by Dan Stout
Kevin Spacey nicely summarizes the power of story in marketing communications, at an event for the Content Marketing Institute.
An engaging story delivered to the proper audience will catch fire, spreading far faster than any structured campaign. Story is how we naturally communicate, and the sooner marketing professionals learn that lesson, the better.
by Dan Stout
My post about Photovoltaic Roof Systems appears at the Needham Electric Supply website. It gives an interesting glance at the forces driving the shift in 'green thinking', and what that means for the contractors who install and maintain PV roofs.
by Dan Stout in Publications
All Are Welcome at High Road Gallery & Studios Artists’ Reception is now available to read on Columbus Underground.
It was a lot of fun meeting the artists who've come together to work in a collaborative space.
by Dan Stout in On Writing
The Hook is an essential element of storytelling...
Read Moreby Dan Stout in Publications
photo by Walker Evans for Columbus Underground
photo by Walker Evans for Columbus Underground
My write-up of the "It's Saturday Morning Somewhere" show at The Vanderelli Room is up at Columbus Underground.
Check it out!
by Dan Stout in On Writing
Okay not everything, but pretty damn close.
When I talk to my peers and clients about writing, I often use sports metaphors. As I do, I almost invariably get some strange looks. Apparently it’s a little unexpected for a writer to also be a sports fan.
This is a huge mistake: sports are theatre on a grand scale, and the way that they compel and involve their audience/fans holds valuable lessons for anyone who wants to similarly draw in their audience. Let’s look at the key elements with which sport hooks fans, and see how they appear both fiction and writing for business.
So come on, and we'll see how the same storytelling techniques that pack stadiums with paying fans can drive readers and customers to flock to you.
First off, your audience needs to know who to root for, and who to root against. On the field, there is no question about who the participants are and what they want. The audience wants a hero and a villain, also known as the protagonist and antagonist.
In business writing, the concept of the antagonist is often left to the side. Resist this temptation. No matter your product or service, there are antagonists in your story. For your customers, the antagonist is the problem they’re looking for you to solve. If you’re a plumber, it’s clogged drains or sinks that need to be relocated. If you sell RC cars, then it’s the unnecessary difficulty that consumers have finding quality RC cars at fair prices. Regardless of your industry, your company is the hero, while the customer’s problem is the villain.
For internal business writing, the antagonist is a little different. Internally the antagonist is often a competing company, but it may be an abstract concept like quality control issues or loss prevention. The trick is to understand the distinction between a concept like “customer complaints” and “complaining customers”. The need for an antagonist stays the same, but the implementation has to be handled skillfully.
For fiction writers, the protagonist and antagonist should be established relatively quickly. And while in fiction the true identity of the villain may be withheld for a time, the threat which that villain poses must be present almost from the initial pages of the story.
As humans, we crave stories about things that matter. Sports see higher ratings and more passion in the stands during the playoffs because we care more when there is more on the line.
In fiction, this can be saving the world, or coping with a terminal illness. “But Dan,” you say, “the stakes can be as high as we want. If the audience doesn’t care about the character, they won’t care about the stakes.” And you’d be right. After all, a crappy movie about saving the world is still a crappy movie.
The job of the storyteller is to force the audience to care about the stakes whether they want to or not. If the audience is invested, they will care what happens to the character. But when the stakes are high for that character, the audience will be riveted, rather than just engaged. Audiences desperately want these stories to matter; we just have to help them along.
Again, we can see a great example from the world of sport: fans crave high stakes so much they’ll manufacture them on their own, by betting on games. A game between two teams without a chance of being in the playoffs can bring a fan to the edge of her seat when she has cash riding on the outcome. And while fantasy football is beloved for many reasons, one of the biggest is that it makes otherwise uninteresting games matter to more fans.
For businesses, this sense of high stakes is so much easier to achieve. The customer has a problem, and wants a service or product to solve it. The nature of internal communication means the issues discussed directly impact the audience (your employees). Both customers and employees are already invested in the story, because it’s their issue that you’re going to solve. Since it’s their problem, the stakes are already high.
Sure, it can be fun for a fan to see your team run wild over the other guys, but blowout contest will never be called a “game for the ages”. Setbacks and reversals are the hallmarks of classic games that will be replayed and talked about for years to come.
For works of fiction, this is known as the try/fail cycle. It’s when things look darkest for our heroes, and nothing seems to be going right. It seems like the heroes are about to score, but they fumble on the one-yard line. Things continue to get worse, until the “Darkest Before Dawn” moment when the tide turns and we come to our resolution.
Setbacks and reversals can add a layer of depth to business writing, but it’s a technique that needs to be handled more delicately than in fiction. After all, Hamlet is a brilliant cornerstone of Western literature, but that doesn’t mean that you want to model your company’s story after it. (Spoiler: It doesn’t have a happy ending.)
You don’t want to give your customers a “Darkest Before Dawn” mindset, but you can let them know the obstacles you surpassed to get where you are. On your About Us section of your website, this could mean addressing the challenges your business faced during the recession. Or you might address that your customers may have faced obstacles -- in your sales material, consider mentioning some of the common ways people try to ‘fix’ their problems before turning to a professional. The goal is not to demonstrate potential failure, but to highlight the ways you’ll come to the rescue in the face of adversity.
One severely under-utilized strategy in customer management is sculpting the story of the customer’s experience. A simple transaction should be expected to move seamlessly, but in any sufficiently large or complex task, there are bound to be setbacks and problems. If the project storyline is told properly during the project, instead of headaches and inconveniences, the customer will recognize a series of hurdles cleared on the inevitable road to success. This can take a talented and customer-centric person on point for communications, but the payoff in terms of referrals and customer satisfaction is enormous.
While we’re looking at the storytelling aspect of sport, let’s also look at the media treatment of big games.
Watch the pre-game media blitz before a championship match. The network showing the game will normally play a pre-made pseudo-documentary that casts the competitors in one of three roles: the underdog, the humanitarian, or the super-human. Media analysts usually describe this as ‘The human-interest angle’. This to help solidify the audience’s investment, and especially to give casual viewers a team or player to root for.
The human-interest stories vary, of course, but generally speaking, the underdog has risen up from a humble background or played through injury. The humanitarian is active in the community services, while the super-human may be the best to ever play the game. These same archetypes are commonly seen in fiction and marketing material.
A fictional protagonist needs to have something to draw in the audience. The underdog, humanitarian, and super-human mentioned above, are not the only ways to get an audience to bond with your character, but they are time honored and effective. Whatever method you use, the establishment of some kind of bond between audience and protagonist is essential to capturing their imagination.
When telling your business story, look in the mirror. Does your company give donations and volunteer time back to the community? Are you a start-up disrupting the old guard? Or is your story about being the best in the world at what you do? Be honest with yourself and your audience. Give your current and potential clients a reason to root for you, and you’ll be surprised at the passion of their response.
After the last second has ticked off the clock, the analysts in the booth or back at the studio begin dissecting the game. What does this mean? What happened, and what happens next?
In fiction, this is known as the denouement. At the end of a novel or film, it gives a sense of completion, like the sense of fulfillment at the end of a championship season. But if there is room for a sequel, or if it’s at the end of a chapter, it also means enticing the audience, keeping them hungry for more. When done properly, storytelling is a series of hooks, pulling the audience along from one scene to another, with the end of the story leaving them wanting more. (Or eagerly looking forward to next season.)
For businesses, the hook means customer engagement, delivering on your promises, and earning repeat customers and referrals. Let your customers know what to expect as far as warranty and service. Make these elements of your business a selling point, rather than fine print, and you will hook them in as repeat customers.
There are plenty of examples of fiction and business writing that fly in the face of these guidelines I’ve listed. My point here is to show that humans in general respond to certain types of storytelling techniques. These stories run deep in our psyche, and appear not only in books, movies, and plays, but also in our sports and even in our junk mail. By understanding how these principles work, we can tell more effective stories in everything from science fiction to quarterly earnings reports.
by Dan Stout in On Writing
I recently did a stint as a slush reader for a small online magazine. For the uninitiated, 'slush' refers to the great pile of unsolicited manuscripts that pile up at any kind of publication. All writers -- especially of fiction -- will spend some time wallowing in the slush pile in the course of their career.
I had heard that reading slush is excellent training for writers, and I found this to be absolutely true. There were lots of things I leaned, some of which I'll break into a separate post. Going into the job, I expected to see some pretty bad stories, and hoped to find some gems. I came across both of those, but the thing that stuck with me most was the agonizing heartbreak of the stories that were just okay.
The Tor Slushpile. Photo by Cory Doctorow
The bad stories, the ones that didn't have a chance, didn't bother me. They were easy to identify, they were no-brainers to cross off the list, and frankly, there weren't that many of them. Even rarer were the great stories. They leapt off the page, and sizzled with life even as I read them. Those too were no-brainers, and quickly got passed along the editorial chain.
The vast majority of the submissions I saw were the stories that I found most frustrating: the ones that were almost good enough. The ones that need a little more effort, more revisions, more focus, or just.... something to put them over the edge. I didn't anticipate how many stories would come through the doors almost ready for prime time. I also didn't anticipate the way they would fill me with rage.
I wanted to grab hold of the authors and shake them, to yell, "Just write another draft, for Chissakes! Make it better! I'm on your side!"
But I couldn't do that. And even if I could, how many of them would listen?
I say this a writer who has produced my fair share of 'just okay'. And this is the greatest lesson I took from the slush pile, that as writers we can always push ourselves to get our work to the next plateau. Often we're so very close to a stronger piece when we give in to complacency, but it's that rallying effort that sets apart those pieces that truly stay with the audience. We owe ourselves that effort. But we also owe the readers and -- yes -- we owe it to the editors, too.
Slush readers aren't in it for the thrill of rejecting writers. They sure as hell aren't in it for the (non-existent) money. They do what they do because they love stories. They love to see words come together and be moved by them. They want to find great stories. And when we authors fail to deliver the goods, we break their hearts.
So revise. Re-write. Push your prose to the next level. Find a way to tell a story that will stay with your readers days, weeks, hell years after they've put it down.
by Dan Stout in Publications
I'm happy to say that my short story "The Bulldog Ant is Not a Team Player" is available to read for free over at the Plan B website. The audio podcast, featuring my story as read by Darusha Wehm, is available as well.
Please check it out and let me know if you like it! And if you get a chance, look over some of the other great stories available on Plan B, and consider picking up one of their anthologies-- they're a great market and deserve the support.
by Dan Stout
A week late and pilfered by squirrels, but our Ogre still makes his appearance...
This week got a late start, though we did get to carve out a fun Ogre. Foster Kid and I ran into a couple issues with the pumpkin, but we still had a good time.
Happy Ogre with a healthy number of horns.
Sad Ogre with stolen horn.
First, the walls were surprisingly thin, which made our plan to use the deformed shape of the pumpkin much harder to implement.
Secondly, our clever, clever plan to use pumpkin stems as the Ogre's horns was stymied when squirrels ran off with the fresher of the two stems.
Foster Kid helped scrape everything down and suggested the stones in the eyes. He picked out and placed the stones in the eye. One quartz and one "just a plain rock".
The Orange Ogre looks a bit better in person than the photos show. The horns really were a good idea. Too bad Rocket J. Squirrel made off with one.
Next pumpkin I think we'll go a little simpler so that we can wrap one up and feel like we really finished one off well.
by Dan Stout
We were a bit bored while watching a movie, so we took the enormous pumpkin from week 4 and carved a skull into its backside.
Our Foster-Kid-Who-Mustn't-Be-On-Social-Media did most of the work on the jaw/mouth, and laid out the overall pattern. Learned that we're okay to be more aggressive next time with the amount of material we remove, and we should remember to drop a candle in before we call it done-- it can be hard to predict how the pumpkin will take to the light. For example, the cracks in the temples didn't show up as much as we'd hoped.
Fun way to spend the evening and a good warm-up for this week's yet to be determined challenge.
PS: the weird marks by the left eye socket are the wounds from where a squirrel tried to make a snack of our pumpkin. We tried to incorporate them a bit into the design, though you couldn't tell in the lighted version.
Next step will be to make it look sharper in daylight!
