DON'T MAKE IT MEAN TOO MUCH.

The second foundation of storytelling is meaning. It’s where most good observations get ruined.

A three-year-old was skipping around the lounge of the shiva house. It was shiva for her grandmother. But she was in a good mood because her aunt had given her a job: packing sweets into packets for the children for Shabbos. Eventually she landed on her father’s lap, her mouth obviously full. He asked her how many sweets she was eating.

She opened her mouth wide so that he could look inside…

I’ve been working through storytelling deliberately for a while now, treating it as a craft with trainable parts rather than a knack that some people are born with and the rest of us aren’t. I mean storytelling in the wide sense: making a point in a meeting, holding a room, writing something anybody wants to finish. The first thing you train is seeing, which means staying with the particular thing in front of you, instead of filing it under a category and moving on. I wrote about that last time.

But noticing only gives you a fragment of reality. It doesn’t tell you what the fragment is about. And a fragment that nobody can say anything about isn’t yet a story. That’s the second thing, and it’s a separate act. Meaning isn’t always attached to the thing. You have to go and find it, and what you come back with depends a great deal on where you look.

Here’s a small example. A week after my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah I noticed that the lilies bought for the occasion had finally opened. The event was over. Even the aftermath of it had mostly passed, and only then did the flowers bloom spectacularly.

Perhaps that’s about how things tend to arrive just after we’ve stopped waiting for them. Or perhaps about the strange afterlife of an occasion. Perhaps it’s about the slight cruelty of something becoming exactly what you wanted, just too late.

Those aren’t three attempts at one answer. They’re three different stories. The lilies didn’t choose between them. I did. And I could have chosen otherwise.

Which means meaning is something you make, and anything you make can be made badly. It goes wrong in two ways.

The first is ‘climbing’. You reach for a meaning so large that it’s true of nearly everything, and in becoming true of everything it stops being about the thing in front of you.

The second is ‘importing’. You turn up at the scene already carrying a feeling, hand it to whatever happens to be there, and then read it back off the scene as though you’d found it lying around.

And there’s one test that catches both. Could I attach this meaning to a thousand other stories? If the answer is yes, then keep digging.

So, back to the little girl with her mouth open. Maybe this was about the innocence we all wish we could return to. Or maybe the passing of time and the cycle of life. Maybe about death being redeemed by young life.

Every one of those fails the test, and the third is the worst precisely because it sounds the most profound. It makes a claim that the moment never made. This sweet little thing wasn’t redeeming her grandmother’s death. She was eating a gummy.

This looks like a climb. The moment I tried to say what the scene meant I reached for the biggest words available. Time. Life. Innocence. Grief. Enormous words, and the higher you climb into abstraction, the easier it becomes to say something entirely true and entirely flat.

The storytelling law underneath all of this is that the best meaning is the one that cannot be separated from the observation that it came from.

So let’s go back into that room and look at what’s actually there. A woman has passed away. Adults are sitting on low chairs. Shabbos is coming, and so somebody is packing sweets for the children. A three-year-old is skipping between them with one in her mouth.

Nobody suspended anything. That’s the part I had wrong. She isn’t being brave, she isn’t choosing joy in spite of the grief, and the adults haven’t set their mourning aside for her. Two entirely different emotional realities are occupying one room, and neither cancels the other.

There’s a second one hiding inside the exchange itself. Her father asks how many sweets she has. An adult would process that question socially before answering it: am I being accused of something, how much should I admit to, what’s the right number here? She hears a question about how many sweets are in her mouth. You want to know? Look. Aahh. Perhaps it’s really about how much complexity we eventually learn to insert between a question and its answer.

Neither of those could be peeled off this scene and stuck onto another one. That’s how you know they came from it.

The importing failure is quieter, and I’ve noticed that I do it constantly. Walking around the park the other day I passed an elderly couple in an old orange Toyota Tazz, both staring straight ahead. I know a little about the man. He lost his wife a few years ago. Perhaps this is about the bleakness the future holds for some of us, is what I thought.

I hadn’t observed any bleakness. Two elderly people were driving somewhere, possibly to Checkers. The bleakness was mine, and I gave it to them.

Underneath both failures sits one instinct worth weakening. We’re trained to ask what something teaches us. And the answer often closes the door for a story worth telling: appreciate the simple joys, cherish your family, don’t judge a man by his hair. A moral shuts the door and the reader (or listener) isn’t interested.

The better question is what it reveals. A three-year-old and her grieving father in the same room, living in two completely different versions of it. Nothing has been concluded. The reader has to do something with it. Meaning starts working at exactly that point, when it expands inside somebody else instead of ending in you.

The same habit decides whether strategic thinking is any good. A client says their brand needs to feel more human, or that audiences want authenticity now. Both are true, both attachable to ten thousand other companies. It’s the identical climb: an accurate abstraction that has left behind everything specific enough to act on. If the strategy would fit a competitor equally well, it isn’t strategy yet.

Week two of the Storytelling Map is Meaning, so here’s the practice.

Take one observation and finish this sentence three times. Perhaps this is really about... Three, not one. The first will be whatever cliché your mind reaches for, and you have to get past it before anything interesting shows up.

Then do the three again with a ban in place: no life, death, time, grief, innocence, childhood or comfort. Losing the enormous words forces you back down into the moment, which is where the good answer was always going to be.

Some will suck. Some will be funny or petty or slightly embarrassing, and those are worth protecting. One risk of taking storytelling seriously is that you start trying to squeeze profundity out of everything, and someone doing that is exhausting to read.

The girl wasn’t a symbol of anything. She was helping with the sweets, she had one in her mouth, and when her father asked how many she opened wide so he could see.

Look at that for long enough and it gives you something. Ask it to mean more than it does and it gives you nothing at all.

Don’t make her carry more meaning than she can bear.