The Olympic Peninsula (c) Richard Pelletier

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]ell me, where are you headed in your writing life? If you had wings, where would you fly to next? Are you satisfied? You ever think you could kick this thing up a notch or two? Where could you go with your writing if you could make it better by this much? Or that much? What might happen if you knew how a Shakespearean sonnet is made? What if you actually wrote one? And what if you began to fall head over heels with the whole heaving apparatus that is the English language? What would that be like?

Some of us have to write. Some of us want to write. The road that connects us is the sheer difficulty of the journey. Writing is bloody hard. But it’s not impossible to write well, or even beautifully. You just have to commit. And you have to read.

It also helps to find fellow travelers who have walked some of the trade routes and have come back with the spices and the silks, the sonnets and the similes.

So I’ve come here today to talk about the idea of writing as a deep, professional, creative, and spiritual pursuit. A beautiful, sacred undertaking that asks of you everything you’ve got and then asks for more. The pursuit of writing well gives life depth and meaning and a richness that is transcendent. It is fucking glorious to chase this mother down. There is nothing else like it. It is the hardest damn art form there is and it is better than cannabis or bourbon or chocolate. It is the closest thing to jazz.

In love there are two things — bodies and words. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I remember seeing Joseph Campbell in an interview with Bill Moyers once. The conversation meandered and Moyers said something about people wanting to know the meaning of life. And Campbell said no, he didn’t think that’s what people were after. He thought people were after an experience of life. Meaning was not the holy grail, experience was. I remember thinking this felt exactly right.

And so I want to tell you to seek experiences. Find ways to gather with other humans in the pursuit of writing beautifully. Ask yourself this question. What could possibly be more fun, more inspiring, more, I don’t know… fuckingdelicious, than meeting a bunch of strangers — all engaged in the dogged pursuit of writing well — and spending three or four days together writing and talking and writing and talking and writing? What if you were doing all this in a beautiful place? What could that do to your writing life? Maybe change it forever? It happened to me. And it’s happened to about 300 other writers, too. Published poets, screenwriters, corporate communications people, speechwriters, content marketers, novelists, copywriters. Writers of every stripe.

I speak of the magical, the wondrous, the steeped-in-kindness-and-fellowship-and-personal-connection Dark Angels writing workshops. There is nothing like it anywhere. It is the eighth wonder of the world. Now in our 15th year, the (UK based) Dark Angels operation has flown to New Zealand and to America. If I could clamber up to the top of the world’s tallest building and shout this story out, I would do it.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better. ~ David Foster Wallace

In Seattle, this June, Dark Angels will run a writing workshop aboard a 65′ yacht. The De Anza III. Our captain and speaker, is a Dark Angels alumnus, Ted Leonhardt. Ted is a brilliant and provocative thinker, and a powerful creative force. He came to a workshop, did some great work and got his wings. He is a hell of a writer and evangelist.

I have the distinct privilege of running this American Foundation course with a hugely talented and big-hearted writer, Jamie Jauncey. Jamie and I ran a Dark Angels America workshop last year. We want you to join us this June on the waterways of Seattle. It promises to be amazing in so many ways.

Great writers are indecent people. They live unfairly, saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead it means I made it. ~ Charles Bukowski

I know of a great winged creature named Proust. Proust is normally found near my house, aloft on the southerly winds of Puget Sound making great big loops over Orr Road. Proust has been here forever, inspiring the artists who live on Whidbey. Lately, for reasons we suspect, but will never know for sure, Proust is often seen leaving Whidbey Island and heading out over the water to make a sweeping right turn where the mainland meets the water. Proust heads south and once she’s arrived over Ballard, Proust circles and circles and circles. We think this is because Proust knows in this place, soon, a group of storytellers will gather and she wants to be there. For you. Do not let Proust down.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Attending a Dark Angels course was the single best thing I did for my career, and myself, last year. As I’ve changed roles and companies, one thing was constant — writing. I’m happiest in a role with lots of writing or communicating or editing and I put a high bar on business writing that sounds human and has a personality. And sometimes in business writing, you can lose sight of that human tone among all of the requests to write about fiscal goals and org changes and new processes. So, when I heard about the Dark Angels — a group of professional writers who stand for the power of words and writing, and for personal connection, kindness and fellowship — I couldn’t register fast enough. The candid tutors put me through my paces with thoughtful exercises that taught me if there’s no tears in the writer, there’s no tears in the reader. You don’t have to be a published writer to attend; you just have to be a human who wants to write good words that make people feel your message.”

Lacy Rohre — Director, Content and Communications | EA Customer Experience

“If you want to know how to use a semicolon correctly, or learn the difference between “who” and “whom”, Dark Angels is not the course for you. These are answers found easily inside a book. Instead, Dark Angels is an experience that gently coaxes you into finding something much more important inside yourself. You’ll unearth a genuine, deeply human voice that transforms the way you write everything. I’m sneaking up on 30 years as a professional writer and I astonished myself with some of the sentences that spilled from me over the course of the four days. I feel very privileged to have become part of the chorus.”

Mat Gorbutt, Senior Writer | Fenton Stevens

“Dark Angels was a life-changer. I’ve been an uneasy writer most of my adult life — not trusting my abilities to put on paper what I had in my mind. Dark Angels reminded me about the power of honesty and empathy. Since the course, as long as I feel that I am approaching my writing with those two qualities, I feel much more confident and free of doubt. Thank you for creating a course that spoke to me so beautifully.”

Lourdes Canizares-Bidwa, Associate Director — Marketing | EY LLP

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“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

We talked about human consciousness and how story-making emerged to help humans make sense of everything around them. We touched on the eight stages of story design (rather intricate engineering from the Mind of McKee.) We looked to John Yorke’s book on storytelling, Into the Woods. We got into binary values in storytelling: truth/lies, good/evil, love/hate, success/failure. Time and space showed up in blog post six. And in the last post, number seven, we talked about the inciting incident — the event that launches the story.

This next bit that is coming soon from John Yorke, is quite interesting too. I speak of the Three-Act Structure. But for now, just plain old structure…

Excerpt from John Yorke’s book: I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, ‘Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you.’ I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps.

Yorke continues -> ‘The Hand is a chapter in a short story, ‘Eating Out,’ by the American miniaturist Leonard Michaels; it’s also in effect a complete story in itself. If all stories contain the same structural elements, then it should be relatively easy to identify within ‘The Hand’ the building blocks with we should now be familiar.

Protagonist — the narrator
Antagonist — his son
Inciting incident — awareness of no feeling in hand
Desire — to explain his action
Crisis — ‘He asked…if I wanted him to forgive me’
Climax — ‘I said yes. He said no’
Resolution — ‘Like trumps.’

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o I’d like to jump in here and bring this back to a business story situation. In an earlier blog post, I talked about an inciting incident that involved Boeing 787 aircraft. What happened was that a couple of years after launch, a number of these new aircraft experienced problems…lithium-ion batteries had overheated. The entire fleet — worldwide — was grounded by the FAA. That is an inciting incident for the ages. Here’s the opening to the case study I wrote for Base2 Solutions a few years ago.

The Right Teams Get the 787 Flying Again
Base2 Joins Experts to Help Solve Boeing Battery Issue

Boeing faced a huge operational and public relations debacle. The FAA had grounded the 787 Dreamliner. Incidents involving lithium-ion batteries took place on two separate aircraft. Engineers from Base2 joined teams of experts working to find and resolve the problem.   

When 15,000 people watched the rollout of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner on July 8, 2007, expectations ran high. The plane was more fuel-efficient than other planes its size. Composite materials made up 50 percent of the primary structure of the plane. And, it relied more on electrically generated hydraulic power for primary flight controls. The first plane shipped in September of 2011.

Then in early January 2013, the FAA grounded the fleet. Two lithium-ion batteries, used for back up power for flight controls, had overheated or vented. The FAA ordered a thorough review by technical investigators.

###

Business stories — and especially case studies — can easily be structured around a time-honored storytelling structure. In this story, is the protagonist the new, but flawed (isn’t the hero always flawed?) 787 Dreamliner? Or is it The Boeing Company? It’s The Boeing Company—whose world has been suddenly turned upside down. It’s The Boeing Company who will have to face down the antagonist or forces of antagonism: the FAA and the problem batteries.

So we already have the beginning ingredients we need for a story. But it gets better. We also have values that arrive in the form of a positive / negative charge. (Ha!) There is success/failure, competence/incompetence, safety/danger and, profit/loss. Right? And by the way there is time and place. The meaning of this story is defined by the period of time that the story describes. Place is simple: the fleet of 787s.

One last point. I loathe the tiresome case study structure of problem – solution – outcome. Just seeing that makes me want to gouge my eyes out. However, that underlying idea that a) something strange or weird or bad happened and b) he/she/they/someone had to work to get things back into balance, and c) balance restored, planes flying again, FAA satisfied, profits and safety secured…it kind of does have a problem, solution, outcome framework underneath it all…

It’s very much a three-act structure, which we’ll dig into more in the next post.

Thanks for reading.

Photo credit: Icarus, Empire State Building 1930 Lewis Hine photographer

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If you’re coming into this series of blog posts on storytelling in business, you’ll probably want to head over here >>
I love this quote by Robert McKee so much, I’m posting it again…

The moment a story appears in front of audience members or readers, they instantly and instinctively inspect its value-charged landscape, seeking an emotional door into the story, a place to stick their empathy.” – Robert McKeee

In this episode, we’re going to go into something I find fascinating; the thing that starts it all, the thing that screenwriters call ‘the inciting incident.’ Here’s how McKee defines it.

Excerpt from McKee:
The inciting incident launches a story by upsetting the equilibrium of the protagonist’s life and throwing the story’s core value either positively or negatively, but decisively out of kilter. This turning point initiates the events that follow and propels the protagonist into action.

Excerpt from John Yorke’s Into the Woods:

All stories have a premise — ‘What if….?’

A stuttering monarch takes instruction from a colonial maverick…
A slum dweller from Mumbai is accused of cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?…
A junk-collecting robot is whisked away from his home planet…

An inciting incident is always the catalyst for the protagonist’s desire. It might be useful to think of them as the subject of a film’s trailer: it’s the moment the journey begins.

Yorke goes on to say that the first attempt to codify the inciting incident, or incidents, came in 1808 courtesy of A. W. Schlegel, who called them ‘first determinations.’

When you think of certain well-known films, the inciting incident can be fairly easy (though also quite tricky) to spot. From one of my favorites, The Verdict, here’s a thought about what’s happening around the inciting incident.

Excerpt from Christopher Lockhart’s blog, The Inside Pitch:
For physical/external storyline: MICKEY jolts GALVIN into consciousness, reminding him that he has five-days to prepare for the ONLY case on his docket. This is a definite money-maker that will ensure GALVIN some much needed income (page 6-7).

For psychological/internal storyline: GALVIN visits his comatose client in the nursing home. He comes to understand the severity and enormity of the case before him (page 8).

Notice what’s being said in the above excerpt: for the physical/external storyline…and for the psychological/internal storyline….two worlds operating here, inside and outside…

INCITING INCIDENTS IN BUSINESS STORIES

Excerpt from Scientific American, by Umair Irfan: 

At 10:21 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2013, about a minute after all 183 passengers and 11 crew members from Japan Airlines Flight 008 disembarked at Boston’s Logan International Airport, a member of the cleaning crew spotted smoke in the aft cabin of the Boeing 787-8.

Soon after this event, the FAA ground the entire BRAND NEW fleet of Boeing aircraft. Suddenly, Boeing was in a world of hurt — deep inside that turning point that initiates all the events that follow–in this case smoking lithium batteries. I know about this story because I had to write about a consulting team that worked on this problem. Every imaginable element of good storytelling was available to work with… But the ‘incident’ that launched the story? Overheating, smoking lithium batteries.

Excerpt from New York Magazine piece, by Yashar Ali:

That first (John) Carreyrou story reported that Theranos’s blood-testing machine had significant accuracy issues and had been used for only 15 out of a claimed 240 tests. Subsequent stories revealed that the machines never really worked, would often malfunction, and could lead to inaccurate diagnoses. Today, the investors are gone; Holmes and the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, Sunny Balwani, who was also her secret boyfriend at the time, are both facing federal criminal investigations, and they have been charged by the SEC with running an “elaborate, years-long fraud.”

The publication of a Wall Street Journal story about serious problems at a Silicon Valley startup–Theranos–was the inciting incident in a cascading nightmare of revelations and crises that would lead to the near total collapse of a completely fraudulent company that had raised $900m from investors. Absolutely amazing story.

Those are high-profile, well-known, public stories. But think about these quieter stories that happen every day:

An administrator at a large university healthcare system is promoted to a position with much more responsibility, and she is not entirely certain she can pull it off. On her own, she contacts an old friend of her father’s, a retired management consultant who coaches her on the quiet. The inciting incident is the new job — the turning point that initiates a series of events that follow…The antagonists in the story are the bureaucracy, and her own self-doubts.

A successful chef-restaurateur opens a new, and fairly large restaurant operation in the midst of an economic crisis. His funding is razor thin. The launch has to succeed right out of the gate because he needs that money to pay rent, vendors, all the rest. He hires a chef to run his kitchen, hires a catering team, servers, a manager; he works with his PR and marketing partners and opening day arrives. Six months in, the chef is declared a failure and is fired. The checking account is on empty. The first review is decidedly ho-hum, if not outright hostile. The chef dons his whites, sharpens his knives and returns to the kitchen, something he has not done in years. He saves the restaurant, and sets it on a profitable footing that supports the establishment for years and at the same time, develops a management and funding framework that serves him well as he opens three more restaurants in the coming years. The inciting incident? The chef who failed and put the entire enterprise at risk.

Thanks for reading, more storytelling for business to come.

Illustration: Wheat Field with Cypresses, Vincent Van Gogh

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I’m going to change things up a little in these posts, by adding in some work by the great John Yorke, who wrote a very, very good book, Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story. Here’s McKee and Yorke on story.

But what is a story? 

Excerpt From McKee:

The essential core in all stories ever told in the history of humankind can be expressed in just three words: conflict changes life. Therefore, the prime definition becomes: a dynamic escalation of conflict-driven events that cause meaningful change in a character’s life.

Excerpt from Yorke:

Storytelling, then, is born from your need to order everything outside ourselves. A story is like a magnet dragged through randomness, pulling the chaos of things into some kind of shape and – if we’re lucky – some kind of sense. Every tale is an attempt to lasso a terrifying reality, tame it and bring it to heel.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his section of McKee’s book gets pretty deep into the weeds and I’m not going dwell here too terribly long. But for the purposes of shedding some light on his thinking, here it is. Personally, I find all this a bit much, slicing the apple to death. But it’s worth looking at what McKee says about ‘meaning’ as he concluded this section. See below.

THE EIGHT STAGES OF STORY DESIGN

Stage One: The Target Audience
Stage Two: Subject Matter
Stage Three: The Inciting Incident
Stage Four: The Object of Desire
Stage Five: The First Action
Stage Six: The First Reaction
Stage Seven: The Crisis Choice
Stage Eight: Climactic Reaction

Excerpt from McKee:

The eight stages of storytelling create meaning in this way: First, at the core of all stories pulses at least one binary value–such as life/death, freedom/tyranny, success/failure, truth/lie, love/hate and the like. Second, the dynamic of cause and effect within the story’s events expresses the how’s and why’s, the ‘because’ of change. Examples: Indiana Jones lives to fight another day ‘because’ under pressure, he is courageous, cool and smart; Winston Smith submits to tyranny ‘because’ he is vulnerable to the cruelty of Big Brother; the A’s win the pennant and Bill Beane saves his career ‘because’ he never loses faith in his judgement. The clear, simple statement of value plus cause expresses a story’s meaning in one sentence.

I’m currently involved in a fascinating writing project with 100 writers. One of the things that’s popped up is someone’s fascination with the facts of a certain person’s story. I argued that it was less the facts that were compelling but what the facts signified, what they revealed about character and inner life. I think that’s what McKee is saying. The fact that Indiana Jones lives to fight another day is sort of interesting, but the real story is beneath that. He lives to fight another day ‘because’ of who he is, what’s he’s made of, his courage.

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THE DEFINITION OF STORY

Excerpt:

To master storified marketing, CMOs need solid working answers to fundamental questions: “What exactly is a story? What are its primal components? How do these elements interact within a story? How do I create a powerful marketing story?”

Me–> I’d say that it’s not only CMOs who need these answers, it’s every marketing writer, communications professional, PR person, startup entrepreneur, business owner. If the whole marketing narrative is broken, we all need to understand how to create and use stories. Onward into a list of what a story is not.

Me–> A story is not a process, or a hierarchy, or a chronology, and you can see McKee’s blood boil on videos when he gets to this, a story is not a journey.

Excerpt:

Euphemisms, such as journey, separate the mind from the unpleasant realities around it, and, like genteelisms we use when we toilet-train chidren, they have a place in polite society. But the protagonist of a well-told story is not a passive passenger; she struggles dynamically through time and space to fulfill her desire.

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. ”

~ Flannery O’Connor

Me–> Okay, now we have to pay attention. This has been wildly misunderstood by almost everyone, including yours truly.

Excerpt:

STORY IS NOT NARRATIVE

Many marketing campaigns have flopped because an ad agency didn’t know the difference between narrative and story. Narrative may sound academic, even scientific, but in a business context, the term is neither logical nor precise. It’s use commits a categorical error for this reason: All stories are narratives, but not all narratives are stories. The four misnomers above, process, hierarchy, chronology, journey, are narratives, not stories.

Narratives tend to be flat, bland, repetitive, and boring recitations of events. They slide through the mind like juice through a goose, and as a result, they have little or no influence on customers. Stories, on the other hand, are value-charged and progressive. The mind embraces a well-told story; the imagination is its natural home. Once through our mental door, story fits, sticks, and excites consumer choice.

The next time you’re bored to the bone by somebody’s ‘story,’ in all likelihood you’re not being told a story. If you were, you’d be listening and engrossed. Instead the guy is torturing you with a narrative, probably a repetitious recitation of “….and then I did this, and then I did that, and then I did the other thing, and then and then and then…”

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s to the concept of narrative and story. I thought hard about this in a book I co-authored recently. The book is Established; Lessons from the world’s oldest companies. My chapter, The Brush, the Mallet, the Chisel, the Letter, was a kind of history, or chronology—a narrative, if you will—about the founding and survival of the oldest operating American company, The John Stevens Shop of Newport, RI. I kept fighting the exact problem McKee lists above, ‘and then this happened, and then that happened, and then this happened, and then that…” The way I solved it, I think, was to let my utter fascination and love for the entire story come through. I lingered on the space itself, the people in the story, and the incredible skill they have and the generational aspect, three generations of men, twice over, who owned and ran this shop. But it’s probably fair to say I did not storify this piece, mainly because to do that, felt not quite right for the material I had. As my friend Nick Parker has said, ‘there’s an open question as to which sorts of content or material are ripe for a storytelling structure.” Agreed.

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In previous posts, we’ve talked about how rational based communications, are really just rhetoric, and emotional communications, have veered into manipulation of consumers, playing on fear and envy. Which is part of the reason why marketing and advertising are in such dire straits. We’ve also touched on the elements of a story– action, reaction. changing value charges, roles, conflict, turning points, emotional dynamics.

So let’s look into Chapter Three; The Evolution of Story. As you might expect from McKee, he structures some of this material in the form of a three act drama.

Excerpt:
“…a three-act adventure that begins with the birth of consciousness. It builds as the mind battles for survival, and climaxes with the triumph of storified thought.’

Consciousness is kind of the inciting incident here. The moment when everything changes and the protagonist is thrown into a whole new world, which in this case is being self-aware.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” ~ Joan Didion

---

ACT I: THE FIRST HUMAN THOUGHT

Excerpt:
The silent awareness of “Me” suddenly transformed a brain into a mind and turned an animal human. Animals react to the objects around them, but the human brain turned itself into an object. Consciousness, in effect, split itself in two.

When self-awareness invaded the first human mind, it brought with it a sudden, sharp sense of isolation. The cost of self-consciousness is a life spent essentially alone, at a distance from all other living creatures, even your fellow human creatures. With that first, primordial I am, moment, the mind felt not only alone but also in terror. For self-awareness brought another, even more frightening discovery, unique to humanity. time. The first human being suddenly found herself alone and adrift on the river of time.

ACT II: THE SECOND HUMAN THOUGHT

“…What’s more, the mind discovered that not only is the future in doubt, but the surfaces of people and things cannot be trusted; that nothing is what it seems. What seems is the sensory veneer of what we see, what we hear, what people say, what people do. What is hides beneath what seems. For truth is not what happens, but how and why what happens happens. With neither science nor religion to explain life’s unseen causalities, the suddenly self-aware mind must have roiled in confusion as chaos, enigma, meaninglessness, and brevity made life unlivable. The mind had to find a way to make sense out of existence.

ACT III: THE STORY-MAKING MIND

Two pages in we get going…

Excerpt:
Because a well-told story wraps its telling around emotionally charged values, its meaning becomes marked in our memory.

Excerpt:
The form of story, at its simplest goes like this: As the telling opens, the central character’s life, as expressed in its core value (happiness/sadness, for example) is in relative balance. But then something happens that upsets this balance and decisively changes the core value’s charge one way or the other. He could for example, fall in love, (positive) or out of love (negative). The character then acts to restore life’s balance, and from that moment on a sequence of events, linked by cause and effect moves through time, progressively and dynamically swinging the core value back and forth from positive to negative, negative to positive. At climax, the story’s final event changes the core value’s charge absolutely and the character’s life returns to balance.

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Excerpt from McKee:
A well-told story captures our attention, holds us in suspense, and pays off with a meaningful emotional experience. Emotional because we empathize with its characters; meaningful because the actions of our protagonist deliver insights into human nature. The word itself, story, confuses many marketers. Some, for example, use the words content and story as if they were interchangeable. As as we’ll discover, that’s like conflating paint in a can with a masterpiece on a wall.”

The other, frequent point of confusion, is between story and narrative. There are key distinctions. Hugely important differences. Of which more, later.

Here we go, this bit is where our book gets in gear and begins to really move.

McKee excerpt: In short, story is the ultimate I.T. I in that storytelling demands information–a wide and deep knowledge of human nature and its relationship with the social and physical realms. T in that a well-told story demands skillful execution of its inner technology, its mechanism of action / reaction, changing value charges, roles, conflicts, turning points, emotional dynamics, and much more. A craft underpins the art.

Storify is the word that McKee and Gerace give us to describe marketing that encompasses story structure. You got to storify it!

Here is where we begin to see some clarity around what defines a story. Story involves just what has been said above. Action, reaction. Changing value charges. Roles. Conflict. Turning points. Emotional dynamics. None of which apply to narrative.

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Philip Pullman

For me, the interesting idea running through this approach to marketing is how to apply it. Where and how can you apply a storytelling structure in your business communications? What specific pieces of content can you storify? If we’re talking about content marketing which underlies all this due to Thomas Gerace’ role at Skyword, then there are numerous avenues to work with. Customer stories, also known as case studies, are prime territory. Ads can certainly fit that bill. Corporate history can definitely be storified.

I wonder? Can you storify home page content? Can you hook a reader on the home page with a brief story, maybe as brief as six words? Ten? Stay tuned for post number three coming your way soon. Should be good, ‘The Evolution of Story’ is chapter three.

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I’ll mark specific passages of the book with Excerpt and I’ll indent so you know where I’m pulling from the text.

Excerpt from McKee:
THE TWO TYPES OF MARKETING DECEPTION
Historically, marketers have driven sales through two types of pretense, one rational and the other emotional.

1. Rational Communication
Classical marketing theory asserts this premise: Human beings are rational decision makers who, when faced with an important choice, gather relevant facts, weight alternatives, then choose the best option. Therefore, to persuade consumers, present your claims in a factual, logical, scientific manner. That’s the theory. In reality, what advertising passes off as logic, is in fact, rhetoric. Science seeks the truth, rhetoric seeks the win. Now more than ever, marketing via rhetorical argument provokes skepticism in the mind of the customer and a negative attitude toward your product or service.

So we get to the problem pretty much right off the bat. Classical marketing theory asserts that human beings are rational decision makers. Ha! I think classical marketing theory has it backwards. We use our emotions to make decisions and use our reasoning powers to justify doing the thing we want to do. So let’s get to that.

McKee excerpt:
2. Emotional Communication
“At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though this language so often camouflages what motivates him.”  ~ Bill Bernbach.

One of the ideas that emerges in this section speaks to Bernbach’s approach to clients. He didn’t talk about advertising but the art of persuasion. ‘Ads needed to touch people’s basic, unchanging instincts — their obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of their own.’

We all know this, we’ve all lived with it, and worked with, and even succumbed to these ideas. The curious thing about all this is there’s a deeper thing going on. That thing says, Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and behavioral science at Yale, in his book How Pleasure Works is this: ‘What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment (or suffering) we get from something derives from what we think that thing is.’ What follows are citations from research and various experiments that demonstrate that our reactions are lashed to the mast of our beliefs. If we believe we’re drinking more expensive wine, we like it more. It works for pleasure and for pain.

The problem is that this sort messaging infrastructure, toying with people’s emotions, is manipulative and is a good part of the reason why advertising and marketing are in so much trouble.

Stay tuned for the next post. Thanks for reading.

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I had a bit of a secret. Poorly kept. The situation was delicate, touch and go. I conjure up an image of my teenage self sprawled out on a lawn, at some outdoor concert, half conscious. Don’t know what this bird flew into, but shit don’t look good. The world was spinning faster and faster. Try and keep up. High-school in New England. A mean, beat down, beaten up, mill town south of Boston. Cramped tenements. Chain link fences. Small bore gangs of Irish, Poles, Portuguese. A lost American city. Lost American boys.

Croke was tall, lanky, dispirited. A lad in a brown leather jacket and jeans, with shoulder length, dirty blond hair. I can’t remember Croke being much of a threat to anyone but himself. Croke loomed large at school and on the street. Mainly because he had a monster heroin habit. More than once, I saw Croke being dragged down the hall, his arms around the shoulders of two burly teachers, his feet dragging behind him. Eyes rolling around in his head. They struggled to get him out of the building, down the stairs and stuffed into a cab. Next day they would do it all again.

Dope was easy to get. Like buying a bag of chips. Like whistling at a pretty girl. Dope was language. Fuck you, it said. The men’s bathroom in high-school was part of the franchise. Mom’s sandwich baggies filled with Tuinal, Seconal, Quaaludes, heroin, speed. The cost was low — lunch money low. You could get anything you wanted at Tadeusz Kosciuszko Square five minutes from my house. The Square. At the Square, you could buy your way into your own imprisonment beneath a statue of a Polish hero of the War of Independence. The irony was lost on us. We weren’t interested in independence. Ours was a more noble conflict — obliterate the self. That stealth army spreading a miracle of warmth across your tender groin, courtesy of Adolph von Baeyer, inventor of the barbituate. Just take me out, Adolph. Across from the Square was Joe Gow’s, where you could get a greasy chow mein sandwich in wax paper and a coke for two-fifty, when you resurfaced and got hungry.

Killer Cabral. I don’t know if Killer had killed anyone when I knew him, but the chances are good, or got around to it in due time. I have one memory of Killer. I’ve got my mother’s car for the night. I’m seventeen. Killer is in the back seat — this is an eight-cylinder Oldsmobile Cutlass, maroon. A machine. I’ve disconnected the odometer. Killer is small. In a black leather jacket. His street rep is fearsome. Killer Cabral is in my car. He’s cooking junk in a spoon. He’s got his works out. Rolls up a sleeve. Ties off, finds a vein. Pushes the needle in. Tilts his head back for a second, eyes closing… Come to daddy.…that’s it. Then, Killer is out. Into the night. Hey, Killer Cabral was in my car last night. No way. Way.

For a while, my best friend was Fat Larsch. Toothpick thin. Stringy blond hair. We were tight for three years. Concerts, camping, ski trips, open-faced turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes at the counter at Rockland Diner. Quarts of Bud. All the shit that kids do. Add weed, downers, and the occasional speed. I never once set foot inside his house. Some kind of weird trouble was going down in that darkened third-floor apartment. Finally, Fat Larsch went for the needle. He died of an overdose. By then, he’d become a respiratory technician at the local hospital. St. Anne’s. I never went to the funeral. I never went for the needle. That was a line I wouldn’t cross.

I woke up in the Emergency Room. Tied it off. All the people who were part of the old world, over. I passed them on the street. I did not meet their eyes. I did not speak. No hellos, no how you doing. I don’t see you.

{ photograph by richard pelletier }

This low-heeled boy had a dream — a wanting. It was so bonkers, so outlandish, and freakish, and buried so deep, it would take over four decades to dig it out. Wanted that mother so hard, had to wrap that fragile thing in blankets and shame and lies and foolish loves and silence.

Touch and go.

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World-famous, there’s-nothing-else-like-it-anywhere Dark Angels writing workshop lands on east coast of America in 2017

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ow goes it? Is your writing everything you want it to be? Could you do with a shot of inspiration? A double shot of joie de vivre? A triple shot of ‘I never knew I could write like that?’ Is there a wee bit of room for improvement? For a potentially life-changing experience?

I want to introduce you to some of the work I do and the people I do it with. I’m reaching your way for a couple of reasons. You’re a good writer. You’re interested in words and stories. For you, business, life, and art are not all that far apart. No silos. And, you like to connect. Which means you are, ahem, the target audience.

first, the back story…

A few years ago, I went on a few writing workshops. The first was in Spain, outside of Seville. The next one was at Oxford. During which we had dinner with Philip Pullman. So, these weren’t just any writing workshops. These were Dark Angels workshops. Twelve years in, over 300 people have rolled through the Angelic writing machine. People talked. So I went on this workshop, they’d say. And they’d get all glassy eyed. The thing was a phenomenon.

Then, in 2015, I was invited to join the firm, as it were, as a tutor. Or, as we are officially known, Associate Partner. The three original founders of the company, John Simmons, Stuart Delves, Jamie Jauncey, felt the need for reinforcements. So nine additional writers, including yours truly, were, you know, onboarded. We are now 12. (Being asked to join that crew was sweet. I cried.) Here we all are at Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre.

The tagline for Dark Angels is Creative Writing in Business. We run our workshops in Spain, England, Ireland, Scotland, possibly New Zealand and this year, the US. Our focus is on business writing, although all kinds of writers have come. Our ship has three captains: London-based novelist and copywriter John Simmons; Edinburgh-based copywriter, poet and playwright, Stuart Delves; and copywriter, musician, and novelist Jamie Jauncey. You will not find three kinder, more talented writer-humans if you tried.

We stand for the power of words and writing, and for personal connection, kindness and fellowship.

When you hear the concept of ‘brand voice’ or ‘tone of voice’ in marketing communications, that’s John Simmons idea. (Many people are saying that the notion of voice in business writing was in the air in the 90s and Alan Siegel of Siegel + Gale also came up with voice as a concept at around the same time. We accept this version of history.)

I discovered John’s books in 2006 and got very excited. Long story short — I got to know him, became a friend of his and his family, have stayed with him in London, and now I’m part of the company. He and his family are lovely and brilliant people.

The whole Dark Angels thing is virtually unknown in America. (Hence, this.) At least I think it is. As far as I can tell, I’m quite possibly the only American who has been to a DA workshop in those 12 years.

The workshops usually are residential affairs between three and four or five nights. (We’ve recently added a Taster Day option.) We spend a lot of time writing. We have our recipe book filled with writing exercises — sonnets and six-word stories and all kinds of fascinating, challenging and imaginative ways of wrestling with story, with words, with language, with writing. Ours is not a ‘how to’ kind of workshop. It’s more a matter of creating a safe, intelligent space to fucking write. We help guide writers as they strike out into different territory. And this is truly different for a writer’s workshop: no critiques. We’ll offer some thoughts about the value of what we’ve asked you to do and we’ll ask you to tell us about it. A simple ‘how was it, trying to write that sonnet, tell us about it.’

The combination of our writing exercises, some collaborations, our conversations about books, writing, music, art, our dinners together, our wine, etc. — the whole wonderful smorgasbord of writers talking, thinking things out and writing, has a powerful effect on people who attend. Folks find new confidence; they get emotional, they get reinvigorated. They find their voice. Imaginations get stoked and stimulated. Lots of people have said the experience changed their lives. I’m one.

The curious and interesting thing is how we tie our creative writing exercises back to business. There are real pearls of wisdom to take back to work.

So Dark Angels is going to come to America this year in early October. We’ll be in Dartmouth, MA, right next to New Bedford in Melville territory. We’ll be in this house in the photo below. John Simmons and I are running this one together. Reader, it is catered.

So I’d like to invite you to come. Or, if you think someone on your team at HubSpot, or MarketingSherpa, or Slack, or WebMD could benefit from an immersion experience that will likely excite them and boost their confidence in their writing…We’re aiming for 6–9 people. But no more than 10 I don’t think.

Many Dark Angels writers are freelancers. Many are in-house writers from places like —

Arts Council of Wales, Bang & Olufsen, Barclays, The BBC, BP, British Airways, Carlsberg Breweries, Clore Leadership Programme, Corporate Culture, Elmwood, The Environment Council, Granada Media, Innocent, Interbrand, Lever Faberge, Mazars, National Library of Wales, O2, Penguin Books, QI, Royal Society of Arts, Scottish Arts Council, Sotheby’s Europe, Swiss Reinsurance, Three.

The crew in Scotland…

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to know more, visit the website.

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