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# Assess story sharing

You can use this page to think about stories and storytelling in the community or organization you seek to help. The better you know how people share stories (or don't) in that community or organization, the better you will be able to plan a project that asks people to share stories.

## What to do here

Answer the questions as well as you can based on what you know about your community or organization. At the end of the page you will see your score: a portrait of the narrative life of your community or organization. If the score is low, it doesn't mean you can't do a story project. It just means you might need to adapt your project to accommodate the way people share stories in your community or organization.

## Connections to other pages

The information you enter here will appear in the project report. However, nothing else in the application depends on this page, and it's entirely optional. Consider it a test of your knowledge about the people who will be telling stories in your project. If you can answer the questions on this page, you have a good grasp of the conditions you will find when you ask people to share stories with you. If you can't answer these questions, you might need to spend more time learning about your community or organization before you will be ready to carry out a successful story project.

## Frequently-asked questions

### What are narrative freedom, flow, etc?

Here are some excerpts from The Working with Stories Miscellany that explain the four categories of questions.

Narrative freedom: Are people free to tell stories?

A lack of narrative freedom means that people want to tell stories but can't. That doesn't necessarily mean the iron hand of authority is pressing them down; it could just mean that the story-sharing culture is repressive or tight-lipped. In any case, a lack of freedom to tell stories puts a damper on all the benefits healthy story sharing can bring to a community or organization.

Narrative flow: Do people tell stories?

This assessment category is about the extent to which people tell stories on a regular basis. It considers whether story sharing is a comfortable and familiar habit, a part of daily life people participate in as a matter of course, or a rare departure from everyday discourse.

Narrative knowledge: Do people know how to tell stories?

This assessment category looks at your community or organization's collective knowledge about the way story sharing works in groups of people: what stories are for, how a story begins and ends, when stories can and can't be told, how to reframe a story to match an audience's expectations, and so on.

Narrative unity: Do people tell the same stories?

The last assessment category has to do with whether stories are shared, or held in common, within the community or organization.