The Philosophical Basis of How Stories Connect with Audiences

"It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it?"

Rule No. 1: Audiences connect best with characters when you tell a story that the audience believes is universal, logical, and organic. 

• Universal means the story centers on a universal values that the audience believes are universally true...that means what is right vs. what is wrong.  In 90 minutes you can't change the audience's moral values more than a smidgen, so you better start and end where the audience generally is. You can nudge people, but you can't convert them. If you want to convert people produce a documentary and present the most biased interviews and visuals you can find. But don't figure you can figure which way the conversion will flop. A pro-Trump doc may just turn people against him, as Dinesh D'Souza has probably discovered, and a anti-Trump doc may create more Republican voters...as Michael Moore has discovered. 

• Logical means the story's cause and effect elements are logically consistent with Natural Law. Now, there are two kinds of natural laws. There is physical kind, e.g. gravity, momentum, inertia, etc.; and there are psychological kind, e.g. guilt, generosity, lust, envy, etc.   You violate one and there will be natural consequences to answer to. 

• Organic means the filmmaker's ability to surreptitiously foreshadow events... while still being universal and logical.  

Rule No. 2: Every one of the universal, logical and organic elements consistently conforms to a single Moral Premise Statement:

[some moral vice] leads to [some physical detriment], but

[some moral virtue] leads to [some physical betterment].

To expand: The vice and the virtue in the statement need to be universal values that most everyone in a general audience will understand at some level, e.g. greed vs. generosity, selfishness vs selflessness, arrogance vs. humility, etc.

The detriments and betterments are logically the natural consequences of the vice or virtue. Greed leads to isolation, generosity leads to friendship. In the political arena, arrogance (both Trump and the Acosta) leads to distrust, but humility (Jordan Peterson) leads to respect. 

This is one of my Big Problems — s.w.

Rule No. 3: Avoid parochial content and jargon...unless your audience is parochial and expects you to use jargon. For instance, Christian faith films often lapse into trite visuals, scenes, and jargon, the meaning of which is obscured to the non-believer. Someone asked Jordan Peterson once, "Are you a believer?" Peterson's logical response was, "I believe a lot of things." 

Rule No. 4: Tell the Truth.

Seems simple, but here's what it means.

When you set up a conflict between a flawed character and a universal vice and universal virtue, remember these three things:

1. Things Don't Happen by Accident. Either nature delivers, or your character is motivated by some value. 
2. The Universe is run by the Eternal Purposes of God. Generally, that means Natural Law is benevolent toward humans, unless humans ignore what is benevolently given them.
3. Novel and unexpected events (e.g. a miracle) occur to accomplish the universe's larger purpose. In such an event, it may appear that Natural Law is violated, but to the clever writer the event is always natural. 

The Story Logic of Things Not Seen

'The road to the Stars" in Bentley Kansas |
Photography by @jaxsonpohlmanphotography

How do you describe something incapable of being expressed in words...things that are ineffable?  The ineffability of ideas is what the storyteller must conquer daily. 

For most writers this comes instinctually. But a closer examination of ineffability can be revealing and improve our efficiency. 

Let's start with a story's theme...okay, okay, the story's moral premise...

Hostility leads to making enemies; but

Love leads to making friends.

With nothing more I'll bet you could come up with a story about that... or at least draft a log line. 

But could you do this? Could you describe for me the IDEA of hostility? or the IDEA of love?

No, I don't mean what hostility or love looks like when practiced in life (e.g. making enemies or making friends). The moral premise already tells you that. But what I mean is, can you describe the idea, the thought, the value? 

Ideas, thoughts and values are ineffable. That are not things we can sense with our six physical senses (sight, smell, touch, hear, taste or balance). The materialists among us would be tempted to say that such ineffable things don't exist, because ideas, thoughts, values or even God can't be sensed, at least with our  physical senses. But ideas, thoughts and values do affect us, and often physically. But where are they? Where do they exist? Can you point to them? See them coming?

As storytellers we know that ideas and insights exist. We rely on them for our physical reality, because it is the thought, the value, the idea that animates our lives and our characters. We might say it is the ineffable that are the first movers of who we are as humans. 

The mathematician can ponder a proof for years...and then suddenly the insight occurs and a solution reveals itself. Such insights have revolutionized civilization. Gravity, Pi, String Theory. While we can describe the resulting formula you can only describe the insight with words that express vague, rhapsodical terms that sound more like a religious experience.

But the insight is real.  Reality is found in the value that anchors a character's arc, that nails the conflict, that motivates action, and allows consequences to be physically experienced. And yet such reality, per se, is incapable of being seen. We CAN describe a character with a mustache sitting on a rock by the side of a road outside Bentley, Kansas at night starring at the Milky Way. But we CANNOT physically describe the value that put the character in that place, lost in his dreams. There you go, DREAMS. You can try to describe a dream, but they're really beyond explanation. You'd have to have been there.

So, what do we, as storytellers, do with the ineffable? Well, we have to treat them as real, as the absolute logic behind our stories. But they are invisible. So, we "struggle to find similes for what cannot be said directly..." we look for visual motifs that symbolize ideas, "personifying the forces of nature and hunting everywhere for metaphors and analogies." (W. R. Inge, Studies of English Mystics as quoted by D. Elton Trueblood in The Trustworthiness of Religious Experience. Friends United Press, Richmond, Indiana. 1939).

Are ineffable things real? Do they exist? The materialist or atheist, if they are to be consistent, would have to say, no. But stories cannot exist without the ineffable. Indeed civilization would not be very civilized without the reality of ideas, values, and insights. 

I hope you won't let the irony of this escape you. One of the first rules of storytelling is SHOW, DON'T TELL. But logic demands that our stories begin with and are motivated by what is not seen...the ineffability of ideas, values, and insight...that which make our stories connect with the reality of our readers and audiences. In fact, without the ineffability of these things, there would be nothing to see, smell, taste, hear, touch or run to or away from. Our lives, and our characters are only real (in a physical sense) because of the reality of the ineffable (that which is not seen). 

Stories Convince Better Than Logic

Want to be more effective communicator and persuader. Tell a story.

INNOCENCE 2
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
(November 30, 1825 – August 19, 1905)
The picture facing me when I wake each morning.

Buttressed by my comments, here are excerpts from a blog post by David Lavenda. You can find the original essay here: Once Upon A Time At The Office: 10 Storytelling Tips To Help You Be More Persuasive.

Which is easier to remember: statistics or a story? What tugs on your heart logic or a story? 
 

Robert McKee, famous Hollywood story guru, is quoted in the essay as saying:

Trying to convince people with logic is tough for two reasons. One is they are arguing with you in their heads while you are making your argument. Second, if you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired to act by reason alone.

I would add that stories that make an emotional connection that evoke adrenalin which sears memories into the bran. Facts, apart from a story, can be lost in an instant because they are not personal.

But there’s more proof of storytelling's effectiveness than just anecdotal evidence. For example, studies carried out by Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock at Ohio State University have empirically shown that people’s beliefs can be swayed more effectively through storytelling than through logical arguments. The researchers posit that persuasion is most effective when people are "transported" to another place using a story.

More accurately a story, told right, uses a combination of three types of Identification Techniques (physical, emotional & moral),  that place the story listener INTO the story and more significantly into one or more character's minds, where the audience participates emphatically in the journey of the character. That is a literal "transportation" and allows the audience to EXPERIENCE the situation as if present in person. In other words, the story becomes a simulation of reality.  Things are much easier to remember that way because "experience" is the best teacher.

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down to discuss this topic with Susan Fisher, a strategic communication expert and principal at First Class. “People are always telling stories; why don’t they do it at work?" asks Fisher. “It’s because they have been taught that at work you use logic and slides and statistics; this seems more professional. Telling stories seems too emotional and possibly manipulative. So people stick to facts and numbers. But the truth is that real emotions always work better, because that is the way to reach hearts and minds, and also people get to see the real you. It’s authentic.”

Here then are Fisher's top ten list of being a good storyteller at work. These are right out of the screenwriter and director's handbook for making successful motion pictures, or writing engaging novels.

1. Plan your story starting with the takeaway message. Think about what’s important to the audience. The ending is the most important point of the story. This is the message we want to deliver, and the one that will linger with the audience.
2. Keep your stories short for the workplace. Three to five minutes long is about what people can digest in today’s ADD world.
3. Good stories are about challenge or conflict. Without these elements, stories aren’t very interesting. The compelling part of a story is how people deal with conflict–-so start with the people and the conflict.
4. Think about your story like a movie. Imagine you are screenwriter with a goal to get your message across. The story has to have a beginning, middle, and end.
5. Start with a person and his challenge, and intensify human interest by adding descriptions of time, place, and people with their emotions.
6. Be creative. Create a storyboard; draw it out, while listening to music or reading something for inspiration. A good story always has ups and downs, so "arc" the story. Pull people along, and introduce tension, just like in a fairy tale. (“From out of nowhere, the wolf jumps onto the path…”)
7. Intensify the story with vivid language and intonation. Tap into people’s emotions with language. Use metaphors, idioms, and parables that have emotional associations. (Note: For more on this, see Leo Widrich’s article entitled, “Which Words Matter Most When You Talk” and studies on intonation performed by Ingrid Johnsrude at Cambridge University).
8. When using a story in a PowerPoint presentation, use appropriate graphics/pictures to convey your message. Stay away from text and complicated graphics. A single picture interlaced with emotional language will go a long way to convey your message.
9. Most of us have not told stories in front of an audience since English class in high school. So you will need to practice. Tell your story in front of a friendly audience and get feedback. Gauge your pace, and take note of the story’s length and your use of language. It will be a bit rusty at first, but underneath it all, we are all born storytellers.
10. The most important point is to make the switch within; because once you internalize that today’s "left-brain" communication style doesn’t work very well and you realize that stories are how people really communicate, you will find it a lot easier to proceed…because it’s authentic. And that is what really persuades.

Fisher also recommends signing up for a storytelling workshop.

Duh! I have a great suggestion....