The 10 Principles of Storytelling

I recently finished a great little book called How to tell your story so the world listens by Bobette Buster.

It’s a short, yet affecting book, looking at how we can all tell our stories better, and Bobette reduces the art of storytelling to 10 basic principles. Here are a few of them below…

1. Tell your story as If you’re telling it to a friend.

I think this is so important. Writing something so that it can be easily understood is a fundamental. You can use all the long words you like, but if your audience doesn’t get the message, you’ve failed.

2. Set the GPS

Even sci-fi has an element of reality and sets its story in a relevant context. Think time, place and context

4. Juxtapose

You want to wake your audience up and keep them interested, so putting two opposing ideas next to each other will hopefully achieve that.

5. Gleaming detail

Pick up a copy of a real-life stories magazine, such as Chat, and pay close attention to the writing. They’ll always include something small that really stands out. Like the song that was playing at a crucial moment, an item of clothing, or a a particular smell. It’s that detail that truly captures the essence of a story.

7. Be vulnerable: dare to share the emotion of your story

This comes back to the belief angle. Readers have to tap into your story and that means how you feel. Don’t be scared to ‘fess up.

10. Let go

Don’t try to overthink. If you allow your story to end where it feels it should, you’re almost definitely right. Let your audience do some thinking and wondering – it’ll make them remember your story even more.

It’s a great book and it certainly got me thinking. Definitely worth getting hold of.

When ‘tone of voice’ goes wrong

Among the many ‘buzzphrases’ that you hear in content circles, ‘tone of voice’ comes near the top. (Hell, I even wrote a post about it earlier in 2013)

And if you take a straw poll of most, big, public-facing organisations, the way they want to seen (which is reflected in their tone of voice) usually includes the words ‘friendly’, ‘warm’, ‘chatty’.

Unfortunately, what a lot of the very same companies fail to take into account is the situation in which they communicate with their customers.

Lack of empathy

Virgin Media's poor tone of voiceTake the social media complaint, for example. We awoke this morning to discover we had no broadband connection at home…

A phone call to Virgin Media casually told us (via a recorded message) they were carrying out work to improve our service.

Leaving aside the fact they hadn’t pre-warned us about this, or the merits of carrying out standard improvements (not emergency, I hasten to add) first thing on Monday morning, my homeworking, self-employed partner took to Twitter to bemoan Virgin’s poor performance.

Within a short time, she received a return tweet delivered in that ‘chatty’ tone I mentioned earlier (see photo above right).

In case you can’t read it, it says: “Hi, now and then we need a little time to make the services better for the future. noon is just around the corner!”

What the (I’m sure very nice) customer service person on social media failed to pick up on is that a genuine complaint doesn’t warrant a patronising, ‘chirpy’ response.

A half-day broadband downtime is a big deal if you’re self employed and rely on fast response.

In this instance, the complaint requires an apology that attempts to sound sincere and at least tries to empathise with the complainant.

I’m sure this was just (or can be passed off as) an idle, one-off error of judgement, but the push for companies to ‘do an innocent’ and pretend they’re your friend when they talk to you will lead to many more poor exchanges with customers.

Guidelines required

This is why tone of voice guidelines that encompass differing scenarios are vital, not just a general 3-paragraph.

It’s really important to make sure you know how a brand will communicate with its audience in as many situations as possible, both difficult and easy. In other words, not just the fluffy, fun stuff.

A great (and probably over-used) example of how to do it is Mailchimp, who have even published their tone and voice (note the ‘and’) on a separate site.

Brands may not need to go to that length, but it’s a great benchmark to start with.

Why the Breaking Bad finale broke new ground for ‘event TV’ (spoiler free)

Breaking BadAlong with tens of thousands of people in the UK, I watched the finale of Breaking Bad on Monday.

Without spoiling anything for those still working their way through earlier series, I can say that it was unanimously ackowledged to be a thoroughly satisfying ending for a popular and critically-acclaimed show.

But – in the UK at least – what made this different was how and when people watched the finale.

You see, unlike amc’s 8pm timeslot in the US, in Britain, we chose exactly when we watched it because we were using Netflix.

A new watercooler moment

Although it was shown on a cable TV network in America, you had to watch the final series in the UK via the web.

Netflix made the episode available to watch at 9am on Monday morning – and I have some friends who indulged before lunch – allowing anyone to watch it whenever they wanted.

Breaking Bad is groundbreaking because we didn’t all sit down and watch it at 9pm together, which historically was how we all experienced the end of a TV show.

In this instance, everyone made their own personal choice of starting time: be it 8.01pm, 8.46pm, 9.22pm… you get my drift. And this is the radical change that has been brought about by the way we now consume TV.

Remember Sky Plus?

The arrival of Sky Plus in the UK back in 2002 allowed us to do radical things. Quite aside from recording programmes on 2 different channels, while you watched a 3rd, you could pause live TV, set up instant series links and choose to start watching something from the beginning even before it had finished.

This was the beginning of what we now know as ‘timeshifting’ – watching TV at a time of one’s own choosing, also allowing you to skip the ad breaks.

This has become so endemic that BARB statistics from 2011 suggested that around 15% of viewing was timeshifted – a figure that is bound to have increased since.

The arrival of Netflix has moved things on again. Imagine telling someone 10 years ago, you were going to watch the most talked-about TV show “on Netflix, through your Wii”. Utter gobbledy-gook to someone in 2003, yet it emphasises how much change has occurred in a short space of time.