Standardizing a narrative means agreeing one fixed version of its critical content and holding every teller to it, while leaving ornament free to vary. Standardize only what is costly if wrong, such as procedures, community law, warnings and founding events, and keep a list that marks each narrative as fixed or free so that tellers know where precision is required.
A standardized narrative is a story, song or list whose critical content has been agreed, verified and fixed, so that it can be checked against a single version.
Fix The Core, Leave The Surface
Standardizing everything is both impossible and harmful. A community cannot hold a large fixed text in memory without trained specialists, and rigid retelling of everything makes tellers afraid to speak. The practical approach is a two-layer narrative:
- Core (fixed): steps, limits, names of places and dangers, the wording of agreements, the order of events that others rely on.
- Surface (free): scene, humour, voices, examples, the order in which minor events are told.
The existing Oral Tradition page makes the same split under the names fixed and flexible content. The addition here is to write the list: each narrative, which parts are core, who holds the reference.
Four Kinds Of Narrative Worth Standardizing
| Kind | What the core protects | Where it is covered |
|---|---|---|
| History | Who did what, what was agreed, what went wrong | Community Canon |
| Procedure | Order of steps, limits and warnings | Procedural Songs |
| Law and agreement | The exact terms the community bound itself to | Precedent Records |
| Warning | The hazard, the cue and the action | Warning Tales |
What You Need
- A list of narratives with fixed/free marked, who holds the reference, and last verified date
- A verification session for each (Verification & Version Control)
- Agreement from the community — a standard imposed by one person is resisted and drifts
Method: Agree A Standard Version
Step 1: Gather the existing versions from several carriers, told separately.
Step 2: Compare. Mark every difference in the core.
Step 3: Resolve each difference against a reference or a physical check; where none exists, the community decides openly and records that it was a decision, not a discovery.
Step 4: Write the core (or if no writing, have two custodians recite it together until it matches).
Step 5: Teach it at the story circle and mark it fixed in the list (Story Circle System).
Step 6: Set a review interval. A standard is revised when the world changes, by the same process that created it.
Common Mistakes
- Standardizing contested history as if it were settled — whoever controls the standard version controls the past. Record the dispute, and keep its sources.
- Freezing a wrong version — standardizing before verifying fixes the error. Verify first.
- No revision path — a standard that cannot change will be quietly ignored.
- Standardizing too much — more fixed text than the carriers can rehearse lowers accuracy across the whole canon.
What’s Next
- Learn next: Community Canon — choosing what to standardize
- Combine with: Decision Archives — where the written core of governance narratives belongs