Curious if you were at this year’s Bay Solstice event? (Oli’s Eulogy seemed like one of the classically ‘personal stories’, and I think Tessa’s was reasonably in that category, although somewhat more abstract)
I agree that personal stories make things much more powerful, they’re just legitimately hard to write (and depend a lot on people having experienced a particular kind of hardship, and then having time/bandwidth/skills to write and speak about it). So it’s hard to always have them.
I also think it’s made Solstice kinda “extra intimidating to start from scratch” in your local community, if there’s a sense that if you don’t have a bunch of powerful personal stories you “didn’t do it right.” Getting a Solstice off the ground is hard in the first place. My sense is that the appropriate vibe of the holiday is something like “personal stories are strongly encouraged, but there’s a canon of good schelling speeches that it’s fine to use, if, like, no one in your local community happened have endured something traumatic that ties in well with the narrative.”
(I do separately think that the sequence readings tend not to work as well, unless they’re heavily edited, since they weren’t really designed for this purpose)
I didn’t go to Solstice Advent this year. I was basically going by the description here:
I decided what message fit in every place in the arc and found a piece that fit there. Only after that did I approach potential speakers. I ended up using four existing pieces wholesale; the rest were based on existing pieces but were either remixed or heavily edited by the speaker.
Whereas I would imagine a Solstice that put heavy emphasis on personal stories would have quite a different process.
Nod. Mingyuan probably has more specific answers here, but I do basically endorse her overall approach and have some thoughts about it.
I think it’s possible (and desirable) to have a single coherent vision for the overall event, while still having personal stories (and indeed that’s what ended up happening here). I think the process was some combo of:
figure out overall shape of the arc
in some cases write specific things for pieces of it
in some cases reach out to people to write things that fit into that part of the arc
in some cases write things, and then send them to people and say ‘hey, can you take this basic idea but write something of your own that’s in your own voice’? (such as Tessa’s speech)
in some cases, find people who had already written things that fit well (such as habryka’s eulogy)
#4 was an option I hadn’t really considered before and I think worked well.
The problem with people writing personal stories independently is they often end up covering fairly similar ground, in a way that ends up a combo of repetitive and disjointed. (Instead of a smooth arc that flows down and then up, you get some weird repetitive motions in the middle, and meanwhile the whole thing ends up with a bit of a ‘designed by committee’ feel. That doesn’t always happen but I’ve seen it happen a few times)
Curious if you were at this year’s Bay Solstice event? (Oli’s Eulogy seemed like one of the classically ‘personal stories’, and I think Tessa’s was reasonably in that category, although somewhat more abstract)
I agree that personal stories make things much more powerful, they’re just legitimately hard to write (and depend a lot on people having experienced a particular kind of hardship, and then having time/bandwidth/skills to write and speak about it). So it’s hard to always have them.
I also think it’s made Solstice kinda “extra intimidating to start from scratch” in your local community, if there’s a sense that if you don’t have a bunch of powerful personal stories you “didn’t do it right.” Getting a Solstice off the ground is hard in the first place. My sense is that the appropriate vibe of the holiday is something like “personal stories are strongly encouraged, but there’s a canon of good schelling speeches that it’s fine to use, if, like, no one in your local community happened have endured something traumatic that ties in well with the narrative.”
(I do separately think that the sequence readings tend not to work as well, unless they’re heavily edited, since they weren’t really designed for this purpose)
((I think Bay events have varied pretty wildly))
I didn’t go to Solstice Advent this year. I was basically going by the description here:
Whereas I would imagine a Solstice that put heavy emphasis on personal stories would have quite a different process.
Nod. Mingyuan probably has more specific answers here, but I do basically endorse her overall approach and have some thoughts about it.
I think it’s possible (and desirable) to have a single coherent vision for the overall event, while still having personal stories (and indeed that’s what ended up happening here). I think the process was some combo of:
figure out overall shape of the arc
in some cases write specific things for pieces of it
in some cases reach out to people to write things that fit into that part of the arc
in some cases write things, and then send them to people and say ‘hey, can you take this basic idea but write something of your own that’s in your own voice’? (such as Tessa’s speech)
in some cases, find people who had already written things that fit well (such as habryka’s eulogy)
#4 was an option I hadn’t really considered before and I think worked well.
The problem with people writing personal stories independently is they often end up covering fairly similar ground, in a way that ends up a combo of repetitive and disjointed. (Instead of a smooth arc that flows down and then up, you get some weird repetitive motions in the middle, and meanwhile the whole thing ends up with a bit of a ‘designed by committee’ feel. That doesn’t always happen but I’ve seen it happen a few times)