170. Advice from Nontraditional Storytellers Part 1

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: The ability to tell effective stories can fundamentally change not just your communication, but the relationships that you have. 

[00:00:10] My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. 

[00:00:20] We have something very special for you, a two part series on unconventional, non traditional storytellers who teach us the essence of effective storytelling. You'll be hearing a series of conversations that help us understand the ingredients to a successful storytelling recipe. 

[00:00:44] I want to let you in on a little secret. When you write a book to help other people, you actually end up helping yourself more. When I wrote my book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, I was amazed to learn so much about storytelling. And the thing that was further surprising is I learned the most from people who weren't storytellers. They simply use storytelling in their everyday jobs. And this got me thinking, wouldn't it be great to learn from the expertise and best practices from these unconventional storytellers? We'll be talking to a magician, a cartoonist, a social media influencer, a lawyer, and even a comedian. Taken together, we will glean insights that can make all of us more effective storytellers. We plan to do this in two episodes. 

[00:01:38] The first of our episodes is going to focus on structure. How do we design and frame our messages? And the second part will be focused on the delivery component. How do we make them engaging and interesting and relevant for our audiences? 

[00:01:53] To start, we're going to take ourselves into the courtroom. We're going to meet Neel Chatterjee. Neel is a high technology litigator. His job is to take very complex ideas and make them accessible stories that the jury can understand and see his version of the truth. Let's hear how Neel does this. 

[00:02:15] Neel Chatterjee: Steve Martin did a presentation on what it takes to be a good stand up comedian. And he said when someone walks out in front of an audience and says, how's everyone doing today? That's a missed opportunity. It's a missed opportunity because that is your first moment to set a theme and a concept on whatever your onstage presence is. And the same thing applies in storytelling. With my teams I always say we have to figure out the two to three line statement on, this is a case about. Because, you know, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, right? That famous line sets a theme of what the whole storyline of the book is going to be about. Same thing happens when you're storytelling in the type of work that I do. 

[00:03:07] People need context to understand the details that they're going to learn within the story. And so signposting is important. A framework of where you are in the story is important. That's not in every kind of storytelling, but I will typically have outlines of, here's where we're going to go. We're going to learn about the parties. We're going to learn about the facts and then we're going to learn about where things went wrong. And then I'm going to tell you what my ask is at the end. For the type of work that I do, that's particularly important. 'Cause it's a lot of hard to digest, sometimes technical information and people get impatient.

[00:03:44] So if they know where you are in the outline, they know how long they have to manage their attention. And that's like a really important thing to do when you're talking to someone, you know, for forty-five minutes or an hour on something they didn't even know they were going to hear about earlier in the day. You know, I'll come up with an outline and a framework, and then sometimes I'll realize that when I'm, when I come up with that outline and framework, I get pride of authorship, but I don't want to change it, but it's just not working. So I have to completely restructure it. 

[00:04:13] What I typically do is I'll take all of the evidence that I might want to give to a jury, and then I put it into some sort of a framework and outline. And then I start paring out as much as I can that I consider noise, things that people might be distracting. And then I'll say, why do I feel uncomfortable about something I'm saying here? And I'll say, okay, maybe I need to address it or need to remove it? 

[00:04:33] Matt Abrahams: When I talk about story, I talk a lot about the premise and the promise. The premise is the situation, the context. And the promise is the commitment you're making to those who are going on the journey with you as you tell your story. And it's clear to me that Neel thinks about the premise and the promise. And when he talks about it being a puzzle, to me, that's really reinforcing the notion that a story is nothing more than just a logical connection of ideas. But they have to be logical for the audience. And Neel really takes his audience seriously, so much so that he works in front of practice juries to see how his ideas resonate.

[00:05:12] It's all about the information, but it's also about the emotion. I like to say that all effective communication stories included must have a goal. What do we want the audience to know? How do we want them to feel? And what do we want them to do? And Neel is absolutely focused on that. And that's what's helping him be effective. And I think it can help all of us be effective. 

[00:05:32] This notion of feeling and framing is critical to effective storytelling. And we can hear that from our next speaker. And I won't say very much about her because one of her big lessons is being concise. Let's listen to Hilary Price, a newspaper cartoonist and author of the syndicated strip Rhymes with Orange.

[00:05:52] Hilary Price: So for my creative process, I tend to come up with the joke first, and then I audition the characters. Is this most effectively done by having two dogs talking to each other, by having a dog talk to a person, a person talk to a dog? Maybe it should be some kind of flow chart or something like that. What is the best way to get the gag across? You know what, I'll walk you through what's going to be my Easter gag, right?

[00:06:21] Matt Abrahams: Great. 

[00:06:22] Hilary Price: So I started out and I was talking with a friend and we were brainstorming ideas or what are the kind of cliches of Easter that are appropriate for a newspaper? So you know, the bunny, right? And then we were thinking, well, where does this bunny exist outside of Easter? And we came up with the idea of, you know, the magician. What if you took the concept of, you've got a magician, and you've got a bunny, and the bunny is turning to the magician and saying, I told you I needed this Sunday off. 

[00:06:58] So then, in order for this to work, you need to have some clues that this is A, Easter. You don't want to say it's Easter, because anybody reading the newspaper on that day is going to know Easter, right? And so I had the bunny, the prop I added was the bunny holding a basket, right? That's all I needed to say Easter. And then it never says, Majesto the Magnificent in the drawing, because if you see a man and a cape and a mustache and there's like a dove and some rings or something, some magic rings, then you, the reader, already bring to the experience where we are.

[00:07:41] And so then it was a matter of, I ended up with, I told you I needed this Sunday off. But it started with before that, like, I told you this was my side hustle. So, the goal in cartooning is you want to simplify and amplify. Those are the two things. And also, not spoon feed your reader. Because the joy of a cartoon, it's interactive. It's going from not getting it, to getting it. 

[00:08:10] You never want to start a story with, you know, first I was born, and then. Too much introduction is not necessary. You want to start at the action moment, or right before the action moment. The way that this translates in, for me, is that I have a single panel to do this. So I can't futz around giving too much information that is unnecessary. And so, with humor, you either want to show an event right before it happens. Or right after it happens. So, if I were going to throw a glass of water at you, what is funnier? Me about to throw the glass of water, or the act of it? Well, you want to give the audience the joy of imagining it. As you're showing it versus telling it, besides water is too hard to draw. 

[00:09:14] Matt Abrahams: Right. There's a practicality to it. So what I'm hearing you say, which is really important for, I think all of us to think about is where do you start? And some of us start too early. 

[00:09:23] Hilary Price: Yes.

[00:09:23] Matt Abrahams: And with too much. 

[00:09:25] Hilary Price: Yes. 

[00:09:25] Matt Abrahams: And we have to think, I love this idea of what's the action moment. 

[00:09:28] Hilary Price: Right.

[00:09:28] Matt Abrahams: I want to ask you, because of all the guests we're talking to, for this mini series, you're the only one that uses any visual elements, at all. But my question for you is how important is the visual element and where does the visual element come in your process? 

[00:09:44] Hilary Price: The first question in creating a joke is taking two disparate ideas and going, what if? What is the connection between these two things? So it is a game that I often play in order to generate gags. I call it the justification game. Trying to decide how two different things might make sense, right? In a way that disrupts the cliches. And I would say that the visual comes later. Like the visual is the last thing that happens. But even that is an iterative process, so I might draw something, and then redraw it, and redraw it type of thing, in order to cut elements out in the same way that I'm cutting words out of the speech bubble. I'm not overcomplicating the drawing because I only want to put the elements that are important. If they're decorative, I don't want them there because I'm going to tell my audience if I've drawn it, then my audience knows it's a clue.

[00:10:49] I've got two things to say in terms of crafting, I would say a speech or a gag. It's called a punchline for a reason. You want to end on the strongest word in a cartoon, right? So the reader has to get to it, then there's the boom. And then your job as a cartoonist is not to have another character comment on the punchline. That is the reader's job, that's the listener's job. You don't like say "and here you laugh," right?

[00:11:28] Matt Abrahams: Right. So Hilary really thinks about how she frames her comics, literally in one frame. And she also thinks about the feeling that she wants people to have as they together with her, in viewing what she's created, come to a mutual understanding. She puts a tremendous amount of thought into where she finds her inspiration for the stories she tells.

[00:11:55] But what she teaches us in all good storytelling, both professionally and personally, I think, is less is more. What's the critical few? And she invites those reading her comic strip, just like we invite those listening or reading to our stories, to have a shared experience. She is bringing us to an experience. Often it's funny, many times thought provoking, and that's what we want. When you are crafting story, you are actually inviting the person who is receiving the story to be part of it with you. And she highlights some of the key ideas, I think, that help us do that. 

[00:12:31] It's really interesting to step back and think about the advice that both Neel and Hilary share with us. It's all about the intentionality of the design of the story. It's how you structure it. It's what you know about your audience. It's about being concise and clear. All of those elements are elements that not only can help us be better storytellers, but just better communicators. And this leads us very nicely into what our second episode will be covering, which is really about how do you engage an audience.

[00:13:01] Stay tuned for episode two of our unconventional, non-traditional storytellers.

[00:13:18] Thank you for listening to this Think Fast Talk Smart mini series. This episode was produced by Jim Colgan, Jenny Luna, and me, Matt Abrahams. Mix engineering by Mumble Media. Special thanks to Don Fraser of the Stanford Storytelling Project. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more about storytelling, please check out episode 168 with Matthew Dicks and episode 50 with Paula Moya.

[00:13:42] You can hear complete episodes with some of our guests in this miniseries through our premium offering at fastersmarter.io/premium. Find more of our episodes on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.