The ebb and flow of a person’s life, told in intimate detail with honest reflection, is often missing from the landscape of ‘news and information’, offering the intimate, unique and otherwise diverse perspectives outlets say they want.

Personal stories are not newsy and they aren’t reported. But here’s my hot take – they are the most powerful and impactful kinds of stories out there. They are integral to a healthy information landscape when approached thoughtfully with honesty and care. Moreso, they are a powerfully transformative experience for their storytellers.

My trust in this narrative form goes back to my time at RadioActive, a one-of-a-kind youth journalism program from KUOW in Seattle which sadly was shuttered last April. RadioActive won several awards for rigorous youth journalism and strong personal stories that would otherwise never have been given a chance to air.

The program changed many lives – including mine. Participating in the program over several years - as a student, a mentor, and an editor – illustrated just how powerful a tool it was for diversifying a media landscape that desperately needs a rich tapestry of perspectives.

Personalizing the Universal

Personal narratives are most impactful in practice when they reflect a broader universal quality through a tight, specific and detailed example. This happens in three ways:

1)      The individual gets to tell the story on their own terms, often by using the first person
2)      The storyteller makes broader themes relatable by scaling them down to specifics
3)      The audience is invited to suspend judgment and increase empathy. No matter how different our lives are, there are emotional cores that are shared by all of us. Personal stories – rather than sweeping social and political commentaries – get to that emotional core much faster.

Challenging what makes a “good story”

How often have you heard someone in a newsroom say, “that’s not a good story”? Personal narratives challenge the assumptions of a “good” story. Everyone’s story is worth telling and true diversity of perspective can be found when a media space encourages personal narratives as a valid form of knowledge building. When we value this breadth of perspectives, then the question is no longer whether the story at hand is “good” or “bad”, but whether it unearths a new layer of understanding about the world. And, I want to argue, every single person’s story will do just that.

Learning how to craft and work through the process of a personal narrative is also a crucial step in building your own journalism, communications, or editing practice because it acutely reveals the stakes of being a storyteller. When you practice crafting your own narrative, you are far more aware of the challenges and decisions your interview subjects and clients face, making this a crucial exercise to understand how to treat sensitive personal content as a third-party.

I’ve chosen to tell my own stories at various point in my life. The lessons I learned have led me to be very careful with how I edit the personal stories of others. I would ask a storyteller to think long and hard about the medium and platform they want to use. The format, medium and structure should ultimately do justice to the personal truth they want to convey. Ultimately, you should not have to make your story fit someone else’s conditions of reality – rather, the strength of its impact relies on the choices you make to be as authentic and aligned as possible with yourself.

As communications practitioners, regardless of field, we must treat the intrinsic value of a storyteller’s narrative as equally important as the extrinsic value of engagements, impressions, and audience reactions. True diversity of perspective is dependent on that authenticity.

Next Time: Telling a personal narrative from three viewpoints, as a storyteller, a mentor, and an editor

What is the most powerful narrative? Yours, of course.