literature, like morality, is a retrospective classification. Ask me in a few hundred years.)

As I read Pillars I kept feeling like it reminded me of something, and after a while I figured out what it was. It was two things. First, it reminded me of reading folk tale collections. I love doing this, but it's a very different experience than reading a coherent novel. Each story is short, but the stories layer onto each other in ways that ripple out as you move through the collection, and across multiple collections, until you arrive at new understandings that can't be found in any one story but straddle a great many of them. Bocaccio's Decameron is a similar set of related but disparate tales, as is Chekhov's oeuvre of short stories (which I read en masse). The second thing Pillars reminded me of was Henry Fielding's novels Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. In those early novels the same characters are followed throughout, but their adventures are superficially described and strung together loosely. So I have read and enjoyed works of fiction like The Pillars of the Earth before, and though they have never been my first choice I have enjoyed them in their own way. It took a while to remember that, but it was worth remembering.

By the way, I noticed an interesting contrast between the critical and popular receptions of The Pillars of the Earth. Many critics apparently panned the book, calling it "a cornucopia of banality," "an inert pudding of slipshod research and slovenly writing," and most damning of all, "not literature." In contrast, most of the popular reviews on Amazon.com laud the book's exciting storytelling, which even the critics grudgingly admit is exceptional. Amazingly to me, many of the popular reviews complain that the book is too detailed! One reviewer said: "Some might consider the plot to be a bit slow, especially with the long descriptions of cathedrals and architecture, but definitely worth it!" Long descriptions? Long descriptions? The amount of detail on medieval architecture in this book could have fit into the first five minutes of the first lecture of the first art history class I had in college. There were only a few sentences on architecture at a time -- just the barest of hints! When you compare it to Henry James taking five pages to describe a glance, it seems almost a joke to say the book is detailed. It makes me wonder if we are all living in the same narrative universe. But that's not the point of this post.

Affinity and organizational narrative

Ah, the point of the post. You thought it would never come, didn't you? The point is that as I pondered the various preferences for and effects of depth and breadth in fiction, I began to see a parallel pattern in narrative work. There has been long debate in the field of organizational narrative about whether it's better to work with few or many stories. Sometimes people suggest that attention to detail in few stories is biased, usually through over-reliance on expert interpretation, and sometimes people suggest that a lack of attention to detail is biased, usually through over-reliance on statistical techniques. But bias is a friendly fellow; he visits everyone and overstays his welcome everywhere.

When you collect few stories, you come to understand them in nuanced detail, like Pip's leave-taking in Great Expectations and the mountain scenes in The Idiot. When you collect many stories, it's not the individual stories but the assemblages that make sense, in the same way that the shallow descriptions in The Pillars of the Earth build up into complex portraits of increasingly familiar, nuanced and enjoyable characters. Both styles of narrative and of narrative research can lead to satisfying and enlightening results.

I'm beginning to think it's possible that hiding behind our declarations of superior quality, both in literature and in narrative work, are rationalized cognitive style preferences for depth or breadth. We think we are making methodological choices based on utility, but there is an aspect of affinity as well. (Yes, this is related to the suggestion I made a few weeks ago, that declarations of the utility of various social media approaches might hide cognitive style preferences for modes of social interaction. It's on my mind.)

I've worked on narrative projects ranging from a few dozen to a few thousand stories, and I've come to enjoy all degrees of breadth and depth. But I'm most comfortable near the lower end of the range, and I think this is connected to my preference for narrative depth over breadth. I most enjoy projects at the sweet spot of 100-200 stories, but that's not necessarily because it creates the best outcome. It's because I can still read all the stories and revel in their details. (I do get nervous when the number of stories dips below 100, but that's because the statistics get shaky, and I like to balance qualitative and quantitative approaches to even out the forms of bias.) When I have a project with a thousand stories or more, I can carry it out, but a little of the fun goes out of it (unless I just read all the stories anyway). I know people who find a hundred stories too many and people who find a thousand stories too few. I haven't done a systematic study of what sorts of novels they prefer, but I have noticed some matches between what people read and what sorts of narrative projects they prefer.

So, if you work with stories, or are planning to, you might want to ask yourself whether you gravitate to depth or breadth in your narrative life. If you like long detailed descriptions in your stories, you might also prefer in-depth qualitative analysis of narrative texts. If you prefer aggregations of short descriptions in your stories, you might find statistics and mass narrative collection more to your liking.

Here's a self-test. Find a copy of Henry James' book The Golden Bowl. Read a few chapters. Do you love it? Can you stand it? Is your reaction like this one?

Like all the rest of James' works The Golden Bowl gave me a massve headache. Amidst all the adjectives and adverbs James tells an interesting story where all the characters act 'splendidly' toward each other. In this case deceit and infidelity are at the core. Hemingway could have written this in 100 pages or less. James just makes your head spin.

 Or this one?

The subtle discriminations, the way James holds up to the light tenuous motives and turns them slowly - very slowly - so that their hidden facets become, fleetingly, visible; the very real portrayal of interesting characters that James reveals; as well as the languorous, unpredictable turns of a Jamesian sentence - all offer the kinds of pleasures that no other writer (possibly excepting Proust) is able to produce.

These are both from customer reviews on Amazon.com. I'm definitely in the latter camp: The Golden Bowl is in my top ten books of all time. (In one of these reviews the word "splendidly" gave me goose bumps all over. If you've read the book you know why.)

But most people probably don't need to read The Golden Bowl to find out their narrative style. What do you read already? What do you come back to and read over and over? That's probably your best answer.

If you are just starting out doing narrative work, I suggest starting with your strength. Find your narrative home and start your work there. If you prefer depth, start with few stories and go deep. If you prefer breadth, start with more stories and watch them swarm. But after you have become comfortable doing story projects in your narrative home, get ready to leave it and travel elsewhere. Why? Because depth and breadth complement each other, and the best narrative work involves both approaches. If you have collected few stories in the past, try a broader shallower collection. If you have never gone deep into stories, try collecting fewer, longer stories and giving them more depth of attention. You are guaranteed to find some new ideas you did not know you needed.

How can you combine depth and breadth in a story project? There are lots of ways to bring them together. You can complement an intense 20-person all-day workshop with a web collection that brings in hundreds of anecdotes. You can collect many anecdotes, then follow up with ten percent of the respondents for in-depth ethnographic interviews. Workshop methods can integrate assemblages of stories into deeper, fewer artifacts. Asking twenty people to integrate hundreds of stories told by dozens of contributors into ten emergent constructs creates a breadth-depth bridge you can use to address an issue from both sides. Many narrative methods can be used in concert, with the outcome of one feeding into another.

If you look for opportunities to pursue both depth and breadth in your narrative projects, I suggest you will find the outcomes to be richer and more useful, and you'll extend your skills so that you can get the most from all narrative contexts.