WTF IS A STORYTELLER?
What’s a story teller?
I’ve met six in the last half hour at D&AD. Every time I get introduced to someone and ask, “what do you do?” They say, “Oh, I’m a storyteller”. It’s like being a copywriter isn’t good enough these days. Being a screenwriter, you can’t say that anymore. Gone are the content creators, EP’s and directors? Everyone’s got to be either Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, or Enid fucking Blyton. I said to the last one, “what does a storyteller do?” She said, “tell stories.” And I said, “what’s a story?” And she didn’t know.
So… what is a story?
I don’t like doing long posts, so I’m going to keep this really short. If I wanted to keep it super short, I would say a story links emotions with data. That’s quite nice, isn’t it? However it’s a little bit more complex than that, but not a lot.
I think the formula for a story is:
attention + empathy + reward = story.
It’s attention that gets you in. That’s what solicits empathy. That’s resolved with a reward. That’s what a story is. The shortest story ever written was written by Ernest Hemingway. It’s six words long. Here it is…
FOR SALE
baby shoes, never worn.
‘For sale’ grabs your attention beautifully.
‘Baby shoes’, bang straight into empathy.
‘Never worn’, I wouldn’t call it a reward necessarily, but it’s certainly a resolution that makes sense of everything that’s come beforehand. What’s so powerful about this is that these stages change our brain chemistry. Attention gets cortisol flushing through your brain. That’s why when you see some something or someone, you find that attractive and you get that rush of excitement, that’s cortisol. Then with empathy, you get that sort of inner glow. When you relate with the character or you’ve been in their situation before. That produces an internal surge of oxytocin. Known as the love hormone, oxytocin the love hormone, when you hug or kiss someone oxytocin levels increase to produce to empathy generosity and orgasm.
Next up, the reward. That’s dopamine, the macdaddy of chemical neurotransmitters. Dopamine helps regulate movement, attentionlearning and emotional responses. It also enables us to not only to see rewards, but to take action to move toward them. It contributes to feelings of pleasures and satisfaction as part of the reward system. It can drive addiction, ambition, success and obsession. In a story, it’s when everything comes together. That’s when you feel like the mental work that you’ve done has been resolved.
That’s it. Those are the three stages that we go through very quickly in that beautiful six word story, “For sale. Baby shoes never worn.” That is storytelling in a nutshell. Send me a message or leave a below and let me know what else you’d like me to talk about.
