10 lessons from doing social justice-centered storytelling for 10 years

This year, I complete a decade of being a storyteller. I have juggled between various roles in this regard: an editor, a writer, a blogger, a content director, a communications professional, a campaigner. Ten years of dabbling different roles to ultimately tell stories. In each one of these roles, even though the roles were significantly different, I was committed to the goal of finding something new to tell or finding a new way of telling the same thing. Stories can be magical, depressing, revealing, reassuring and repetitive. But they are needed and their value couldn’t be more timely and critical than the present times that has forced us to come face-to-face with nothing short of an apocalypse.

In all these years, I have picked up a few lessons on what ethical and real storytelling looks like. How has storytelling evolved over the years? What do narratives and the way we weave them teach us? What are some central tensions that exist in communications and storytelling? My lessons are coming from a space of having done storytelling centered around feminist organizing, human rights and social justice movements. Here are 10 lessons from me to you:

1. Storytellers are enablers: Telling a story is an act of power, an act of privilege and hence an act that needs to be honored for what it is. We are enablers, not the center pieces of the craft we create. We are here to support people in telling their own stories in the fashion that they feel most comfortable in. We are catalysts in releasing narratives that were hidden for years, perhaps even decades. We are mischief makers in digging and pushing and poking communities and peoples to tell stories that haven’t been told before. We are hungry like that but we must never forget our role in this ecosystem.
2. A good story causes great discomfort: A good story makes us uncomfortable. It makes us stand up and take notice. It opens our eyes towards a truth we couldn’t see before. It bolts us back into a reality we perhaps avoided for a long time. It recaps something that was long forgotten. It exposes a violation, a wrongdoing, an unfair or unjust act. It creates a sense of discomfort that is needed because only that can create action. Discomfort is good and a good story is even better because it made us move out of that comfort zone.
3. Stories matter: I’ll repeat this one for dramatic effect: Stories. Matter. They have the power to move the strongest hearts and the toughest minds. They can cause waves of emotions and change across movements, sectors and spaces. They can change the course of a narrative. They can shift the focus on a global level. Never underestimate their reach because someone somewhere is reading, watching or listening to something that is making their hearts and minds sway. [Just don’t expect it to happen in a single day!]
4. Communications work is collaboration work: Every inch of communications work I have done has been an attempt to collaborate. It usually means reaching out to people who have more validity and authenticity than me on a given subject matter and letting their words take a shape that I help create for them. It also means several back and forth, questioning my own assumption of how a story ought to be told and making space for newer ways of telling a story and centering the perspectives that require and demand attention. Nothing teaches you patience and empathy as much as collaboration.
5. Deadlines should be dead: A lot of storytelling is dictated by deadlines. A report that has to be released on a certain day. A campaign that has to be launched on another international day. A blog that has to be written commemorating a globally recognized day. It’s hard to not fall into this pressure, especially when we are all trying to leverage global attention and knowledge on a particular issue. But guess what? Transphobia needs to be talked about after May 17th too. Girls’ rights deserve a spotlight not only on October 11. Black lives matter every single day and not just throughout Black History Month. These are good reminders to tell us why we are doing what we are doing and how every aspect of our work need not be time bound.
6. Creativity is exhausting: Stories are never original. Someone somewhere has covered it already. Perhaps an angle has remained unexplored. Perhaps the medium to tell that story hasn’t been diversified. Perhaps that story requires it to be told again and again because people’s memories are so short. Whatever the case may be, to come up with a new way to tell a[n old] story is a creatively consuming process. Acknowledging this and taking proactive measures towards nourishing our creative spirits is key in ensuring we don’t get disillusioned from the enchanting world of storytelling.
7. Credit is necessary: When organizations are weaving narratives, oftentimes it is the hard work of a bunch of people (sometimes and alarmingly, a singular person). Nonprofits and philanthropic spaces are especially notorious for overburdening the smallest team with the largest work with inadequate compensation–monetary or otherwise. Who wrote the story? Who translated it? Who designed the graphics? Who supported the shaping of the content? Who offered editorial guidance? Name them. Acknowledge them. Respect their time and labor. Pay them well.
8. Consent is sacred: This is a tricky thing to navigate even though its utmost importance can never be questioned. Whose image goes alongside the story? Did they consent to using it for your storytelling needs? Who has been named in the story? Are they comfortable? Even if they are, is it safe to name them? Consent is tricky precisely because even if it seemingly exists in the affirmative, movements and activism, especially feminist organizing, exists in some of the most volatile and dangerous contexts of the world. One, then, has to take a call around whose physical and digital security is at stake in the process of telling a story. Is it worth it?
9. Stories should be for everyone: Stories can take many shapes and forms, just like water. An oral story holds as much legitimacy as a visual story and the reason why they both need to coexist is because we want everyone to be able to experience the storytelling. Stories are one of the few things that connect us all as humans and no community should ever feel left out of it. As storytellers, it is our job to identify creative ways and mediums of exploring a story because it is the uniting nature of stories that makes it so irresistible.
10. Not every story needs to be told (and that’s okay): Some stories are better left untold. Maybe you’re not the right person to dig it, maybe it is incomplete and intended to be for the interim, maybe it is toxic and can cause severe damage, if released, or maybe it is too confusing to unpack for your audience. We must learn to let it be because one of the toughest things we will do as a storyteller is identify which are the stories that do not require a telling. It’s okay.

For those interested in some further reading on narratives and storytelling, please see below:

• Hot tips for feminist communicators
• How to communicate your feminist agenda
• How embracing new narratives can revolutionize what it means to do human rights
• Changing the narrative: Weaving #ShiftThePower throughout the #Globaldev sector
• Challenging harmful visual narratives through images
• Content Labs | Narrative Briefing: a report by Culture Hacks Lab
• Culture and the Anthropocene Issue 1
• Mud and Antler Bone — Interview with Martin Shaw — Emergence Magazine