I have been whiling away the lockdown reading John D. MacDonald's "standalone" thrillers, paperback potboilers from the late 50's and early 60's.
It's no wonder Ian Fleming and French mystery readers loved John D. His prose is pungent and punchy, and his take on Americans' habits raises his work to the level of the "literary" writers of his day (think of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal).
A Key to the Suite, which earned John D the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere,“examines the ferment of a big-time convention," according to the cover of the original 1962 paperback.
Corporate hatchet man Floyd Hubbard has been sent by the home office to a trade show. His mission: to dig up dirt on a has-been sales manager, Jesse Mulaney. Management wants Mulaney gone and knows his obsolescence is on full display when he attends trade shows.
But Mulaney's ally, Fred Frick, knows Hubbard has it in for his buddy, and plans to turn to the tables.
Frick hires Cory Barlund, a classy prostitute, to woo the family man Hubbard. He instructs Cory to bed Hubbard, then “make some horribly slutty embarrassing scene" in front of his coworkers—a scene guaranteed to send Hubbard running back to headquarters.
The gorgeous Cory rather quickly seduces Hubbard, but then feels sorry for him and tells him about Frick’s scheme.
And that's when the fireworks start.
As a veteran of the industry, I'm captivated by John D's taut descriptions of trade shows and the goings-on behind the curtain—both the innocent and the vile.
You find yourself so on edge following the fates of the husbands, wives, whores and hoteliers who populate the pages of A Key to the Suite, you can hardly put it down.
This week the video Plandemic proved its box-office mojo.
Before YouTube deleted the video, over eight million people watched.
Plandemic stars discredited NIH researcher Dr. Judy Mikovits, who claims that two eugenicists, Mr. Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci, are plotting to take over the world.
Plandemic “recast a pusher of discredited pseudoscience as a whistle-blowing counterpoint to real expertise,” a political scientist told The New York Times.
As P.T. Barnum observed, Americans are suckers for self-proclaimed "truth-tellers" like Mikovits.
They fail to see these messiahs for what they are: grifters.
Since Plandemic was released Monday, Mikovits' $22 book Plague of Corruption has reached the very top of Amazon’s list of print best-sellers.
And before the video's release, she cashed in on a fundraising campaign—halted last Friday by GoFundMe—that backers of QAnon were publicizing.
"Conspiracy theorists are winning," writes Jeffey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. "America is losing its grip on enlightenment values and reality itself."
An accomplished con artist, in 1854 Bickley founded the Knights of the Golden Circle, a membership organization dedicated to expanding slavery by annexing Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean.
Membership dues were paid by checks made out to "President General of the American Legion," who was none other than George Bickley.
A retired candy manufacturer, in 1958 Welch founded the John Birch Society, a membership organization dedicated to combating a "furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians."
The society was in fact a pyramid scheme: members had not only to recruit other members, but buy an inventory of books they were supposed to sell to prospects.
A small-time thief, pimp, jailbird and drug-pusher, in 1968 Manson founded The Family, a California commune with over 100 members.
A year later, he persuaded a band of his stoned-out followers to murder everyone living in two Beverley Hills homes, because their owners had ripped him off in a drug deal.
A former disc jockey, alcoholic and drug addict, in 2002 Beck founded Mercury Radio Arts, a right-wing multi-media company. The company is named after Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on the Air.
Although he cites the muck-raking hero of Citizen Kane as the explanation, Beck in fact chose the company's name because he admires the way Welles hoodwinked all America with War of the Worlds.
The word grifter—meaning con artist, thief, swindler, or flim-flammer—dates to the early 20th century.
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
— David Ogilvy
Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, wants you to believe storytelling is hack work.
"I’m absolutely on board with storytelling as a content marketing device," he says. "But just because you understand story arcs and can riff on Joseph Campbell doesn’t mean you’re now Francis Ford Coppola or William Faulkner. Content marketing is a job, not an art form."
I suspect Baer doesn't know that Faulkner, with over a dozen dependents to support, wasn't above sports writing, travel writing, and movie scriptwriting (he's credited for, among other films, The Big Sleep).
But I get Baer's point: marketing's kind of storytelling ain't art-making; it's hack work.
"I see more and more content marketers straying from this perspective," Baer says, "thinking that they are newfangled hybrid players, straddling the line between fine art and commerce. They are not.
"The only job that content marketing has is to create behaviors among target audiences that benefit the business. Content must prod behavior, or it’s a useless exercise."
Sadly, that's the majority. If you're publishing content without telling stories, it’s time to reboot and retool. The silicon Watson can now publish content better than you can. But how do you tell a story? You don't patchwork data, as this tale does:
Acme will save 40% of its IT infrastructure costs over the next four years by migrating to a cloud solution. Acme is a small company without IT staff. Before our team migrated its users to the cloud, Acme used a single Domino server, which served up mail and one application, as well as a Traveler server for six mobile devices. Our team migrated all of the users from the on-premise Domino solution to a standalone cloud solution. This also included moving the six Traveler devices. Each user was reconfigured to connect to the cloud servers and provisioned with a clean mail file, as well as given a local copy of his or her old mail file to use as an archive. In addition, the one application (a vacation calendar) was moved to the cloud. In order to do this, we set up a user called vacations@acme.net and had all vacation requests sent to this account. Administrators were then able to go in and approve or deny them. In addition, all users can now view the vacation calendar to see who is in or out on a given day. With a small operation and no in-house IT support, Acme wanted to get back to “doing business” instead of “supporting business.” The cloud solution lowered its costs by eliminating the yearly licensing of Domino and decreasing the onsite footprint of servers. What should you do, instead?
Give us a character we can care about
Give us a drama with a narrative arc
Give us details that help us imagine what happened
Spare us unnecessary facts
Give us insights, new perspective, and a call to action
In short, give us a story:
One of America's most known and respected anvil makers, Acme is a small business whose profits were at risk due to recurring IT costs and poor vacation planning. Ironically, the company's IT needs were simple―email and a sharable vacation calendar―so simple, in fact, the company had no IT staff. But it did have two servers that needed babysitting, and which occupied an office that a key salesperson coveted; plus a $10,000 a year software license―and no sharable vacation calendar. Our team helped Acme move to the cloud. In doing so, we equipped every employee with email and gave everyone access to the vacation calendar, so employees can now plan their work around others' absences. As a result, Acme's two servers are history; the $10,000 annual license is history; a top salesperson now has the office she so desperately wanted, instead of a cubicle on the plant floor; and the company is running a lot smoother. Acme will cut IT costs by 40% in the next four years! Would you like to do that? Give us a call today. See the difference? It's elementary.
History's most famous storyteller, perhaps, is Jesus Christ, which would also make him history's most famous liar. Jesus told parables, allegorical stories that aim to teach. Among his best-known is "The Good Samaritan." The parable teaches neighborliness and goes like this: A man was traveling when he fell among robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and left him half dead. A priest who was also traveling the road saw the man and passed by him. So did a Levite. But when a Samaritan came upon the man, he took pity and stopped; he bound his wounds after pouring oil and wine on them, and set the man on his own beast and brought him to an inn. The next day, the Samaritan gave two denarii to the innkeeper and said, "Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back." Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?
Well-told, the parable can be a powerful way to put across a lesson, as contemporary storytellers like Malcolm Gladwell know. Perhaps every salesperson's favorite parable is "The Stingy Customer." It warns against false economy and goes like this:
A rep received a call from a prospect. He told her he wasn't going to hire her company, but instead pay three college students to build his company's shopping cart. He also told her he was nobody's fool: her fees were too extravagant. Four months later, the man called again and asked the rep to look over the students' code, which worried him. The rep saw the students had taken shortcuts, making the application sluggish and easy to hack. With little experience a hacker could steal all the customers' names, passwords, credit card numbers and CCIDs. The rep wished she'd told him four months earlier, "If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur." TED organizer Chris Anderson says the parable "can entertain, inform and inspire all in one." But he cautions parable-tellers to avoid preaching. "You don’t want to insult the intelligence of the audience by force-feeding exactly the conclusion they must draw from the tale you’ve told," Anderson says. "It’s important to test your material on someone who knows the audience to see if it lands with clarity, but without clumsiness."
How often do you encounter content posing an idea, but nothing else? An idea for a story isn't a story, says writing coach Larry Brooks, "unless you juice it with some combination of the Trifecta elements."
Each single element of the Trifecta "stands alone as a potential windfall;" all three combined are "pure gold." Intrigue. "A story is often a proposition, a puzzle, a problem and a paradox," Brooks says. Intrigue arises "when you (the reader) find yourself hooked because you have to know what happens… or whodunnit… or what the underlying answers are." But intrigue need not depend on drama or mystery. "Sometimes intrigue is delivered by the writing itself. A story without all that much depth or challenge can be a lot of fun, simply because the writer is funny. Or scary. Or poetic. Or brilliant on some level that lends the otherwise mundane a certain relevance and resonance." Emotional resonance. A story provokes a feeling, Brooks says. "It makes us cry. Laugh. It makes us angry. It frightens, it seduces, it confounds and compels. Every love story, every story about injustice and pain and children and reuniting with families and forgiveness—name your theme—is dipping into the well of emotional resonance for its power." Vicarious experience. A story takes for a ride we'll remember. The juice of a story "isn’t so much the dramatic question or the plucking of your heart strings as much as the ride itself," Brooks says. "The places you’ll go, the things you’ll see, the characters you’ll encounter, the things you’ll experience." A story gives you "an E-ticket on the Slice of Life attraction."
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
That the boundary between the real and the imagined is porous was proven this week when a well packaged web of lies provoked a gunman to shoot up my neighborhood pizzeria. Words are how we think, and how we think is "not just mildly interesting, but a matter of life and death," says historian Howard Zinn. "If those in charge of our society—politicians, generals, corporate executives and owners of press and television—can control our ideas, they will be secure in their power. If they dominate our thought, they will not need soldiers patrolling the streets." Words are powerful.
Handle them with care. "Outright media lies are easy to debunk," says Shoq. "It’s the lazy, fact-free, inside baseball analysis that’s killing us.”
There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.
— Josh Billings
"Delete" is the key to sharper storytelling—and maybe the cure for Content Shock. Or, as novelist Elmore Leonard put it, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." The web's awash with crap content, writing that confuses and bores and bogs down readers with too much "too much."
Prolix writing exhausts us; and writers who produce it, Leonard says, are "perpetrating hooptedoodle," a word coined by another novelist, John Steinbeck.
Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday (a sequel to Cannery Row) included a prologue that featured two characters speaking, Mack and Whitey No. 1. One night Mack lay back on his bed in the Palace Flop house and he said, “I ain’t never been satisfied with that book Cannery Row. I would of went about it different.” And after a while he rolled over and raised his head on his hand and he said, “I guess I’m just a critic. But if I ever come across the guy that wrote that book I could tell him a few things.” “Like what?” said Whitey No. 1. “Well,” said Mack, “like this here. Suppose there’s chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. That’s all right, as far as it goes, but I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about. Sometimes maybe I want to go back, and chapter five don’t mean nothing to me. If there was just a couple of words I’d know that was the chapter I wanted to go back to.” “Go on,” said Whitey No. 1. “Well, I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing—I kind of like to figure out what the guy’s thinking by what he says. I like some description too,” he went on. “I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it—but not too much of that.” “You sure are a critic,” said Whitey No. 2. “Mack, I never give you credit before. Is that all?” “No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story come out.”
Indeed, Sweet Thursday readers could encounter two fancy chapters inside, "Hooptedoodle 1" and "Hooptedoodle 2." They could skip them, if they wished. Storytelling won't advance your goals if you don't recognize the power of well-chosen words. Don't burden readers with hooptedoodle; leave long-form flights of fancy to the poets. There's power in your "Delete" key. Use it.
Killjoys will kvetch. "Someone who performed in Las Vegas the same day he became a Nobel Laureate doesn't belong to the club of Lewis, O'Neill, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Bellow and Morrison."
I refuse to accept this.
In his Banquet Speech, Faulkner said:
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
This just in: Employers want people who can write. The Wall Street Journal reports that a survey of 180 companies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found 4 of the top 5 skills valued by employers are "hallmarks of a traditional liberal-arts education." Clear-writing skill was ranked Number 3 (following leadership and teamwork). “It’s easier to hire people who can write—and teach them how to read financial statements—rather than hire accountants in hopes of teaching them to be strong writers,” head recruiter for the investment firm Morningstar told The Wall Street Journal. One Morningstar employee—the firm's expert on more than a dozen well-known equity-strategy funds—was a philosophy and classics major who earned a PhD in theology. Want to improve your job or promotion prospects? Go back to school and study philosophy (expensive), or read Writing Tools and The Art and Craft of Feature Writing(cheap). HAT TIP: Thanks to Kevin Daum for informing me of NACE's survey.
Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.
Robert McKee
Henning Mankell, the creator of Wallander, said his crime novels—like your company's products—took root in an idea.
Returning to his native Sweden from a stay in Africa in the spring of 1990, Mankell noticed racism had taken a stranglehold on the nation. "It soon dawned on me that the natural path to follow was to write a crime novel," Mankell said. "This was obvious because in my world racist acts are criminal outrages."
Writers like Mankell understand: while ideas alone don't compel audiences, stories do. But what makes a story a story? How do you tell one?
You have to find a hero. Forget about Citizens United v. FEC. Corporations aren't people. Your story can't be about your damn company. It has to offer us a flesh-and-blood hero who struggles to overcome a cruel world. Without Wallendar, we don't care.
You have to create suspense. Page-turners, plays, movies and TV shows grip audiences because of suspense. The setup teases and you want to know, What happens next? No tease, no story. Right away, you have to put Wallander in a mysterious jam.
You have to appeal to emotions. Most facts are unmemorable. And most people aren't fact-minded. Stories tug at emotions. Fear. Uncertainty. Confusion. Ambition. Greed. Admiration. Wonder. The soft stuff.
You have to personify. An idea like "racism" is intangible, difficult to understand, and not especially gripping. Not so Wallander combatting victimizers of people on the margins. Convert ideas into characters and storylines.
You have to paint pictures. "Show, don't tell." Lightly sketch each scenario as your story unfolds and let your audience connect the dots. Don't feel compelled to lecture. You're a storyteller, not a preacher or teacher.
You have to find a niche. Long-term success comes when you find a niche you can own. Wallander tapped the popular niche known as "Nordic Noir." Every novel in Mankell's series is propelled by a backdrop where mean streets are walked by morose Swedes who themselves are neither mean, nor tarnished, nor afraid. You can tell stories—endlessly—when you find a niche that appeals to your audience.
How does storytelling (new school) differ from arguing (old school)? Let's look back—to 350 BC. In Poetics, Aristotle taught that stories have three acts:
1. An inciting moment 2. A climactic struggle, and 3. A resolution. In Rhetoric, he taught that arguments have two:
1. The statement
2. The proof.
Three acts versus two. That's the difference. While marketers crow on and on about storytelling, most default to arguing. Benefit-laden bullets are safer than heroes in a bind.
"Eighty to 90 percent of all commercials are not story-based; they are premise-based," says brand consultant Richard Krevolin in The Hook. "There is a much greater comfort level wth TV spots that convey specific product benefits to the consumer and do not tell stories."
Krevolin cites Tabasco's TV spot "Mosquito" as a case in point. It dramatizes the statement Tabasco wants you to remember: its sauce is hot.
But "Mosquito" isn't storytelling. All we see is a guy who relishes eating a meal doused with hot, hot, hot sauce. Cute, but not buzz-worthy. "If we rewrote the spot so that at the beginning we see that he is plagued by mosquitos biting him and terrorizing him all day and night, we would feel for him and understand his dilemma," Krevolinsays. "Then, when he fails to defeat the mosquitos with conventional means and decides to use Tobasco sauce instead, we would cheer for him when he achieves victory." Storytelling always takes three acts.
As a marketing strategy, storytelling was born in a bathtub.
The year was 1951. Stories couldn't move merchandise, the Madison Avenue experts agreed. Then an obscure shirtmaker from Maine, Hathaway, approached an equally obscure ad man, David Ogilvy, with only $30,000 to spend. To win him over, the company's president pledged never to fire Ogilvy or change one of his ads. Ogilvy had been mulling the notion that "story appeal" could sell products, and decided to test the theory with his new client's ads. He was sitting in his bathtub when the image of the Hathaway Man came to him. Ogilvy appeared in the office the next day and instructed his art director to find a model who resembled novelist William Faulkner, who'd recently won a Nobel Prize, for the photo shoot. En route to the shoot, Ogilvy bought a 50-cent eyepatch at a Manhattan drugstore. He handed the eyepatch to the photographer and said, "Humor me." Ogilvy's copy assured readers Hathaway shirts—like the men who wore them—were "in a class by themselves." "You will get a great deal of quiet satisfaction out of wearing shirts which are in such impeccable taste." Ogilvy's first ad in the series ran in The New Yorker. Within a week, every Hathaway shirt in Manhattan was sold. "We have never seen anything just like it," said the magazine's ad manager. The Hathaway Man soon catapulted the company to the top-ranking shirtmaker in the world—and storytelling to the top drawer in every marketers' toolchest.
Story arcs deliver "the pleasure of pity," said the 18th century playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller.
We're led to pity when we learn about other people's suffering. But for the listener to feel pity, the storyteller must:
Provide vivid details.Because suffering told can't equal suffering witnessed, to provoke pity the storyteller's details must be vivid.
Make the characters accessible. To feel pity, the listener must experience a resemblance between herself and the sufferer, Schiller says. "Where this resemblance is lacking, pity is impossible."
Provide tons of details. To work, the story must be complete, Schiller says. No important detail can be left out. "We must have unrolled before us, without a single link omitted, the whole chain of determinations."
Draw the story out. The suffering must be durable. The listener wants to flee suffering, but shouldn't be allowed to do so too soon.
Storytelling isn't designed to teach, Schiller says. That's what history lessons are for. Storytelling is meant "to move us, and to charm our souls."
Make the audience feel pity for a character. Then make the audience experience increasing amounts of fear for the character, as you put the character through increasingly worse circumstances. Finally, release the audience from the tension of anticipating the terrible things that are going to happen to that character, and the audience feels great.
Don't cut it on the job market? Now you can go back to school. Tuition free. H'University, brainchild of razor manufacturer Harry's, gives students the chance to "learn real-world skills from world-class entrepreneurs, and apply to get hired at top companies." Personifying value, the microsite proves again content marketing isn't branding. Content marketers like Harry's realize customers want brands to help them become better citizens, not just better shoppers. That realization puts content marketers a cut above competitors.
A race is on to deliver "the experience stack," says Mike Wadhera in TechCrunch. Mobility has fundamentally changed computing, he says. While desktop computing was all about your timeline-based profile (think Facebook), mobile computing is about in-the-moment self-expression (think Snapchat). With the onrush of mobility, "You are not a profile. You are simply you." We've all become, in effect, amateur auteurs. "The stories we tell each other now begin and end visually, making the narrative more literal than ever," Wadhera says. Providers are racing to monopolize mobility by building a pile of immersive toys he calls the experience stack (pictured here).
"The full stack is in service of capturing and communicating real-world moments," Wadhera says. "Reality is its foundation. As you move up, the layers transition from physical to logical. At the top is the application layer made up of products like Snapchat Live and Periscope." Tomorrow’s toys will boggle our storyteller's brains, Wadhera says. "Our online and offline identities are converging, the stories we tell each other now start and end visually and investments at every layer of a new stack are accelerating the development of experience-driven products. Taken together, these trends have cracked open the door for a new golden age of technology."
Amazon founder and newspaper owner Jeff Bezos' thumbprint continues to appear in the online version of The Washington Post.
Having trouble finishing long articles? You can now use a gadget to enter your email address at any point. The Post will send a URL that lets you pick it up later where you left off.
We can expect more Kindle-like add-ons to appear in The Post, as Bezos dabbles deeper in journalism.
"The transformation may not be apparent on the surface, but the Internet billionaire has ripped up and revamped the technology underpinnings at The Post since buying the storied daily in 2013, while investing in the newsroom with more journalists, video offerings and tools for digital storytelling," AFP reported in January.
Bezos' investments might be paying off.
Last December, readership of The Post's website overtook that of The New York Times.
An enthymeme, first described by Aristotle in Rhetoric is an incomplete logical construct. It's based on an unspoken premise shared between a speaker and her audience.
Here's a familiar enthymeme:
"Make America Great Again."
The unspoken shared premise:
"America used to be great."
An enthymeme's power comes not from what's spoken, but what's unspoken, Aristotle says. When a premise is left unspoken, the audience supplies it, completing the circle.
So, instead of the speaker persuading us, we persuade ourselves.
For Aristotle, self-persuasion is especially effective because we take pleasure in participating in the exchange. We're tickled with our ability to connect the dots—to "get it" without handholding.
But self-persuasion is also self-absorption, Aristotle warns.
An enthymeme helps us see a resemblance—a likeness—and we like most what is like ourselves. "All are more or less lovers of themselves," Aristotle says.
The effective speaker exploits this self-love.
She knows that—when the audience completes the circle—it chooses to hear what it wants to hear.
"If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea," impresarios say.
B2B marketers would do themselves a favor scribbling more (or less) on the backs of calling cards.
In Chief Content Officer,"content tilt" champion Joe Pulizzi praises PricewaterhouseCoopers' newsletter series 10 Minutes ("content tilt" equates to a brand's point of difference). As its name implies, the series promises readers 10-minute mastery. And, as you'd expect, the topics are thorny: audits, cyber-security, data privacy, derivatives and eco-efficiency. Pulizzi calls the newsletter series an example of content tilt "genius."
"PwC understands its audience members need intelligent, mission-critical information on complex business topics, but they don't have time for long-form content. The newsletter is designed to aid skimming, and is alway short and to the point." PwC gets B2B content tilt. Leave out the boring parts.
