From Forums to Feedback: The Composite Stories Experience
About the Authors and the Stories
Vanessa Bonham is a fifth-year honours English student with a minor in Creative Writing at UofG. She has worked with the LWWRC as a Communications and Research Assistant since September 2024. She began working on the Composite Stories project in November 2024 and has been a primary author for the stories about Lily, Wren and Cyrus, and Evelyn.
Jordyne Craig is in her fifth year of the honours Justice and Legal Studies co-op program at UofG with a minor in Creative Writing. She began working at the LWWRC as the Research and Content Coordinator in January 2025. She has been a primary author for Lily, Wren and Cyrus, and Evelyn in addition to her role as a developer for the Reimagining Livelihoods multimedia website (livelihoods.ca), where the stories are stored.
Three composite stories were created using data from the Reimagining Livelihoods project and the Disability and Livelihoods in Canada partnership. This blog describes what composite stories are and how we developed these three stories.
What Is a Composite Story?
The process of developing composite stories for the Reimagining Livelihoods project is a complex one. It can’t be explained without a brief overview of composite stories in general. What is a composite story? It’s essentially a mosaic of different data points which tell a singular, fictional story. The way we typically explain it to people is that “It’s turning complex and extensive data into an easily digestible and engaging story.”
It’s simple for us to understand now, but it wasn’t in the beginning. We read a series of articles on the concept of composite stories, and their benefits as a way to share qualitative data. The article “The use of composite narratives to present interview findings" was a great starting point to help grasp how these stories work. Also, the article “The composite first person narrative: Texture, structure, and meaning in writing phenomenological descriptions" was essential to understand the importance of seemingly “small” details when creating these kinds of stories.
Most, if not all, of the small elements of these stories are pulled from interviews, surveys, or peer-reviewed research. No part of these stories was added without considering how it might change the way the rest of the data is understood. So, how did we get from raw data to full-fledged stories?
Turning Whiteboard Notes into Full Sentences
Writing these composite stories began in 2023 as a part of the Reimagining Livelihoods project, which consisted of two parts. The first part was a Reimagining Livelihoods Forum, hosted from August 23–24 as a hybrid event. This event was an opportunity to converse and collaborate with diverse people and perspectives across Canada and globally. The second part was a multimedia platform on livelihoods: livelihoods.ca. In planning content for the website, the idea of writing composite stories was born. Data was available in the form of a series of interview transcripts and survey responses from two pilot projects in the Disability and Livelihoods in Canada project: one on disabilities and volunteering and the other on young women with disabilities and pre-employment supports.
The writing journey began in the summer of 2024. Students working at the Centre at that time—Co-op student Mabel Mechery, and graduate research assistants Aurora Matteocci and Kathryn Reinders—started adding the relevant data to a whiteboard and began fleshing out some basic attributes for three characters whose stories would be told using the data.
These students scanned data for details which might make a compelling, relatable, and diverse character. For instance, in one interview someone made a comment about selling on Kijiji to make extra money. That detail was pulled from the interviews and used in a story to become a source of income for one of our characters who is unable to work due to their disability.
Along with listing key character traits, these students also identified common barriers that participants had expressed were limiting their livelihoods. These barriers served as thematic guidelines for the types of stories we wanted to tell. Using the whiteboard as their foundation, these students began writing the beginning of Lily’s story.
Writing
In November 2024, when I (Vanessa) joined the Composite Stories writing process, I started with Lily. The original students had drafted about four paragraphs introducing Lily. She was 19 years old, had just graduated from high-school, and used a wheelchair because of her cerebral palsy.
There were no previous composite stories for me to look at, but our Centre had collaborated with the Guelph & Wellington Task Force on Poverty Elimination on the Storied Lives: Shifting Perspectives on Poverty project. This project had created composite stories from their data and then recorded them as podcasts. Listening to these podcasts helped me understand the tone I’d have to use and the anticipated flow of the story.
From there, I began writing the rest of Lily’s story, using the original whiteboard and an Excel file populated with additional research. It was a welcomed challenge throughout the process to make Lily seem alive. We didn’t want readers to be confused by jargon or get the sense they were reading a report—we wanted them to be sitting across from someone at a coffee shop listening to their story.
For this reason, we opted for first-person writing and a more casual tone that matched Lily’s age and demeanour.
It was also challenging, because our writing team was so small, to approach things from multiple points of view. Since the data was from so many individuals and perspectives, it was challenging to weave a story that would feel cohesive. As authors, we’d create a draft for a character's story that we thought checked all the boxes and then would realize, after receiving feedback, that we’d left something unexplained or that two data points were conflicting with one another.
Polishing Our Work
After we finished writing Lily’s story, it was reviewed by members of the Advisory Committee, who were responsible for providing feedback on the composite story drafts before they were published. Some people in the Advisory Committee commented on grammar, sentence structure, or flow of the stories, and others focused on ensuring that the stories reflected the data and literature. Having both aspects of the story critiqued helped us feel confident about the story’s authenticity.
When Lily’s story went live on our website, our confidence in the other two draft stories grew. Having a better understanding of the approval process and what people were looking for in the stories meant that we were able to write Evelyn’s and Wren and Cyrus’s stories with additional clarity. With a clearer process of how we wanted to write the stories and what they should look like, we decided to divide and conquer when writing about Evelyn and about Wren and Cyrus. Together, we brainstormed for the remaining two stories, then we divvied up the work and each took a story. After working individually on the stories for a couple weeks, we switched to view the other’s progress and contribute our own notes. That went on until the first full drafts of Evelyn’s story and Wren and Cyrus’s story were complete; this allowed both of us to work on the stories, but also to be able to take a step back and continue the story with fresh eyes.
Alongside this process, seeing the final character drawings from the activist design studio we collaborated with, The Public, was the push we needed to finish writing these stories.
It was so exciting to see the characters our team had created and all the details we’d included presented in a visual design. Our characters were finally coming to life.
Reflecting on the Project
Because this project has been touched by so many people, we thought we would share the personal impact it’s had on us so people can understand the continued importance of livelihoods research.
Jordyne
This project means so much to me; it’s incredible to see something come together that so many people have been a part of. Composite stories have really given me a different perspective on storytelling and research, realizing a story doesn’t have to be 100% fictional and that sharing research doesn’t have to be done with an academic paper. I joined the project after all of the brainstorming and the research was complete, so from my perspective, once that was done, the longest part of working on composite stories truly was the revising process. A part of our process that made it so efficient and reliable was having multiple people review our work and having them ask the right questions that we couldn’t see because we were so close to the project. It was also so unique writing three distinct characters: Lily as a new graduate of high school, Wren and their relationship with Cyrus, and Evelyn as a mother and a newcomer to Canada. All characters had important goals, and the stories showed the vastly different ways in which we all strive for a livelihood that makes us happy.
Vanessa
I had no idea the depth of work I was getting into when I was invited onto this project. But as I read all the interviews and survey responses, I realized how many people cared about being heard and represented. With each new character trait we developed, I understood it as another chance for someone out there to read our stories and feel seen. Not only did this project allow me to develop skills in research, analysis, collaboration, time management, writing, and proofreading, but it also allowed me—as a disabled woman interested in disability research—to explore different representations of disability, barriers, and diverse people in the community. I would agree with Jordyne that the longest part of the process was editing and addressing comments from our team. However, what was additionally challenging was weaving together different types of research. Jordyne and I braided together the data from interviews and surveys, but oftentimes these comments weren’t enough to form an entire character. We had to do additional scholarly research on various topics like immigration policies, employment agencies, and even housing grants. This process helped me understand that when we rely on solely anecdotal or solely empirical evidence when conducting research, we never really get the full picture.
Next Steps
While we’ve wrapped up writing composite stories, there is continued space for engagement within this project. The stories are available to be read on our Reimagining Livelihoods website. On this website we also invite you to explore our knowledge sharing section, where we list resources, organizations, and news about livelihoods. As well, the engage section of this multimedia platform is a space for you to share your feedback on the site, suggest resources or tools, or even share your own livelihoods experience!
To further connect with this project, take a look at our LinkedIn page or explore #LivelihoodsCanada on our Live Work Well Research Centre socials!