170. Advice from Nontraditional Storytellers Part 1
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Hi, matt here. What kind of one panel cartoonist, a magician and a lawyer teach us about storytelling? The answer quite a lot.

With our five year university coming up in january, we have begun experimenting with new ways to bring you practical and tactical communication and career advice and guidance. This week, we're debug ing at two part mini series on storytelling from non traditional storytellers. Not only does this mini series provide super useful information, but we try out a new format too. As an added bonus, are thinking talk smart premium supporters get access to full interviews from some of our many series guests. Stay tuned for more exciting content in the coming weeks and months.

The ability to tell effective stories can fundamentally change not just your communication, but the relationships that you have. My name is that braham, and I teach strategic communication at stanford graduates of business. Welcome to think talk smart. The podcast we have something very special for you, a two part series on unconventional, non traditional storytellers who teach us the essence of effective story telling. You'll be hearing a series of conversations that help us understand the ingredients to a successful storytelling recipe.

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I want to let you win 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, thin faster, talk smarter, I was amazed to learn so much about storytelling.

And the thing that was further surprising as I learned the most from people who weren't storytellers, they simply use story telling 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 story? Tell will be talking to a magician, a cartoonist, a social media influence, or a lawyer and even a comedian.

Taken together, we will clean insights that can make all of us more effective storytellers. We plan to do this in two episodes. 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 is to start, we're going to take ourselves into the courtroom.

We're going to meet neal chatelet. Neil 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 honey el does this. Steve Martin .

did A 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 on stage presence is.

And the same thing applies in storytelling with my teams. I always say we we have to figure out the two to three line statement on this is a case about because IT was the best of times. That was the worst of times, right?

That famous line sets a theme of what the whole story line of the book is GTA be about. Same thing happens when you're story telling in the type of work that I do. People need context to understand the details that they're going to going to learn within the story.

And so sign posting 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 onto go. We're going to learn about the parties. We're gona learn about the facts and then we're going to learn about where things went wrong.

One of that i've going to tell you what I ask is at the end, for the type work that I do, that's particularly important because it's a lot of hard to digest, sometimes technical information and people get impatient. 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 ness.

I want, you know, for forty five minutes or hour on something they didn't know they're going to hear about earlier at the day. You know, i'll come up with an outline and a framework and then sometimes i'll realized that 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. 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 pairing 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 I need to remove IT.

When I talk about the story, I talk a lot about the premise and the promise, the premises, the situation, the context and the promises, 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 neil thinks about the promise and the promise, and when he talks about IT being a puzzle, to me, that's really reinforcing the notion that 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. 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 audiences to know? How do we want them to feel and what do we want them to do in neel is absolutely focused on that, and that's what's helping him be effective.

And I think I can help all of us be effective. This notion of feeling and framing is critical to effective story telling, 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 conscious. Let's listen to Hillary Price, a newspaper cartooned and author of the syndicate ated strip ryme with a orange.

So for my created process, I tend to come up with the joke first, and then I addition 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 I should be as some kind of flow chart or something like that.

What is the best way to get the gag across? You know, i'll walking through what's going to be in my easter gag, right? great. 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 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. 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 end was the bunny holding a basket, right? That's all I needed to say easter.

And then IT never says majesty the magnificent in the drawing, because if you're see a man and a cake and a mustard ash and there's like a dove and some rings or something of magic rings, the new the reader are to bring to the experience where we are. And so then IT was a matter of, I ended up with, I told you I needed this sunday off, but I started with before that, like I told you, this was my side hustle. So the goal in cartoon is you want to simplify and amplify.

Those are the two, 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.

But 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 puts around giving too much information that is unnecessary.

And so with humor, you either want to uh shown event right before that 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 what you want to give the audience the joy of imagining IT you're showing IT. There's just telling IT besides, water is too hard to draw, right?

There's a practical ality to IT. So what i'm here, 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 and and was too much yeah and we have to think I love this idea of what's the action moment ah I want to ask you because of all the guest we're talking to uh, for this mini series, 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 coming? Your process?

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 gas.

I call the justification game, trying to decide how two different things might make sense, right? In a way that disrupts the cliches. And I would see that the visual comes later, like the visual is the last thing that happens.

But even that is an additive process. So I might draw something and then redraw and redraw type of thing in order to cut elements out in 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 gonna a tell my audience if i'd drawing IT that my audience knows it's a clue. I got two things to say in terms of crafting. I would say a speech or a gag.

It's called the punch line 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 is a cartoonist is not to have another character comment on the punch line that is the reader's job. That's the listener's job you don't like, say, and here you are, right.

right? So Hillary really thinks about how SHE frames her comics, literally, in one frame. And he also thinks about the feeling that he wants people to have as they, together with her, in viewing which she's created, come to a mutual understanding.

SHE puts a tremendous amount of thought into where he finds her inspiration for the story he tells. But what he 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 listings 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. It's really interesting to step back and think about the advice about neil and Hillary share with us.

It's all about the intentionality of the design of the story is how you structure IT is 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 story tellers, 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. Stay tuned for episode two of our unconventional, non traditional story tellers.

Thank you for listening to this think fast talk mart mini series. This episode was produced by jim cogan jenne luna and me matt mix engineering by mumble media. Special thanks to dawn fraser of the stanford storytelling project.

If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about storytelling, please check out episode one sixty eight with Matthew dix in episode fifty with polymers. You can hear complete episodes with some of our guests in this many series through our premium offering at faster, smarter di o slash premium. Find more of our episodes on youtube or whereever you get your podcasts and check out faster, smarter audio for deep dive videos, english language learning content and our newsletter.