8 ms·

You just gotta tell a good story

124 points by kamphey 4y ago

cwmoore 4y ago
...to create stories (content). In fairness, author brings up an interesting counterpoint in teaching board games, because we do not learn games by hearing stories about them, but rather rules, pitfalls, and goals.
labrador 4y ago
What I find frustrating is people who write history and don't put enough thought into telling the story. The word story is right there in the name "history". Instead they put more emphasis on listing a chronology of events, the personalities and a description of the surroundings. That's all well and good, but the story really ties it all together. For example, I like WW2 audiobooks to fall asleep at night. "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer or "The Second World War" by Sir Winston Churchill are pretty standard, but then you listen to "Barbarossa - Hitler’s Fatal Gamble" by Jonathan Dimbleby and notice a big improvement in the story telling that holds your interest. And once in awhile you get really surprised by how good something is (by an amateur no less) such as "Red Road from Stalingrad" by Mansur Abdulin. Edit: If you want an example of prime, top notch story telling look no further than "Spare" by Prince Harry ghost written by J. R. Moehringer, who has won awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Whether you like Harry or not, the writing is almost flawless and really makes Harry's case I feel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Moehringer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Moehringer
- Nition 4y ago
  One recommendation from me: "Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk" by Len Deighton.
  - labrador 4y ago
    Thanks, I'll look for it. The backstory of Red Road From Stalingrad is interesting: Over the following few years, Abdulin worked to complete his memoir while at least some of his comrades, such as Shamrai, were still alive to read it. Some years after its Russian publication in 1991, Artem Drabkin, a Russian popular historian of the Soviet-German War, found a copy and realized it could find an English-speaking audience. He tracked Abdulin down in the town of Novotroitsk, and suggested an English edition. Abdulin's reply was "Why not? Let's give it a try..." The English edition was published in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Road_from_Stalingrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Road_from_Stalingrad
harry8 4y ago
Maybe writing the story also matters. Maybe writing it in a way that isn't annoying. Like so many one line paragraphs that he's done here. Just something I noticed. When I skimmed and stopped reading it. YMMV.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
alexccrist 4y ago
teaching is not storytelling. teaching is instructional - and works best following journalism writing rules: 1. tell/write the most important thing first (in case the reader don't follow further) 2. tell/write the details 3. then tell/write the least important information (so if the reader don't even reach this point, he was already exposed to the most important information)
- ivansavz 4y ago
  Yes, I've come to the same pattern after many year of crafting explanations. If I may add somethig, an initial step 0 that contains a "pitch" or "hook" to motivate reader to read the material. e.g. why what you're learning is important/useful.
A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
Aside: Was that blog post taken from Twitter? If not, Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. Nearly every "paragraph" is a single sentence, and the longest of them is just 300 characters. I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-laconic. Elmore Leonard would approve of that.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  If you read it aloud, I think it is very punchy. I’m guessing considering the authors pedigree that his writing style was a conscious choice.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  > Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. This is wild speculation. Newspaper journalism has always tended toward paragraphs of one or two short sentences at most. It's a stylistic choice born partly out of the physical constraints of newspaper layouts, but it also makes articles easy to skim, and the information density tends to be high. This style has always been shared with news articles online, which don't have the same width constraints, but which do have similar considerations when it comes to be easy to skim. Ultimately, paragraphs are just a tool for grouping that's bigger than a sentence. Writers should use whatever groupings makes sense for whatever they're writing. In this case, it seems to be just an expression of the writer's voice. That's probably how they talk in real life. People like to find reasons to hate "things nowadays", but this isn't one of them.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
    > but it also makes articles easy to skim, and the information density tends to be high I don't think the information density was high enough here that each sentence warranted its own paragraph.
- pshc 4y ago
  This writing style is more characteristic of LinkedIn to me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Octokiddie 4y ago
The author uses a one-sentence writing style ubiquitous in "long-form" ad copy. You say one thing. Then another. And another. See how it hooks you? And makes you want to read further? Me neither. But apparently it "works" very well.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  Totally anecdotal but a lot of people seem to really struggle reading long paragraphs these days. So yeah it probably works for those people.
  - ergonaught 4y ago
    It doesn’t “work”; it helps you know what to skim and skip because of the already shallow engagement with the content. It isn’t writing intended for an engaged audience, which is to say it isn’t writing. It’s just copy.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
    The paragraphs need to be visually formatted correctly. Correct width and spacing and such. Adding more line breaks doesn't help people read. It frustrates them because now they have to skip 5 "paragraphs" to get to the next talking point.
- badpun 4y ago
  For me, couple-words paragraphs like the above should be reserved for the most profound realisation. I.e., if you manage to nail the essence of some complex and novel thought in a couple of words, then they really deserve to stand on their own, in a separate paragraph. There should at most a couple of these in any given book (at most). But, in practice, books are peppered with them, which, to me at least, is very cringeworthy.
sublinear 4y ago
I prefer a good bullet tree that breaks down an idea. This is just my opinion, but I'm sick of stories and other long form content like youtube videos. They take way too long to communicate very little information and are full of ads.
waprin 4y ago
The other day I was aimlessly browsing through Youtube, and I found a video by a man named Ira Glass. I had never heard of him but apparently he's a famous NPR journalist. He told a story about how in English class he learned to start with a theses and then explain facts. But, in broadcasting, he learned that doesn't work. Instead, you start with an anecdote - the purest form of a story. Ira pointed out that humans are naturally drawn to listen to stories, so by framing facts as a sequence of events, it gives them momentum that can make even the most boring of facts more interesting and engaging. As I listened, he elucidated by talking about a man waking up and walking around his house. While nothing in his story happened, the way he told it was very suspenseful, which did make me much more curious as to what Ira was going to say next. I think Ira makes a great point, and even if you are just trying to educate people on a topic matter, framing the facts you're trying to convey as a sequence of events makes it much more likely you will succeed at conveying the information you intend to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ezU57J8YI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ezU57J8YI
- jschveibinz 4y ago
  Good link. Thank you.
- theturtletalks 4y ago
  Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." The art of storytelling is inherent in all of us and a skill we should all try to master.
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    > Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." Source? This quote appears in many places online, but never with any source, besides "attributed to Plato", or "as Plato once said" etc. Usually this means it's not something Plato said. The internet is full of fake Plato quotes. I got to the 6th page of google results before seeing anything like a source, and followed that trail - "Leadership Manipulation and Ethics in Storytelling" by T Auvinen, 2013, cited 110 times, says "Even Plato stated that those who tell stories rule society (Fisher, 1985)". So I looked at that paper, WR Fisher's "The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning" (1985), which doesn't contain that quote or anything like it! It does say, in its one paragraph about Plato: "[Plato's] “contribution” to the transformation of logos was to technologize it, to make it a term appropriate to only philosophical discourse. The effects of his thought were to create “experts” in truth, knowledge, and reality; to establish the rational superiority of philosophical (technical) discourse; to relegate mythos to myth (meaning fictional); and to downgrade rhetoric and poetic. Dispensations were made for rhetoric and poetic; they had a place in the life of the community but they were not to be considered serious intellectual arts. They were to be controlled or informed by philosopher-kings." Which is vaguely in the right ballpark - although more like its opposite. Tentative conclusion: Plato didn't say that.
fwlr 4y ago
This post’s writing markedly improved right when it started talking about teaching board games and dropped right when it stopped. I think it’s because the author’s passion for this anecdote about teaching board games distracted them from consciously applying that peculiar staccato style. I don’t know the reason for the staccato style. Self-imposed onto their content because it’s good for engagement? A technique for generating content when they don’t have any? The linguistic analogue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brought on by repeated Twitter concussions?
- djmips 4y ago
  Incredible gear shift into the board games. I bounced right off of the first part but dug in and flowed with the board game part and maybe I also learned something. At the end, I was like why did I dislike this writer to start...
- Hackbraten 4y ago
  > The linguistic analogue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brought on by repeated Twitter concussions? Not sure if you did that on purpose, but your comment just blew my mind. Concussion as in “total absence of discussion.” Love it!
  - fwlr 4y ago
    ;)
syntheweave 4y ago
You'll never believe this one weird old tip, but... I don't think there was a story in this blogpost so much as a humblebrag about a never-fail technique for teaching board games. Certainly it had nothing on the craft of storytelling, which itself is dominated by marketing-message literature of this sort. The relationship between story and teaching is baldly asserted from authority and then never brought up again.
- 6510 4y ago
  If you have to say it you must think it's not obvious to me - for some reason.
Waterluvian 4y ago
It’s the same story every time: “‘you just need this one thing’ doesn’t work. You need a balance of concerns.”
zharknado 4y ago
Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction is a solid, relatively easy-to-understand framework for getting better at helping people learn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Principles_of_Instruction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Principles_of_Instruct... For extra credit, self-determination theory is a fantastic and relatively simple way to conceptualize how motivation affects learning.
throwaway14356 4y ago
I coin a code comment format long long ago. Over the many years that followed I've never bothered to coin a name for it, until today! I present to the world: Talented Comments! It was late at night after spending a seemingly absurd amount of time in the coding zone. One of those winning steaks where one writes many walls of code that suspiciously lack the usual bugs and typos, draining one cup of coffee after the other... It struck me all of a sudden that very little remains of the developer after he leaves this world. All we have is the shining diamond but no collective recollection of the man who cut it. Thus Talented comments was born. It takes 3 stages, the first is a story, preferably about your early childhood, the second part is what you've learned that day (from the described experience) and the third and final stage explains to the future reader (even if it is obvious) how that lesson applies to the code below. And then we wait, hopefully for a hundred years, for someone to find it. Extra points if one can awkwardly name a function, class or variable to hook into the story. My gut says it will help with preservation.
- tdrgabi 4y ago
  I'm not sure if you are sarcastically referencing online recipes nowadays, or are serious...
magic_hamster 4y ago
This was a weird, inconsistent, somewhat aimless thought stream. I guess it's okay if you just enjoy reading something like this. Teaching the winning condition first is a good tip.
mnky9800n 4y ago
I think the author loves a good carriage return more then he loves a good story.

124 points by kamphey 4y ago

...to create stories (content). In fairness, author brings up an interesting counterpoint in teaching board games, because we do not learn games by hearing stories about them, but rather rules, pitfalls, and goals.

labrador 4y ago

What I find frustrating is people who write history and don't put enough thought into telling the story. The word story is right there in the name "history". Instead they put more emphasis on listing a chronology of events, the personalities and a description of the surroundings. That's all well and good, but the story really ties it all together. For example, I like WW2 audiobooks to fall asleep at night. "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer or "The Second World War" by Sir Winston Churchill are pretty standard, but then you listen to "Barbarossa - Hitler’s Fatal Gamble" by Jonathan Dimbleby and notice a big improvement in the story telling that holds your interest. And once in awhile you get really surprised by how good something is (by an amateur no less) such as "Red Road from Stalingrad" by Mansur Abdulin. Edit: If you want an example of prime, top notch story telling look no further than "Spare" by Prince Harry ghost written by J. R. Moehringer, who has won awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Whether you like Harry or not, the writing is almost flawless and really makes Harry's case I feel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Moehringer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Moehringer

Nition 4y ago
One recommendation from me: "Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk" by Len Deighton.
- labrador 4y ago
  Thanks, I'll look for it. The backstory of Red Road From Stalingrad is interesting: Over the following few years, Abdulin worked to complete his memoir while at least some of his comrades, such as Shamrai, were still alive to read it. Some years after its Russian publication in 1991, Artem Drabkin, a Russian popular historian of the Soviet-German War, found a copy and realized it could find an English-speaking audience. He tracked Abdulin down in the town of Novotroitsk, and suggested an English edition. Abdulin's reply was "Why not? Let's give it a try..." The English edition was published in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Road_from_Stalingrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Road_from_Stalingrad

harry8 4y ago

Maybe writing the story also matters. Maybe writing it in a way that isn't annoying. Like so many one line paragraphs that he's done here. Just something I noticed. When I skimmed and stopped reading it. YMMV.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

alexccrist 4y ago

teaching is not storytelling. teaching is instructional - and works best following journalism writing rules: 1. tell/write the most important thing first (in case the reader don't follow further) 2. tell/write the details 3. then tell/write the least important information (so if the reader don't even reach this point, he was already exposed to the most important information)

ivansavz 4y ago
Yes, I've come to the same pattern after many year of crafting explanations. If I may add somethig, an initial step 0 that contains a "pitch" or "hook" to motivate reader to read the material. e.g. why what you're learning is important/useful.

A_D_E_P_T 4y ago

Aside: Was that blog post taken from Twitter? If not, Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. Nearly every "paragraph" is a single sentence, and the longest of them is just 300 characters. I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-laconic. Elmore Leonard would approve of that.

zwkrt 4y ago
If you read it aloud, I think it is very punchy. I’m guessing considering the authors pedigree that his writing style was a conscious choice.
nerdponx 4y ago
> Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. This is wild speculation. Newspaper journalism has always tended toward paragraphs of one or two short sentences at most. It's a stylistic choice born partly out of the physical constraints of newspaper layouts, but it also makes articles easy to skim, and the information density tends to be high. This style has always been shared with news articles online, which don't have the same width constraints, but which do have similar considerations when it comes to be easy to skim. Ultimately, paragraphs are just a tool for grouping that's bigger than a sentence. Writers should use whatever groupings makes sense for whatever they're writing. In this case, it seems to be just an expression of the writer's voice. That's probably how they talk in real life. People like to find reasons to hate "things nowadays", but this isn't one of them.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  > but it also makes articles easy to skim, and the information density tends to be high I don't think the information density was high enough here that each sentence warranted its own paragraph.
pshc 4y ago
This writing style is more characteristic of LinkedIn to me.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Octokiddie 4y ago

The author uses a one-sentence writing style ubiquitous in "long-form" ad copy. You say one thing. Then another. And another. See how it hooks you? And makes you want to read further? Me neither. But apparently it "works" very well.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
creakingstairs 4y ago
Totally anecdotal but a lot of people seem to really struggle reading long paragraphs these days. So yeah it probably works for those people.
- ergonaught 4y ago
  It doesn’t “work”; it helps you know what to skim and skip because of the already shallow engagement with the content. It isn’t writing intended for an engaged audience, which is to say it isn’t writing. It’s just copy.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  The paragraphs need to be visually formatted correctly. Correct width and spacing and such. Adding more line breaks doesn't help people read. It frustrates them because now they have to skip 5 "paragraphs" to get to the next talking point.
badpun 4y ago
For me, couple-words paragraphs like the above should be reserved for the most profound realisation. I.e., if you manage to nail the essence of some complex and novel thought in a couple of words, then they really deserve to stand on their own, in a separate paragraph. There should at most a couple of these in any given book (at most). But, in practice, books are peppered with them, which, to me at least, is very cringeworthy.

sublinear 4y ago

I prefer a good bullet tree that breaks down an idea. This is just my opinion, but I'm sick of stories and other long form content like youtube videos. They take way too long to communicate very little information and are full of ads.

waprin 4y ago

The other day I was aimlessly browsing through Youtube, and I found a video by a man named Ira Glass. I had never heard of him but apparently he's a famous NPR journalist. He told a story about how in English class he learned to start with a theses and then explain facts. But, in broadcasting, he learned that doesn't work. Instead, you start with an anecdote - the purest form of a story. Ira pointed out that humans are naturally drawn to listen to stories, so by framing facts as a sequence of events, it gives them momentum that can make even the most boring of facts more interesting and engaging. As I listened, he elucidated by talking about a man waking up and walking around his house. While nothing in his story happened, the way he told it was very suspenseful, which did make me much more curious as to what Ira was going to say next. I think Ira makes a great point, and even if you are just trying to educate people on a topic matter, framing the facts you're trying to convey as a sequence of events makes it much more likely you will succeed at conveying the information you intend to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ezU57J8YI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ezU57J8YI

jschveibinz 4y ago
Good link. Thank you.
theturtletalks 4y ago
Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." The art of storytelling is inherent in all of us and a skill we should all try to master.
- yesenadam 4y ago
  > Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." Source? This quote appears in many places online, but never with any source, besides "attributed to Plato", or "as Plato once said" etc. Usually this means it's not something Plato said. The internet is full of fake Plato quotes. I got to the 6th page of google results before seeing anything like a source, and followed that trail - "Leadership Manipulation and Ethics in Storytelling" by T Auvinen, 2013, cited 110 times, says "Even Plato stated that those who tell stories rule society (Fisher, 1985)". So I looked at that paper, WR Fisher's "The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning" (1985), which doesn't contain that quote or anything like it! It does say, in its one paragraph about Plato: "[Plato's] “contribution” to the transformation of logos was to technologize it, to make it a term appropriate to only philosophical discourse. The effects of his thought were to create “experts” in truth, knowledge, and reality; to establish the rational superiority of philosophical (technical) discourse; to relegate mythos to myth (meaning fictional); and to downgrade rhetoric and poetic. Dispensations were made for rhetoric and poetic; they had a place in the life of the community but they were not to be considered serious intellectual arts. They were to be controlled or informed by philosopher-kings." Which is vaguely in the right ballpark - although more like its opposite. Tentative conclusion: Plato didn't say that.

fwlr 4y ago

This post’s writing markedly improved right when it started talking about teaching board games and dropped right when it stopped. I think it’s because the author’s passion for this anecdote about teaching board games distracted them from consciously applying that peculiar staccato style. I don’t know the reason for the staccato style. Self-imposed onto their content because it’s good for engagement? A technique for generating content when they don’t have any? The linguistic analogue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brought on by repeated Twitter concussions?

djmips 4y ago
Incredible gear shift into the board games. I bounced right off of the first part but dug in and flowed with the board game part and maybe I also learned something. At the end, I was like why did I dislike this writer to start...
Hackbraten 4y ago
> The linguistic analogue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brought on by repeated Twitter concussions? Not sure if you did that on purpose, but your comment just blew my mind. Concussion as in “total absence of discussion.” Love it!
- fwlr 4y ago
  ;)

syntheweave 4y ago

You'll never believe this one weird old tip, but... I don't think there was a story in this blogpost so much as a humblebrag about a never-fail technique for teaching board games. Certainly it had nothing on the craft of storytelling, which itself is dominated by marketing-message literature of this sort. The relationship between story and teaching is baldly asserted from authority and then never brought up again.

6510 4y ago
If you have to say it you must think it's not obvious to me - for some reason.

Waterluvian 4y ago

It’s the same story every time: “‘you just need this one thing’ doesn’t work. You need a balance of concerns.”

zharknado 4y ago

Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction is a solid, relatively easy-to-understand framework for getting better at helping people learn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Principles_of_Instruction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Principles_of_Instruct... For extra credit, self-determination theory is a fantastic and relatively simple way to conceptualize how motivation affects learning.

throwaway14356 4y ago

I coin a code comment format long long ago. Over the many years that followed I've never bothered to coin a name for it, until today! I present to the world: Talented Comments! It was late at night after spending a seemingly absurd amount of time in the coding zone. One of those winning steaks where one writes many walls of code that suspiciously lack the usual bugs and typos, draining one cup of coffee after the other... It struck me all of a sudden that very little remains of the developer after he leaves this world. All we have is the shining diamond but no collective recollection of the man who cut it. Thus Talented comments was born. It takes 3 stages, the first is a story, preferably about your early childhood, the second part is what you've learned that day (from the described experience) and the third and final stage explains to the future reader (even if it is obvious) how that lesson applies to the code below. And then we wait, hopefully for a hundred years, for someone to find it. Extra points if one can awkwardly name a function, class or variable to hook into the story. My gut says it will help with preservation.

tdrgabi 4y ago
I'm not sure if you are sarcastically referencing online recipes nowadays, or are serious...

magic_hamster 4y ago

This was a weird, inconsistent, somewhat aimless thought stream. I guess it's okay if you just enjoy reading something like this. Teaching the winning condition first is a good tip.

mnky9800n 4y ago

I think the author loves a good carriage return more then he loves a good story.