Adichie describes her own middle-class family’s servant in Nigeria and how her mother consistently characterized his family by its poverty. She felt pity for him, but then was surprised to discover one day that his mother made beautiful baskets. It had never occurred to her that they would be capable of making anything.

She extends the parallel to literature (that it is a Western phenomenon), to her American college roommate’s expectations about her (that she wouldn’t be able to speak English and would listen to tribal music) and her own mistaken impression of Mexicans (whom she had known of primarily through reading stories about illegal immigration).

She notes how impressionable and vulnerable we can be in the face of a story, and suggests that hearing only the dominant narrative cannot help but generate stereotypes.

Adichie’s words might find particular relevance for narrative reporters using the power of storytelling to portray another place or culture. And they bring to mind a comment that National Geographic reporter Tom O’Neill recently made in an interview on why he sometimes chooses not to focus on a single character in his narrative stories:

My experience from reading stories about one character is that they’re compelling, but sometimes they feel depopulated if the story is dealing with bigger issues. Of course it’s the skill of the writer to bring in the bigger issues. But if you’re doing something in Indonesia, and you find one person, the reader can feel like they didn’t get a sense of the larger experience.

The danger of the single story in narrative journalism doesn’t just involve whether to follow one subject or three; it can also rear its head in the portrayal of an entire country. In his Narrative Matters essay from this year, novelist Alexander McCall Smith writes about wondering how much of the AIDS crisis to include in his The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which he knew might help frame readers’ impressions of Botswana and Africa:

For me, as a novelist whose books—not as part of any concerted plan on my part—have been viewed as an introduction to a previously not very well-known country, the issue has been this: what should I say about AIDS? What role should AIDS play in a fictional account of the life of a country in the throes of the illness? Is writing about Botswana without mentioning the AIDS pandemic like writing about London during the Blitz without mentioning the fact that bombs were going off?

Ultimately, of course, no novelist or reporter can assume responsibility for fully representing a people or culture through a single story or even a series. But Adiche’s words might recommend that we know enough history to be aware of what came before, and not to simply reinforce the story that’s already out there.

“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue,” says Adichie, “but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

You might not expect to find these stories in a research and policy journal.  But since 1999, Health Affairs has quietly published compelling medical narratives. These essays, first-person stories with links to health policy, run in the journal’s Narrative Matters department. The entire 10-year collection is available free online thanks to funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which has sponsored the project from the beginning.

The essays undergo a peer-review process that hones accuracy and clarity. Narrative Matters editor Ellen Ficklen says the stories are geared toward policymakers, in an effort to show the human consequences of legislative decisions.

But they have found a broader audience. NPR, which has aired commentaries excerpted from several essays, has entered into a collaboration to produce more pieces derived from Narrative Matters essays. Audio links for the completed commentaries can be found with the text versions on the journal’s Web site, along with some podcasts, which will soon be available through iTunes U.

The most popular essay on the site, Jerald Winakur’s “What Are We Going To Do with Dad?,” was featured three years ago as a Notable Narrative on the Nieman Narrative Digest site and additionally ran in the Outlook section of The Washington Post. The Post has also started using some Narrative Matters essays in its health section, which recently lost staff reporters.

The essays range from well-done to riveting, but none of those I read got bogged down in policy or medical jargon. How does such clear and simple narrative find a home in a policy journal? “When you write for policymakers,” Ficklen says, “the person who’s actually reading it is a staffer. They have to get the story fast, and they have to get it easily. And that’s writing for everybody.”