Misconception time!!
This is the start of a four-part series on the MOST COMMON STORYTELLING MISCONCEPTIONS I encounter in my work.
The first? “Keep it light.”
If you want to tell a good story, you absolutely should not keep it light.
Here’s an excerpt from a Harvard Business Review interview with screenwriting instructor and storytelling expert Robert McKee:
“When people ask me to help them turn their presentations into stories, I begin by asking questions. I kind of psychoanalyze their companies, and amazing dramas pour out. But most companies and executives sweep the dirty laundry, the difficulties, the antagonists, and the struggle under the carpet. They prefer to present a rosy—and boring—picture to the world. But as a storyteller, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you’ve overcome them. When you tell the story of your struggles against real antagonists, your audience sees you as an exciting, dynamic person.”
McKee goes on to say that an overly rosy picture will feel inauthentic, whereas including the fears, struggles, and difficult realities at the heart of any worthwhile endeavor will make a story truly inspiring to colleagues, customers, investors, and more. We like long odds.
This is why all those Silicon Valley stories of sleeping on couches and working out of garages and getting fired from the start-up you founded live so prominently in our collective consciousness. The scrappy underdog is a huge part of our national mythos in the United States. (Whether that mythos is ultimately more fiction than fact is another question.)
So, if audiences love an underdog, and if––as McKee says––it’s the conflict and the heavy stuff that makes stories work, why do people still prefer to keep things light?
The problem is, to tell a good story with real conflict, you’ve got to get vulnerable. You’ve got to talk about the times you didn’t think you’d make it. The obstacles you faced along the way. The fiscal years that looked pretty bleak. And understandably, this freaks a lot of people out. In my experience, it’s often people who have seen great success in their careers––executives, founders, and other leaders––who are mostly likely to balk at sharing the difficult times they or their organization have been through.
Some responses I’ve gotten from clients include:
People don’t want all that doom and gloom!
Life is already bleak enough; why highlight the bad stuff?
I don’t want them to know I struggled so much.
Talking about this feels self-referential.
Will anyone really care?
I totally understand these concerns. We’re trained to highlight the good stuff in our job applications, our social media profiles, and our reports to the board. And as marketers, we’re also trained to focus on the value for the audience, rather than crafting a narrative about ourselves or about the organization we represent.
So, to be told that most of a story should focus on the struggle instead of the success? And that it might make sense for a story to highlight the history of your organization, or your own path as a leader?
It does feel counterintuitive. But hear me out.
Think about superhero films. These are *literal* heroes…and their stories are all struggle, all the time. At every narrative juncture where things are going more or less OK for the protagonist, we know trouble is just around the corner. Right until the very end.
Here’s one example. (Spoilers for Thor: Ragnarok ahead.)
At the beginning of the film, Thor finally gets his hands on a relic he’s been searching for. Great, right? But when he returns to Asgard with this bounty, everything’s in disarray. So Thor sets out for Earth to find Odin and make things right. He does succeed in finding Odin...but then Odin promptly dies and, to make things worse, Thor’s estranged, murderous sister Hela shows up to gloat about it. The two skirmish. Hela destroys Thor’s hammer, and in the battle’s fallout, Thor ends up on a...let’s say colorful planet, where he’s kidnapped and sold as a gladiator. As prep for the tournament, the locals even cut off his gorgeous Thor locks.
Yet despite all this adversity, fatherless, hammerless, long-golden-hair-less Thor keeps trying to get back to Asgard and save his people. Rather than making him look weak, all this struggle makes him look stronger. The conflict is the interesting part, and why we root for Thor along the way.
Editors and creative writing instructors say “show don’t tell” so often, it’s kind of a cliché at this point. But there’s a reason this advice bears repeating. And when you craft them right, this is exactly what stories achieve. You don’t need to tell your audience how awesome this hero/leader/product/organization is. Because you’ve already shown them.
The thing is, we’ve been marketed to our whole lives. So if someone tells us, hey, this product is awesome and this organization is awesome, we’re immediately going to think––okay, but where’s the proof?
And that’s where storytelling comes in. Taika Waititi didn’t need to tell us how strong and persistent and dedicated to Asgard Thor was. Instead, he showed Thor in action, working against very long odds to get back to his home planet and save the day.
When you’re willing to share your own struggles, or your organization’s, you’ll achieve the same effect. You don’t have to tell the audience how great you are, or how much money you’ll save them, or why you’re absolutely the best person for this very cool gig. You can instead show, through a story, how you faced down difficult times to get to where you are today––and make the audience decide to root for you, all on their own.
Happy storytelling!
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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