I was inspired by the question, “are there uses of storytelling that are offensive or inappropriate” to do an internet search.  Not knowing what words to use I typed in “bad stories” and came up with

Bored.com – bad date stories

Lovestory.com –  love stores with bad or sad endings

MakingLemonade –  bad stories from single parents

TheFrisky – bad sex stories

Workingamerica.org – bad boss stores

Texas Hold’em – bad beat stores from the poker table

Badgolfer.com – what it says

There are bad customer service experiences, bad driver rants, regifting horror stories and reasons to tell bad adoption tales. You can find stories about bad Facebook, divorce, leadership, haircuts, journalism, and car dealer experiences. There were 253,000,000 entries for bad stories.

I was curious so I searched “good stories” and there are only 126,000,000 entries. Apparently Google says there are twice as many bad stories as good stories.

But all that is a digression (how easy to do with searches) from the original question, what stories are not OK?  According to Judy Rosemarin in Kathy Hansen’s blog, A Storied Career, the answer is gossip or false advertising.

I’d add lying with the intent to maliciously deceive. I’m not talking about exaggerating or embellishing a story, that’s fair in telling stories, but manipulating the truth to unduly influence someone is a bad story in my book.  What’s your bottom line?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 9:18 am and is filed under Arts. Tags for this post: A Storied Career, lying, storytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.