Daniel Slotnik, whoever you are, you should be ashamed of the rotten New York Times obituary you wrote about my old buddy Thom Steinbeck.  Your first sentence includes the word “bitterly,” your only quotes from other people are from his father’s biographer disparaging him, and there was not one word about what a funny, fun-loving, boisterous, jovial storyteller Thom was.  Not one.  All you did was rake as much muck as you could find on him, then do your best to give him a final drowning in the shadow of his larger-than-life father.  I assume you were assigned to write the obituary and never met the man.  You should be ashamed of yourself.  F. you, Slotkin.  (btw, that’s for Thom — he would appreciate my saying that for him)

Me and a barrel-chested man.

STRANGERS SHOULDN’T WRITE OBITUARIES

What made Daniel Slotnik feel the need to stomp on the grave of John Steinbeck’s son, Thom Steinbeck who departed the world last Thursday?

His obituary is nothing but muck, raked back and forth.  There’s no quote from his wonderful widow, Gail.  There’s no quotes from his good friends.  Yes, he was engaged in plenty of legal battles.  So what.  He was a fun and generous person who supported veterans and workers groups vigorously.

And by the way, Slotnik, you overlooked the definitive statement on Thom to make your rotten case against him in death — the slender supplemental volume by Jackson Benson, Steinbeck’s biographer.  It was titled, “Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost.”  When I first moved to L.A. and went in search of Thom I began by checking out Benson’s biography which I had heard was massive.  I saw the Jackson Benson name on the spine of the thin book and wondered as I checked it out with a stack of other works on Steinbeck how “THE” biographical work on Steinbeck could be so small.

When I got home I realized it wasn’t the biography.  No, the biography is indeed 1,184 pages.  The “Ghost” book was a separate essay he wrote after completing the biography.  At the start of the smaller book he explained that he wrote it as almost a public service to all future biographers of famous people.  What he wanted them to know was about the horrendous battles, conflagrations and befuddlements he had to endure in dealing with the descendants of John Steinbeck, most prominent of whom was his son, Thom.

So there, Slotnik — you might as well have at least hit the bullseye by citing that work.  No, there was nothing wrong with any of the facts cited in your NY Times obituary.  It’s just that there was more to the man — a human side — that I now want to share because I was so fond of him.  Here we go.

LOOKING FOR STEINBECK’S SON

I met Thom in 1994 when I first moved to Hollywood.  I had to meet him.  I had grown up as a marine biologist transfixed on his father’s book “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.”  It was my density to meet him (and yes, I said density, an oblique reference to “Back to the Future” to show I will be infusing this piece with humor, something the NY Times obituary lacked, severely).

I was in a writer’s group where a woman was listing the other clients of her agent with Gersch Agency and mentioned his name.  I had her give her agent a letter to Thom from me.  A month later a “producer” (I found out later actually just one of Thom’s drinking buddies) called me up suspiciously.  I made clear I was a poverty stricken marine biologist just starting film school.  I managed to prove I was sufficiently innocent/incompetent and was thus granted security clearance.

A week later I met Thom at one of the swankiest bars in Beverly Hills.  I walked in.  Everyone looked too young and hip for me.  But then I spotted an older guy at the bar wearing a sort of captain’s hat, looking 1000% out of place.  I said to myself, “Please don’t let that be John Steinbeck’s only living son.”  It was, and he was already three sheets to the wind.

To make matters worse, one of the hottest young actress wannabes in my acting class was our waitress.  She kept bringing the drinks, but glaring at me like, “Dude, you’re with THIS old guy?”

We sat there for FIVE hours that first night, trading stories, laughing our asses off.  I drove home obliterated.  He told me stories of love and hate for his father.  He told me about how his brother and he always wanted to rent a tractor and chains and in the middle of the night tear down the statue of their father in the middle of town in Salinas, California.  He told me how much his father would hate EVERYTHING to do with the tourists endlessly honoring and worshipping him — which by the way was already palpable in his wonderful final personal book, “Travels with Charley.”

Thom told me about serving in Vietnam as a combat photographer — he told me he was the only one who shot film footage of the iconic photo of a Vietnamese man being executed (a photo of which won a Pulitzer Prize).  He told me about his beloved brother who died in surgery in 1991 — the person he felt closest to in his life.

A couple years later I was part of his bachelor’s party in LA where we went to Thai food, a strip joint, then a massage place.  A week later I took my buddy Jay Vavra with me up to Pacific Grove to his wedding to his wonderful wife, Gail Knight.  Just last year, as Jay was dying from leukemia, I went up and saw Thom and Gail in Santa Barbara and managed to find a couple of shots of Jay in their wedding photos which I contributed to his memorial service.

Thom and I worked on making a documentary of sorts out of “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” for a couple of years.  We had a number of fairly sloshed creative lunches, then at one point — and I’m sorry, but I just have to share this with some of you who can appreciate the outlandish humor of it (the rest of you can get stuffed) — we typed up a synopsis one day and as a joke he added on the cover page the subtitle of, “A Ribald Tale of Barrel-chested Men and Large Breasted Women on the High Seas.”

A month later he called me up and said, “Olson, I messed up.  It’s all over — I made a boo-boo — I accidentally sent that draft to Elaine” (his father’s third wife who shared with him control of the Steinbeck estate)  “She read the subtitle and wasn’t amused — she said no way will she grant rights to us to make a film.”  Which ended that project, but at least we laughed really, really hard about it.  For years.

In 2003 I brought him to our Shifting Baselines Roundtable Evening in Santa Monica.  At the intermission he told all the scientists they were full of shit — that the ocean was already done, all they were doing was agonizing over the remaining bits, then stormed out angry.  Which of course the next day was followed by a phone call with me where we laughed our asses off, again.

Thom was awesome.  He was of a different generation.  If you didn’t know him you could easily write the sort of pile of crap that Daniel Slotnik has written in the New York Times.

Actually, you know what, the whole journalism world owes the Steinbeck family an apology for the infamous question asked of John Steinbeck at the press conference for his Nobel Prize in 1962.  A journalist asked if he thought he deserved it.  That fundamentally soulless, disrespectful tone matches the NY Times obituary for his son.

Thom was just like his old man.  Not perfect, but deeply caring.  He did a lot of work with military veterans and farm labor groups and lots of other meaningful causes.  He was connected with the land and with working class folks, just as his father sort of tried to be and wanted to be and thought he was, but actually never really was, as Thom confirmed to me.  But at least his sentiments were in that direction.

They both knew bullshit when they saw it.  The New York Times obituary for Thom is pure bullshit.  You want to see the proper, decent, dignified way to write an obituary, Slotnik?  It’s right here, in the Monterey Herald, including a quote from Thom’s old buddy Arlo Guthrie.  Thank you, Monterey Herald.

“EPIC 2014” predicted the merging of Google and Amazon to create Googlezon; the beating heart of a massively superficial world. That hasn’t happened yet — the merger — but the superficial part is pretty close.

Gonna be a busy and fun fall with lots of Demo Days that will give rise to lots of Story Circles. Yesterday we launched the first Story Circle for USGS folks (both scientists and communications staff) who took part in the Colorado Demo Day in March.  We’re just getting started. 

THE FALL TOUR FOR STORY CIRCLES.

A DOZEN DEMO DAYS

The two Demo Days we did three weeks ago with USDA, NASA and University of Maryland produced 39 of 80 participants signing up to eventually enter into Story Circles that involve the 10 one-hour sessions. It takes a while to get each one off the ground.  From our March Demo Day, we have launched 4 Story Circles (two for USDA, one each for USFWS and USGS) involving 20 of the 35 participants in that Demo Day.

This fall’s events should involve at least 500 scientists and communications staff.  No telling how many Story Circles will arise from the Demo Days but I’m sure it will be lots (4 are already set for Tufts alone).  It’s a slow process, but we are on our way towards establishing small pockets of “narrative culture” meaning groups of workers where everyone in the group is fluent in the narrative language of Story Circles.  That is the point where we can start to put an end to painful AAA and DHY miscommunication efforts.

A wonderful time lies ahead!

At our two Demo Days last week we heard from two of last year’s participants in the USDA prototype Story Circle. When their circle ended a year ago, one of them was moderately positive about the experience (though not wildly enthusiastic), the other wasn’t really certain it was worth the time.  But a year later, their tone was completely different. They talked in detail about how it has changed how they write, read and think. Yes, it is that profound. The same pattern of needing time to let the training soak in has emerged with the AAAS Invention Ambassadors I work with. The bottom line: NARRATIVE TRAINING TAKES TIME (furthermore, one day workshops on storytelling are somewhere between useless and counter-productive).

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES.  Two participants in the USDA/ARS Story Circle prototype last year, Cathleen Hapeman (left) and Gail Wisler talk in detail about how Story Circles has changed how they write, read and even think.

THE PATH TO NARRATIVE INTUITION IS STEEP AND CHALLENGING

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I can assure you that obtaining the gift of “narrative intuition” ain’t gonna happen for you in a day, either. These things take time.

That wasn’t what one government program officer (at an unnamed agency) wanted to hear last year when I met with him.  He said they liked the sound of Story Circles, BUT … (he actually used the ABT template to say this), their people are too busy, THEREFORE could we shorten it to 5 instead of 10 one hour sessions.

I didn’t say no. Instead, I had Mike Strauss, head of the USDA Office of Scientific Quality Review and coordinator of the USDA prototype of Story Circles write a lengthy explanation of how it was only in sessions 6 to 8 that we started to see the emergence of elements of “narrative intuition” in the participants.

NARRATIVE TAKES TIME

Last week I listened to the further confirmation of this from two of the members of that Story Circle who spoke at lunch time with both of our recent Demo Days at USDA.  No one was more blown away than I as they talked enthusiastically about the value of the Story Circles training.

But here’s the most dramatic aspect of what they said — they were nowhere near certain of the value of the training a year earlier when it finished.  In fact, last August I interviewed Gail Wisler on camera and was really wanting her to say Story Circles was awesome, but she couldn’t and wouldn’t.

Seriously.  I was cueing her, almost verbatim — “So would you say the training has been helpful?”  To my dismay she was filled with hesitancy — saying basically it’s probably useful to some people, but she wasn’t sure yet.

Which is why I was stunned, a year later, to hear them both talk so confidently. Cathleen had used the ABT to give structure to a huge and very complex “project plan” (their central organizing document at USDA) with multiple investigators and various aspects of studying sources of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. She said repeatedly that without the training of Story Circles the project would have been a tangled mess. But instead, it scored the highest rating she has ever received.

Gail was equally certain and enthusiastic.

IT TAKES A YEAR, EVEN FOR INVENTION AMBASSADORS

None of this should be much of a surprise since I talked about it in “Houston, We Have A Narrative.” But I really never totally believe anything I preach, so it’s still pretty remarkable to me when I hear it from others. Which was also the case with the AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassadors this year.

For three years I have been brought in to work with the team of scientist/inventors they choose to give a series of talks during the year. It’s always a bit of a shock for them to be subjected to me — especially the ones who have given TED Talks with over a million views. They naturally think there’s no need to mess with their presentation skills.

In fact, last year more than one complained about having to use up their time with my lecture and notes to them.  And yet this year I was told, before I started with this group, that the same people who complained last year after my three days of working with them, as the year went on and they gave their talks, actually began to incorporate things I had recommended using the narrative tools.  By the end of the year they were apparently telling about the value of the tools and the training in their talks.

It just takes time.

And that’s what Story Circles is all about.

A SHOCKING LACK OF PUSHBACK

So there’s the biggest shocker of all — almost everybody seems to realize this stuff takes time.  Just yesterday I had a conference call with another organization interested in Story Circles.  One of their communications folks said she has been bothered by the one day workshops they have run.  She said she always feels there’s no “follow through.”  As a result, she totally understood the need for the 10 one hour sessions aspect of Story Circles.

All of which gives me great hope.  After 25 years of studying the communications challenge and finally coming up with this whole approach of Story Circles I had feared I would hit the same brick wall that has refused to support my journey. But it’s turning out to be the opposite.  Everybody gets it.  They are ready for the 10 one hour sessions. Even the big boss man at that agency who wanted to cut it to 5. That agency is now participating and ready to run their first Story Circles.

Yay.

It’s nearly two weeks since I bought a new iPhone 6S, but they still can’t activate it because of the tangle of Apple ID’s and passwords they had me create.  I think they’ve lost track of what Steve Jobs preached.  Complex is the default nature of most systems.  As Jobs always said, simplicity is hard work — which is especially true in communication.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, STEVE JOBS? OUR NATION TURNS ITS OVERLY COMPLICATED EYES TO YOU.

iPhone INCOMPETENCE

I really can’t believe how stupid my experience has been over the past two weeks with the iPhone 6S. I bought a new one.  They tried to set it up at the Apple Store, but after spending 1.5 hours trying to upload the contents of my iPhone 5 to the iCloud to back it up, the upload failed because of their poor wireless service (wouldn’t you think the store would have good wireless service?).

I succeeded from home, but then began encountering a tangle of several Apple IDs they let me put into the system (or actually I think created for me — I’ve never created a me.com or iCloud.com email address) somewhere over the past few years.

At one point the guy on the phone started asking me a series of those annoying privacy questions.  They were questions I have NEVER, EVER answered in my life — including “Where did your parents meet?” They met on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The guy wouldn’t tell me the answer but said the answer he had was a one-word city. How could that be?

He asked several other questions I have never, ever heard, yet said they had answers for them.

What a mess. They ended up having to file some paperwork that will take another 3 to 5 days to clear.  All just to activate the phone, which the guy couldn’t do for me because … “It’s just not that simple,” he said, verbatim.

The whole process left me feeling like their security backup systems have gotten so complicated their employees can’t really completely understand them. Which felt like it’s been a long time since Steve Jobs and his obsession with simplicity has left the building.

STORY CIRCLES IS SIMPLE

I guess I’m thinking a lot about simplicity these days because it’s at the core of our Story Circles Narrative Training. The entire program is built around the one simple narrative template of the ABT. It’s working great, and is a thing of beauty to watch how powerful it all is because of one main attribute — simplicity.

But it hasn’t come easy. The ABT is the result of a 25 year journey. Simplicity takes time. We all know this, though I think some of this thinking has been lost at Apple.

The violent crime rate is low, the economy is strong, ISIS is in decline, and Obama has pulled off miracles, but the Democrats are utterly incompetent at communicating any of this.  Trump is running as “The Law and Order President” when there’s nothing close to a crime wave.  It’s really sad.

LOOK AT THE NUMBERS. From the Urban Crime Reporting Program. The per capita murder rate in 1960 was 0.00005. In 2014 it was 0.00004, meaning it is lower today than even 1960. But you would never know this from listening to Trump. The Democrats appear determined to not get in the way of his distortions.

GOTHAM CITY?

The best quote I heard last night in the commentary on Trump’s nomination speech was political consultant Mike Murphy who said in reference to Trump’s fear-mongering speech, “Who knew we were living in Gotham City with marauding gangs.”

Seriously.  Look at the numbers for violent crime.  Everyone knows the murder rate is nearly half today of what it was in the early 1990’s, and it’s even lower than in the idyllic early 1960’s.

Trump is billing himself as “The Law and Order President.”  It’s so completely wrong.  But what is far more wrong is the utter and complete ineptitude of the Democrats to refute this.

It’s straight out of McKee’s Triangle.  Trump is telling a big “archplot” fear-based story that is just not true.  The Democrats are stuck with the real world “miniplot” story of “There is no crime wave.”  It is a tough challenge, but not impossible.

The solution is to tell a powerful archplot story of Trump’s reasons for lying, but do it in an interesting, compelling way that’s something more than just whining about him being a liar.

TRUMP KNOWS NARRATIVE

It’s so sad watching all this.  He is a master of narrative as well as performance.  The convention had a clear, singular, recurring theme of “Make America Great Again,” for which the word “Great” was easily switched out with “Safe” and “First” and anything else inspiring.

What do the Democrats have planned for their theme?  If the past year is any guide, they will change their slogan mid-convention.

The liberal pundits did their best to label the Republican convention as a disorganized mess.  But no, it wasn’t.  It had energy, spontaneity and everyone spoke constantly of aspirations.

I dread hearing the assessments of the DNC next week.  It will be smooth, professional, flawless and … it’s gonna be boring.  I guarantee you the most common critique will be “too scripted.” That’s been a problem with previous conventions.  This one seems inevitable for that label.

It’s a mess.  How can this moron be running as the Law and Order President when there isn’t any sort of a crime wave?  And how can the Democrats be so inept as to let him get away with it?

Filmmaker Michael Moore already predicted Trump will win.  To quote Han Solo, “I got a bad feeling about this.”

From sadness to joy in less than two minutes.

SOME THINGS AREN’T MEANT TO BE RETURNED.

CHANNELING A SPIRIT

I want to share a great moment I had on Saturday at the wonderful memorial event held at University of Washington for the late, great grandaddy of marine ecology, Robert T. Paine.

As I’ve made clear in both the dedication of my first book and in a blogpost, Bob meant a lot to me.  It was 40 years ago this summer that I first met him and he became my undergraduate advisor.  We stayed buddies over the years, trading lots of emails in recent years.  As Peter Kareiva conveyed so nicely last week on Andy Revkin’s NY Times blog, Bob embodied the very best of everything in ocean science.

At the memorial Bob’s daughters brought lots of his possessions — from books to t-shirts to marine ecology equipment — for everyone to take home whatever they fancied.  I’ve never seen that done before, but it was very cool — a chance for people to keep with them some of his enduring spirit — especially his books in which he had written his name.

I was milling around catching up with folks when a friend walked up with a copy of my recent book. It was the copy I had sent Bob last fall and written my heartfelt words of thanks on the opening title page.  She gave it to me, innocently assuming I’d want it back.  I stood there holding the book, starting to fight back an unanticipated wave of emotion, thinking, “No.  I don’t want this back.  Ever.  I gave it to him.  Why would I want it back?  It almost feels like rejection.”

It was disorienting.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  I wanted to throw it in the trash.  Something — anything — get it away — this was spiritually wrong.

But then … I swear, within less than a minute I looked across the room and said to the group, “Oh my goodness, is that Chuck Birkeland?”

He was my invertebrate natural history professor that same summer I met Bob Paine and one of the many incredibly cool, fun and smart marine ecology faculty I got to know in the U.W. Zoology Department.  The last time I had seen him was 35 years ago in Palau.  In fact, below is a photo of us headed out for a dive on that trip, plus he and I both worked on the crown-of-thorns starfish problem.

He had come from Hawaii for the event.  I walked over to him, he immediately smiled, said he had enjoyed my recent work on science communication, BUT THEN … he said, “Of course, I haven’t had a chance to get your most recent book.”

Bingo.  Amazing.  THAT was what was meant to happen with the copy of my book inscribed to Bob Paine.  And it did, as you can see in the photo I insisted we take (above).

I left the event with the biggest smile on my face in a long, long time.  Incredible how some things like that work out.

Bob, your copy of my book has ended up on just the right book shelf.

HEADED OUT FOR A DIVE in Palau, 1981. Lanna Chang on the left, Chuck Birkeland in blue shirt on the right, seated next to me.

This woman has deep narrative intuition and a pretty funny story to tell.  It’s not a perfect story, but she does a great and hilarious job with what she has.  Let’s listen to it then break it down for structure.

I DON’T DO WELL WITH “EXTRA”.  Jessica LaShawn needs her own show.

DELIVERING THE LITTLE PURPLE MAN IN SECRECY

I love this story so much.  One of my best friends and favorite people in the world is the singer/actor/dancer Carol Hatchett who was one of The Harlettes (Bette Midler’s backup singers) for many years and a frequent backup singer for Prince.  I got to know her twenty years ago when she starred in my USC musical comedy film, “You Ruined My Career,” which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 1996.  I’ve heard lots of stories from her about Prince over the years just like this one.  She and everyone she worked with loved him, just as this woman does, but he did have his particular ways.

So it’s a hilarious story, not just because it’s really funny, and not just because she’s really funny, but most importantly, because this woman is a great storyteller with deep “narrative intuition” — the key element we work to establish with Story Circles Narrative Training.

To analytically show you how good she is, I break down her story into individual elements and explain their dynamics.  I’m using a mixture of templates here — ABT, the Logline Maker, and The Story Cycle.

STORY ANALYSIS USING THE ABT AND OTHER TEMPLATES

This little exercise is a chance to see how excellent storytelling is equal parts science and art.  The science part is the template structure that we can spot.  The art half is her ability to know which specific details to include.

One of the key things to note is how little superfluous information is delivered, yet at the same time everything in her story is clear.  This is the sort of optimization process a person with great narrative intuition is able to achieve.  Great storytelling is about knowing which key details to keep in, and which can be cut out.  The set of criteria for the selection of material is too great and complex to do it analytically — you just have to have the intuition for it.

Central to everything is the ABT dynamic at multiple levels.  Sometimes she used the actual And, But, Therefore words.  Other times you can feel their presence and I’ve added them in parentheses.  Keep in mind that “so” is the word that is usually used in speaking instead of the clunky “therefore.”

Also, keep in mind how crucial and essential the “end of the first act” is to effective storytelling. There is no more important element to narrative structure.  If you delay it too long, you bore everyone.  If it happens too early, people get lost.  Knowing where the first act should end may be the single most important element in making a story work.  She pulls it off flawlessly.

LINE BY LINE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

OPENING ABT –  She automatically catches your attention with her first sentence.  The reason for this is that it is narratively structured with the ABT.

She begins by saying, “Hey, y’all, I’m so sad, I just heard about Prince and I love Prince, lord knows I do … (BUT) uh, not as much most of y’all, I haven’t even seen “Purple Rain” all the way through, so (THEREFORE) I just wanted to get on here real quick and tell y’all a story about the time Prince fired me …”

JUSTIFICATION –  As she continues, she explains why she’s telling this story, “ … because some of y’all need to laugh and you need to hear something great to know what kind of man Prince was.”

ESTABLISHING SETTING – The next sentence begins the story by establishing the setting through place and time, “I was blessed to actually work with Prince when I was out in L.A.”  This is similar to the “Once upon a time” cue that signals we’re headed into story mode.

EXPOSITION –  She’s laying down the details with next bit, “I was working the Grammy Awards — I worked the Grammy Awards like three or four years.”  This starts to give us the context in which the story occurs.

FORESHADOWING (with an ABT) –  “And I got assigned to Prince — (AND) now, how they even assigned me to Prince, I don’t know, BUT y’all know Prince is a little difficult, and (THEREFORE) he was a little difficult.”  By warning us he’s a little difficult we can already begin to feel a little bit of anticipation of things to come — we start thinking, “uh oh, she’s working with a prima donna”.

DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTER (an ABT) –   She describes the main character, “I got to work with him AND he’s so tiny and cute — I’m about five seven, like two hundred pounds, so I’m not like a super-little lady, BUT Prince is like right here to me and (THEREFORE) he was so cute.”

END OF THE FIRST ACT –  “So nobody knew that Prince was performing at the Grammy Awards and so it was my job to keep it a secret about Prince, so I go in there and see Prince and he cool as heck, and he’s laid back, and he’s like I gotta find a way to get to the stage, and I was like, oh, I don’t really know how to get you to the stage, we could like walk through here and get to the stage, and (BUT) he’s like “No one is supposed to know I’m here!”  And I’m like … okay — y’all know I don’t do well with “extra” — I don’t do well with extra.”

WHY THIS IS THE END OF THE FIRST ACT –  You can feel she was in her “Ordinary World,” just doing her normal job, escorting the celebrity to the stage.  But her Ordinary World gets overturned and she enters the “Special World” (in a big way) when Prince tells her something she’s never heard before — that the celebrity needs to keep his presence a secret, even back stage.

ACCENTUATION OF THE END OF THE FIRST ACT –  To add a little drama to this important point of structure she says, “So that’s when I knew that this was a set up and this was a chance for me to really get closer to God.”

COMIC PREDICAMENT –   We now have a classic comic predicament established.  We have two characters who have conflicting goals.  One just wants to do her (hopefully routine) job as simply as possible, the other wants do extraordinary things (to maintain secrecy about his presence). That’s a recipe for an entire comedy movie — like the 1981 version of “Arthur” with Dudley Moore (not the remake which flopped) where his butler is basically Jessica and he is Prince — same situation.

THE SECOND ACT BEGINS –  She now starts her journey of addressing the problem she has posed (trying to get Prince to the stage in secrecy).  She says, “Again, Prince is difficult — most of y’all know that — so I figure out a way to navigate Prince and try to sneak him through, BUT he sees this little roller car, and he’s like “Hey, get me on this roller cart.”  Okay, you know those little rollable hanger-like closets, but on wheels — its like a closet on wheels.  He gets his little tiny butt on this little roller cart, and he hides behind a sheet on the roller cart, and he wants me to push him.”

THE STAKES GET RAISED –  She has set up her journey which seems reasonably simple, but now she’s going to make it more dramatic as she says, “Now I cannot see where I’m going on this little roller cart in front of it, and we are trying to navigate through traffic and we are on set for the Grammy Awards.  And I don’t really know where I’m going.  It’s just little old me pushing this big old heavy metal roller cart with Prince on it.

FURTHER RAISING THE STAKES –  Here she makes it clear how difficult the job is.  “You cannot drop Prince.  You cannot hit Prince.  And you can’t say “Hey, help me,” because Prince is on here.  It’s up to me to keep it a secret because Prince is on this little ugly cart.  So Prince has got an attitude because I’m bumping into stuff.  Then I get an attitude because you get an attitude with me.  You can’t come for me — I don’t care if you are Prince — I love you Prince — I already done got cussed out by Stevie Wonder cause I kept saying I’m sorry — and you come over and you got an attitude with me because I can’t push you on this little roller cart, sir.

FIRST CULMINATION –  The story has been built way up to the point now where something has to give.  And it does as everything unravels and plunges her into her “darkest hour.”

DARKEST HOUR –  This is where our hero, Jessica, plunges into disaster.  She says, “So Prince gets mad and he tells me that I’m FIRED!  He told me to get the hell out, and away.  And I was like, you little old man — you — I swear … And let me tell you what he did — he flung his hat — you know how Prince flung his hat — and he got on the little roller cart and he stuck his little six and a half shoe out, and he starts scooting, through the sheet on the little roller cart, and he just left me there, looking stupid and dumb, and I couldn’t get back in the dressing room.

PLANT AND PAYOFF –  She gets a final accentuation here by doing what is called “plant and payoff.”  This refers to when something in a story is “planted” early on as it is mentioned and may be lightly funny but doesn’t seem that necessary to the story, yet it will have impact later if it is “paid off.”  A while back she had planted her past experience with Stevie Wonder.  Now she pays it off by saying, “And I was hungry and I ain’t have nowhere to go, and they were like okay we gotta re-assign you to somebody else, and then Stevie Wonder was like, “She probably sorry.”

END OF STORY AT TWO THIRDS POINT –  That ends up being the last bit of narrative and the end of her story.  We’re only about about two thirds of the way through the video, but the storytelling now pretty much ends.  Her next line is, “So, that’s what happened to me and that’s what happened when I worked with Prince.”  “So” is the same word of consequence as “therefore” which means she’s at the “T” in her over-arching ABT and this is all we’re going to get for storytelling.

From here she conveys the general idea that he did make it to the stage, but her comments are no longer tightly feeding the narrative (problem/solution dynamic) as she hits on summary notes about “I learned a lesson” and her friends texting her and “So that’s what happened to Prince,” and some silliness about how he was “the founder of kick push.”

In fact, you can feel how she has exited from the narrative world.  The narrative part of her brain is no longer active.  She’s now just tossing out statements of summary and random thoughts.  It feels totally different.

It’s too bad — we were ready for the story to get crazier at this point, but she sticks to the truth, which wasn’t quite as wild as earlier.

WHY THIS VIDEO DIDN’T GO VIRAL:  NO THIRD ACT

Nobody knows exactly why some utterly stupid videos go viral and others don’t.  Length is a fairly important variable but not absolute.  Most viral videos are about two minutes or less, yet the KONY 2012 viral video has over 100 million views and is nearly a half hour long.

Demographics are essential with viral videos because of the teen demographic — they are the driving force behind almost all viral videos — if you’re not playing to the teens, you’re probably not going viral.  That’s what drove the KONY 2012 video and made brainless entertainers like Pewdie Pie into Youtube mega-stars.

There’s nothing teen-appealing with this video, and at over 5 minutes it’s relatively long, but also it has a major structural problem in that it doesn’t have a third act.  If you view Matthew Winkler’s amazing animated video about The Hero’s Journey you see that Jessica’s story ends with Stage 6 — The Darkest Hour.  She got fired, was banished, and that was it — story over.

GIVING JESSICA’S STORY A REWRITE

What the story needed in narrative terms was for her to quickly regroup after he fires her, decide to get even with Prince for being humiliated by him, concoct some scheme to humiliate him, have it succeed in a wild and hilarious way, then in the final scene have him offer his apology to her so we can see he’s changed and become a better person.  So what’s missing is actually the whole second half of the second act in addition to a third act.

The key point is the story abandoned us in the middle of the journey, which meant that no matter how tremendous her story skills might be — and lord knows she is brilliant and hilarious — unless she made stuff up, she just didn’t have the material she needed to bring the story home.

To put it in simple terms, imagine a sports highlight reel scene of a player shooting the winning basket where we see him pull off a wild move stealing the ball from his opponent, spinning to his left, jumping up, shooting the ball, following the ball in mid-air, then cutting to a commercial.  That’s kind of what she does with the abrupt ending.

And this, once again, is why scientists have good reason to fear storytelling dynamics.  There is often an irrepressible desire to fill in all that missing stuff in order to have a story that will go viral.  When a scientist gathers all the data to tell half the story, there can be a temptation to over-reach for the last parts to make the story arc complete.  It’s only human.  Which is what makes it dangerous.

But at the same time, when it comes to scientists and storytelling, the most important thing is not to blindly shun the whole of “story,” but rather to confront your fears and gain an understanding of what causes the problems.

THE POWER OF STORYTELLING RESTS IN THE SPECIFICS

One final tidbit.  She does a great job of demonstrating this absolutely fundamental rule of how the power of storytelling rests in the specifics.  I repeat this endlessly in Story Circles.  It’s the little details that are so powerful — namely her referring to his “little tiny butt” and his “little six and a half shoe.”  So classic.  She’s awesome.

It wasn’t the greatest story ever told, but it was a perfect front end of what could have been one for the ages.  And now you see why Hollywood is such a fickle place.  They want perfect stories, and they get them — either through the shaping of fact or the manufacturing of fiction.

Filmmaker Josh Fox is the embodiment of misguided environmental good intentions.  His recent environmental “documentary” on HBO titled, “How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change” was labeled “conceptually scattered” by Variety, “scattershot” by the NY Times, and Village Voice called it an exercise in, “exasperating self-importance.”  It is people like Josh Fox who give the entire field of “environmental filmmaking” an unwatchably bad reputation.  He needs to quit.

Environmental filmmaking is hard enough without this guy further ruining the brand.

DEAR “UNEVEN” ENVIRONMENTAL FILMMAKER …

Please stop.  I recorded Josh Fox’s recent HBO film (the lengthy title is above) and tried to watch it, but I honestly couldn’t make it through the opening self-loving credits of him dancing alone in his home.  So I’ll just let Village Voice, Variety, and the NY Times provide the details with their reviews.

I disliked his first movie, “Gasland” enough.  It featured his stooooopid “breathy voiceovers” (as the Village Voice review calls them) that automatically speak of distortion, dishonesty and exaggeration with every breathy word.  This is not “documentary” filmmaking by any stretch of the word.  It is biased, self-certain editorializing at a level beyond even Michael Moore.  It’s the sort of polemics that chase away people who are on the fence about the severity of environmental concerns.

“Gasland” at least had enough storytelling to garner good reviews.  But here’s the problem — both the Motion Picture Academy (it was nominated for an Oscar) and the majority of film critics are lefty do-gooders who are more than willing to give these sort of boring “documentaries” a positive review simply because the films carry their values and politics.  The reviews are generally characterized by a “YOU NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE” attitude.

The truth is, nobody needs to see any movie, ever, unless it is truly interesting, coherent and engaging.  Not “scattershot.”  It really doesn’t work to have “some good sequences” buried in a boring mess.  The entire film needs to be watchable.  The planet really does need tightly scripted, well told narratively structured filmic essays on these issues of the sort that even environmental opponents can concede are well made.

And what is it with these “critics” that they don’t grasp the fact that a film needs to both have the right message AND be watchable to actually advance their beloved causes?

There is no excuse for what Josh Fox does other than self-indulgence, laziness, distraction, and self-delusion.  The goal of good filmmaking is “to tell a good story.”  This is even more important when the credibility of an extremely important issue like environmentalism is at stake.

Supporters of environmentalism need to realize that Josh Fox is hurting, not helping.  If you care about the planet, you should ask him to stop.  What he’s doing is worse than Exxon.  I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but it really is true.

As some great scholar once said (I think), “To err is human, to bore is unforgivable.”

 

STORY CIRCLES NARRATIVE TRAINING.  As Mike Strauss, Director of the Office of Scientific Quality Review at USDA says, “Story Circles doesn’t teach writing, it teaches thinking.”