The 90-minute constraint

The default question for any workshop is "how much time do we have?" The default answer is "as much as we can get."

Narrative by Design inverts this. The 90-minute window is a design choice, not a constraint to work around.

What 90 minutes does:

• Forces compression. You cannot write a full personal narrative in 90 minutes. So you have to compress one.
• Eliminates the warm-up. There is no time to gradually arrive at the work. The work starts.
• Demands a witness. A 90-minute solo workshop is just journaling. The format requires someone else in the room, which is what makes the compression honest.
• Makes failure cheap. You can do another 90-minute session next term. The exercise does not have to be the moment.

What 90 minutes does not do: produce a finished personal story, settle anything, or replace longer reflection work. None of those are the goal.

The discipline of the format: when students ask "can we have more time?" the answer is no. More time would change what the exercise produces, narrative compression needs the constraint; with more time it becomes narrative expansion, which is a different exercise entirely.

90 minutes is not magic. 60 might work. 120 probably doesn't. The point is not the exact number; it's that the constraint is doing pedagogical work. Compression-as-method (see the earlier note) requires a forcing function. Time is the forcing function NBD uses.

Open thread. Most pedagogy decisions about time get made for scheduling reasons. They should get made for learning reasons. The two often conflict. When they do, defend the learning reason if you can. The lab has lost this defense often enough to know it is worth fighting.