Coming Now: A Bear at the Door

This is The Academic Storyteller because you, if you’re here, are an academic with stories to tell, and a reason to tell them.

A narrative concept can help explain why we’re all here. Writers, storytellers, use the phrase “a bear at the door” to mean there’s a looming problem. Danger lurks, adding a thread of tension to the story. Stakes become more clear, actions more urgent. The reader feels compelled to keep going until that danger—that tension—resolves. Many of us can sense a bear at the door now.

You’d like to think that when there’s a bear at the door, people would act accordingly—that they would take precautions like locking the door and the windows, call someone who could help get rid of the bear, stay alert to the danger. In remote northern Norway is a place called Svalbard, where polar bears are abundant. I read once that people traveling outside the town are encouraged or even required to go armed in case of a dangerous encounter with a bear. That is the definition of a clear and present danger, and a literal example of the metaphor storytellers use. Think of a car accident or a cancer diagnosis or a high fever like this. It’s a bear, roaring and scratching at the door. We know it’s there and we have to react. The stakes are life and death, and everyone knows it.

What if the bear is at the door, but the people in the house don’t know it’s there? They will continue to act according to their knowledge and understanding of the world; unconcerned and free to pack a picnic, open the door, and unknowingly invite calamity in. I work with lots of authors from public health and adjacent fields, and this is one of the problems they face. Public health, or any discipline of preventing problems from occurring, deals exclusively with the bears nobody knows about. When it works, nobody will ever fully understand what could have happened; when it doesn’t, suddenly it becomes an issue for emergency response. We worry that if public health enters the conversation at all, it is as a failure, or taking on the role of a scolding know-it-all. As you read this, you might already understand how the metaphor applies to your own work.

For so many authors, this idea hits close to home. They want to help people understand the danger so it can be avoided, or the opportunity so it can be grabbed. And after years and years of providing data, leading with data, being honest and open and letting the data do the talking, they are coming to realize that’s not enough. It’s not working. Especially in the face of the muddled information environment we live in today, people interpret your data within the context of everything else they’ve taken in. How can you help them put the pieces together accurately?

Now you might already be thinking of ways to solve (to prevent) this core problem. What you might be thinking is that we need to make sure people know. About the bear at their door. About the danger of influenza or smoking, or climate change or shortsighted economic policies. That’s not wrong, but it isn’t sufficient, either. Plenty of research has shown that knowledge deficits, and closing them, don’t explain whey we fail over and over, across domains, to have the impact we want.

At the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in 2024, Dr. Reed Tuckson gave a galvanizing keynote. Decrying the loss of trust in public health and science, he told the assembled crowd of ten thousand or so, “the stories we’re telling aren’t resonating.” He recognized that you can’t just point to a stack of data and say “look at the evidence!”

This substack will be devoted to helping academic authors tell stories that work. If you’re writing a book, or if you think that these writerly concepts and techniques will help you, follow along. I’ll be posting tried-and-true narrative techniques and writing principles that can elevate your writing so it has the impact you envision, and I’ll be looking for examples of other writing that works so we can all learn from it.

My goal is that this newsletter will always be free for subscribers—if you feel like this is important and you want to make a pledge along with your subscription, I will be honored to have your support.

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