Every story begins with paying attention. That is exactly what I have been doing for the past two weeks while backpacking through Sicily.
I have been walking, observing, noticing and collecting narrative fragments: shifting light modelling this absurd, beautiful landscape. Conversations with strangers. Local myths and history. Everyday things. When you see them. And, a few times, escaping bushfires. But mostly I have been discovering patterns of meaning in my own doing, because this is fieldwork for 𝘕𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘺.
The manuscript is finished, but the research continues as I want to develop its visual storytelling layer until September. Some things simply need time. And although not knowing where the journey leads is often more unsettling than exciting, it’s worth doing. The true meaning usually reveals itself only once you think you’re finished. It must be some kind of natural law.
As a tutor and coach, I often encourage others to trust that process, write the end, discover what it is all about, and then start for real. Practising what you preach is another matter. But I can say it with more conviction now, because 𝘕𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘺 has grown into an approach that I couldn’t have thought of just a year ago.
When I started writing, I already believed storytelling is a way of thinking. Perhaps even one of humanity’s oldest research instruments. What I didn’t expect was where following that thought would lead me. In the end, I developed a Narrative Lab to explore five fundamental movements of storytelling: perceiving, reflecting, collapsing, speculating, and transforming.
This approach also became a way of travelling inwards: to understand authorship and creativity, and to find the place within yourself that no technology, and no one else, can ever replace.
As the first sentences of 𝘕𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘺 were born on an Italian mountain, at the Santuario della Nebbia, it felt right to return to another Italian mountain to finish the manuscript. This time I spent several nights in a tent on Etna, surrounded not by white mist but by volcanic smoke. More when I am back!
#narravity #researchfieldnote #storytelling #narrativeresearch #creativeresearch #artisticresearch
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