An important distinction.  The “singular” narrative is part of narrative structure.  The “single” narrative refers to limited exposure.

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY.   Which is not the same as the importance of “a singular narrative.”  Let’s get clear on this.

SINGULAR VS SINGLE (NOT THE SAME)

Last month I was caught out by a grad student at our Demo Day at Yale Forestry School.  I was talking about the power and importance of “the singular narrative.”  He said, “But haven’t you seen that TED Talk about the dangers of the single narrative?”  I had not seen the presentation he was talking about (though should have).  I was left with little more of an answer than the standard Rick Perry, “duh, nope … whoops?”

I found the TED Talk. It’s very good. But it’s not about “the singular narrative.” It’s about “the single story.” The distinction is important.

THE SINGULAR NARRATIVE

This is a fundamental piece of “classical design” or archplot as I have presented in my books, citing Robert McKee’s landmark 1997 work, “Story.” It refers to the shape of the ideal form of narrative structure for the masses. He lists 8 characteristics, one of which is “the single protagonist.” This extends to the basic idea of presenting just a single central narrative. Not two.

Nicholas Kristof does a wonderful job of presenting this dynamic in the real world with his classic short, simple essay in Outside Magazine in November, 2009 titled, “Nicholas Kristof’s Advice for Saving the World.”  He cites the work of psychology professor Paul Slovic who shows how “storytelling needs to focus on one individual, not a group.” Not two individuals. Just one. That is the power of the singular narrative.

I read a very intellectual blogger last year saying, “I’d like to think people can keep two thoughts in their mind at once.” You’re welcome to wish for that, but it just doesn’t work that well for the masses. They prefer the singular narrative.

But there’s also a dark side which is the public’s insatiable desire for singular narratives. Last week there was a prime example of this reported in the NY Times as they told of how the story of the infamous “Patient Zero,” (who supposedly spread the AIDS epidemic throughout the United States in the 1980’s) actually wasn’t that clear, simple or singular of a story. There were earlier patients, but mentioning them dilutes the strength of the story, leaving you with the usual choice of story or truth.

THE SINGLE NARRATIVE

In her wonderful TED Talk, Nigerian speaker Chimamanda Adichie tells of growing up in a culture where the only stories they were told were of affluent white explorers from Europe. In hearing only this “single story” she naturally grew to believe that was all there was to storytelling — it always had to be about these people. She eventually realized it was possible to tell stories about her own people.  Her talk is about the dangers of being raised this way.

It’s a great talk and very culturally important, but it’s not at all about narrative structure. Very important to see the distinction. And very important to understand that you don’t have to tell only singular narratives, but failing to do so comes at the expense of size of audience. This is a fundamental narrative principle, as old as Gilgamesh (and Enkidu!) himself.

The Narrative Index reveals two modes for Donald Trump’s communications.  We know from last spring he scores high when he is speaking off the cuff with his solo unscripted voice.  But when he is scripted and less impulsive he scores much lower.   Last week he gave an unfunny, unappealing, flat and unclever speech at the Al Smith dinner.  If his Narrative Index for it was low, it would suggest it was written by his staff.  If high, it was probably written by him.  The actual score was 38, suggesting the madman created the whole mess by himself.

TRUMP HAS TWO MODES as reflected by the Narrative Index (But/And ratio). On his own, he has high narrative content. When others get involved, it drops. But look at the mess that was his Al Smith Dinner speech last week. It suggests he did all himself.

WATCH ME NOW

The patterns that emerge from the Narrative Index data are not necessarily causative — just correlative.  But they do continue to show a lot of consistency.

First off, we know that debate performances in general, being unscripted, tend to score higher than speeches.  This has been consistently true all year.  You can see it once again for the three Presidential debates.  Both Trump and Clinton score above 20 for all of their debate performances. They also showed no overlap in their scores (Trump: 28, 30, 30; Clinton: 20, 21, 21).

Trump continues to flounder with his speeches.  Once upon a time he shot from the hip and always scored above 20.  But ever since his victory in the primaries and his decision to go with a teleprompter for his speeches (seeking the advice of “veteran strategists”), his scores have been as low or lower than Hillary.

The implication is that other people put their hands into his prepared speeches, as he tries to speak diplomatically, causing the Narrative Index to plummet. The debates have allowed him to return to old form, producing higher scores.

If this really is a valid pattern, then we can use it to ask the question of who the hell wrote his unfunny, off-putting, crap speech last week at the Al Smith dinner?

Look at his score — a 38.  Kinda suggests little old Donald wrote it all by himself, thinking he would unleash his brilliance and charisma on the crowd who eventually booed him.  The speech sounded like nobody else had a hand in it.

Just imagine the guy as President.  Yikes.

This is important.  Very important.  In one of our Story Circles Narrative Training sessions recently a scientist was presenting his ABT about herbivory in rain forests starting off with basically, “The climate is changing and in rain forests we are seeing …”  This is one of the fundamental communications mistakes being made by the science and environmental community — the assumption that climate change is “the new normal” — that everybody knows about it now.  No, they don’t.  My advice: think through what the “ordinary world” means, realize most of the public is still grasping what climate change means, then start your narrative in the pre-climate change world.  Climate change is the central “problem” now.  To assume everyone has already advanced to that stage runs the risk of losing a lot of people, as well as coming off as aloof.

WHAT MAKES A HERO? This is from Matthew Winkler’s excellent TED ED video of 2012 that everyone should watch a few million times. Yes, it may feel like it’s “too Hollywood” if you’re a scientist, but make no mistake, your entire life is about problem/solution which involves the journey from the “ordinary world” (you have no problem) to the “special world” (you are seeking a solution) then back to the ordinary world when you’ve solved the problem. A crucial aspect of this for communication is to be sure you’re starting in the right ordinary world.

TIPS ARE FOR TURKEYS

As a rule, I’m hesitant to get involved in offering up “tips for communication” because it reinforces this sad notion many people have of thinking they can get great at communication without ever investing the time to engage in an actual training regime such as Story Circles.  The bane of what we do with Story Circles are the short attention span folks who say, “Great, three words — and, but, therefore — I’m all set, thanks, all done.”

It’s not that simple.  I don’t care if you pride yourself on being “a quick study.”  You’re missing the point — it’s about building narrative intuition, which takes time.

But for the sake of discussion and because this is a fairly profound element, I’m going to share this one bit that we’ve encountered in Story Circles.

WHAT IS THE ORDINARY WORLD?

This is a question that my buddy Mike Strauss, head of the Office of Scientific Quality Review for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has locked onto a lot in our training.  He has now overseen 5 Story Circles at USDA, including the prototype that produced the effusive testimony of participants a year later that I told of in July.

He has taken to stopping a lot of people as they are working on their narratives and asking them to think through and clearly define the “ordinary world” of their project.  If you’re not familiar with this term you can get a good first introduction with Matthew Winkler’s excellent TED ED film.  This is the whole dynamic you get with Story Circles — other people poking and prodding your narrative, helping you develop it as clearly and strongly as possible, ideally before you even start writing much of anything.

Everyone should stop and ask themselves this question for any project — what is the ordinary world — the conditions before the problem is identified.  Describing the ordinary world is where you lay out elements of agreement — things that everyone in your audience knows.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION TAKES TIME

And this is where a lot of climate communication is making a mistake.  I moderated a panel on climate change for the Malibu Public Library Speaker Series last month.  We had 3 climate experts and 200 audience members, almost none of whom had any background in climate science.  Most didn’t have the first clue of what climate change really means.

But even for the people who are climate experts.  It doesn’t hurt to open with a tiny bit of historical review — that once upon a time our climate wasn’t changing this rapidly.  We can all agree on that, and agreement is where you want to begin.

This is a tough dynamic because so many people want to begin by impressing you with how much they know.  It often takes a true expert to feel comfortable enough starting slowly, but it’s essential for communication to work well.

And in the meanwhile, Story Circles is so amazing — we learn something new with every circle we launch — like the one we started this week at Tufts University with five faculty members.  It is our 12th circle so far. Lots more to come.

It’s called “the singular narrative.”  It’s what the masses demand.  It’s a narrative principle that goes back at least 4,000 years — to the story of Gilgamesh — as Hollywood screenwriters know.  This morning we finally see behind the scenes of an epic tragedy.  Just as I began saying in January on this blog, Hillary Clinton has lacked a clear singular narrative/theme/slogan/message from the start.  This spring I communicated all this for three months with a Hillary campaign staffer who tried to pitch my thoughts to the campaign but hit a brick wall.  The tragedy is that from the start Hillary had a clear singular narrative and one word theme of EQUALITY.  It was there in the opening 250 words of her candidacy announcement on June 13, 2015 as she talked about “No ceilings” and said it VERBATIM with “what it takes to build a strong and prosperous America: “Equality of opportunity…”  But she eventually stumbled upon the shallow slogan of “Stronger Together” which says nothing about equality.  She could have used this singular equality narrative in the spring to join forces with Bernie Sanders who had the same theme at the core of his campaign.  They could have united under a single historically powerful word.  But the hacked emails now show the truth of what happened — utter narrative chaos.  She ended up with only one direction to go — attack Trump’s stronger singular narrative.

THE ONE THING (THAT THE CAMPAIGN HAS LACKED): These days I open my talks with a 30 second clip from the 1990’s movie, “City Slickers” that has come to be called “The Curly Moment.” Jack Palance as the cowboy-wise Curly tells Billy Crystal he needs only one thing in life. Billy Crystal asks what that one thing is. Curly replies “You gotta figure that out for yourself.” As the hacked emails of Hillary’s Campaign Director John Podesta now show, her campaign never did figure that out.

DIRECTIONLESS:  HILLARY

In August of last year I heard NY Times columnist and three times Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman talk on “Meet the Press” about how Hillary Clinton’s campaign lacks a message.  I sent him an email agreeing with everything he said, he wrote back a nice, albeit sad, reply of basically “yep.”  By the fall, as my book, “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” was coming out from University of Chicago Press and I was living and breathing narrative principles as I became inescapably aware that her campaign was suffering from complete narrative chaos.

Last month The Guardian ran an editorial with the title of, “Hillary Needs A Slogan.”  I forwarded it to Friedman, he wrote back, “Yep, thanks for reminding me.”  It’s been a very sad thing to watch.

DIRECTIONAL:  TRUMP

At the same time, Donald Trump showed deep narrative intuition from the very start by launching his campaign with a single, narratively powerful slogan, “Make America Great Again,” from which he has not veered one inch since that day.  Less than a quarter of the way into his announcement speech he first mentioned it in reference to the existing system “… they will never make America great again.”  Since then he has repeatedly circled back to that singular, narratively structured message endlessly, including two nights ago in the latest debate.

In my book I present the ABT Narrative Template, which I have termed “the DNA of story.”  It is the template of “and, but, therefore.”  Trump knows this template at a deeply intuitive level.  His slogan has been, “America is a great AND mighty nation, BUT we’ve slipped in the world, THEREFORE we need to make American great again.”  This has been the DNA of his campaign from which, despite all his incompetence and ineptitude with gaffes and anger, he has not veered at all. It is probably the central element that keeps his disastrous campaign still alive and enabled him to score respectable marks in this last debate.

“A STRUGGLE TO DEFINE WHAT SHE STOOD FOR” (NY TIMES)

That was how two NY Times writers put it this morning in their article about the hacked emails of Hillary’s campaign director John Podesta.  These words are no surprise to me.  In March I managed to contact James Carville with my thoughts about the absence of a clear narrative to her campaign.  In an effort to be of assistance, I pointed to the narrative tools I present in my recent book.  I do this stuff for a living these days.  I’m not a crackpot — I currently work with five government agencies including NASA, National Park Service and USDA, and a variety of other science and environmental organizations as I have for over a decade.

He very kindly referred me to Hillary’s campaign, a staffer contacted me in April, we spent three months with me offering up my specific analytical suggestions, and he valiantly trying to generate some interest.  Ultimately, as the hacked emails reflect, the cacophony of voices in her campaign made it hopeless for any outside voice — even if the person has authored three books on narrative.

“VEEP” WARS (HBO)

The hopelessness of my plight was spotted early on by one of my Hollywood buddies who pointed me to the episode of HBO’s “Veep” where the campaign speech writers have a big cork board covered with different Post-it notes representing the contributions of each of the competing speech writers.  He warned that in a situation like that the chances of an outside voice being heard were zero.  The hacked emails now confirm those comic scenes are a direct representation of what really has gone on.

The NY Times writers were alluding to exactly this when they said, “the exchanges among her aides are sometimes less “House of Cards” than “Veep,” HBO’s scabrous comedy dissecting the vanity and phoniness of Washington.”

THE MISSED “NO CEILINGS” THEME (HER STAFF)

The text of what the NY Times has written is painful to read for any Hillary supporter such as myself.  They talk about how the hacked emails show, “ …the campaign’s extreme caution and difficulty in identifying a core rationale for her candidacy, and the noisy world of advisers, friends and family members trying to exert influence.”

If not EQUALITY, she at least had the potential theme of “NO CEILINGS!”  She mentioned this at the start of her announcement speech, then a year later gave her primaries victory speech in a building in Brooklyn for which in her second sentence she noted, “we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one. ”

She could have had the crowd shouting “NO CEILINGS!  NO CEILINGS!  NO CEILINGS!” all night long.  And as one political veteran friend of mine has noted, that would at least be “aspirational” in the same way as “… GREAT AGAIN!” is.  But instead they ended up with the narratively empty “Stronger Together.”

DEAFNESS OF TONE  (HER STAFF)

How could her campaign committee have been so totally tone deaf to the need for the singular narrative?  “No Ceilings” could have been the war cry for millions of people across the land.

Here’s a final sad quote from the NY Times writers that sums it all up, “  The private discussions among her advisers about policy — on trade, on the Black Lives Matter movement, on Wall Street regulation — often revolved around the political advantages and pitfalls of different positions, while there was little or no discussion about what Mrs. Clinton actually believed.”

ONE LAST THING:  IT’S NOT TOO LATE

There’s a month left.  She’s gaining momentum.  Just start shouting it out — EQUALITY!  NO CEILINGS! Something, anything that has clear, singular narrative dynamics (Stronger Together doesn’t).

It’s there in the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — that’s the slogan, with of course the one minor gender updating needed now.  Shout it out and bring this train into the station.

Good debate moderators usually score all the way up to the 50’s for their Narrative Index (BUT/AND ratio). Their job is to “advance the narrative” which results in them squaring off the candidates by using the word “but” frequently — as in “Your opponent says this, BUT you say …” Lester Holt’s reviews were so-so for his job as moderator of the first debate. His Narrative Index was a meager 17. Kind of figures.

Nice guy, but …

GOOD MODERATORS INTERROGATE: For the Democrat debates last spring, every group of moderators scored 25 or higher, putting Lester Holt at a level below them.

MODERATORS NEED TO “ADVANCE THE NARRATIVE”

One of the interesting things that emerges with the Narrative Index is the role of good moderators. It’s their job to “advance the narrative” — to not just sit there letting the candidates go on and on, but to push them into positions of conflict. They do much of this using the word “but.”

A good moderator repeatedly points out “you said this BUT your opponent says this — THEREFORE?” The result is good moderators end up with a high Narrative Index score (BUTs to ANDs).

You could see this in the third Democrat debate last spring with major veterans Martha Raddatz and John Muir. Together they scored a 56. Here are some representative questions from them, all structured around the word of contradiction, “but.”

RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, the Department of Health and Human Services says more than 17 million Americans who are not insured now have health coverage because of Obamacare. BUT for Americans who already had health insurance the cost has gone up 27 percent in the last five years while deductibles are up 67 percent, health care costs are rising faster than many Americans can manage. What’s broken in Obamacare that needs to be fixed right now?

MUIR: You have said it’s your goal not to raise taxes on families making under $200,000 a year a goal. BUT can you say that’s a promise as you stand here tonight?

RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, first ladies, as you well know, have used their position to work on important causes like literacy and drug abuse. BUT they also supervise the menus, the flowers, the holiday ornaments and White House decor. I know you think you know where I’m going here.

MUIR: As I pointed out the CEO pay, 200 percent of their time — for that family of just 2 percent. You’ve all said, “you would raise the minimum wage.” BUT Senator Sanders what else – speak to that household tonight. 20 years, just a 2 percent raise, how as president would you get them a raise right away?

Lester Holt, as moderator of the first Presidential Debate last week received mixed reviews (that was actually the headline in People Magazine). Aside from allowing Trump to run wild, he just didn’t do much advancing of the narrative. And so, not surprisingly, his Narrative Index was a mere 17.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the two candidates — Trump scored a 25, Hillary a 20. Both of those values were about average. Which is how most people felt about their performances. Neither of them delivered a blazing, inspired vision for the nation. They both just jabbed and defended in a fairly directionless way.

They actually started off in the normal fashion with Hillary launching a barrage of “and, and, and” statements as Trump presented the singular narrative of how China and other countries are having their way with us. But the divide quickly vanished as Trump lost his composure and Hillary got feisty.

From his convention speech to last night’s debate, Donald Trump has tried his best to generate fear around crime in America.  I still love Republican strategist/skeptic Mike Murphy’s comment after Trump’s Republican convention speech — “Who knew we’re living in Gotham City?”  The statistics don’t support what Trump is saying.  But the problem is he’s selling a “positive pattern” narrative (meaning a clear pattern, not a positive vibe).  The truth, in this case, as is so often the case, is a null narrative of “there is no net increase.”  This is a classic example of how null narratives are a tough sell.

A SHIFTING BASELINES PROBLEM. If you started tracking the murder rate in 2010 you might accept Trump’s hysteria about crime being out of control. If you set your baseline at 1992 you see it’s dropped in half. But that’s not as good of a story.

FIGHTING TRUMP WITH A NULL NARRATIVE

In “Houston, We Have A Narrative,” I told about the difficulty of propagating null narratives, meaning situations in which there is no clear pattern.  This is part of the challenge of establishing innocence in the legal system.  People always want a culprit, which is a positive pattern (definitely need to come up with a better term for this than “positive” because everyone is so fixated on the popular definition of that word these days as being happy and uplifting, grrr …).Fighting for innocence is another example of trying to convey a null pattern (we don’t know who did it, but not this person).

Our brains are programmed to seek the positive pattern.  Trump, having deep narrative intuition, has a good feel for this.  He knows how to exploit these programming flaws of the average brain.

And that’s what he was doing (again) last night in the debate as he talked about the murder rate. But as the data above from 538 Blog show, the murder rate today is half what it was two decades ago.  It’s just that lots of people don’t know this and it’s hard to get them to hear it because … it’s a null pattern.

Everybody wants a good story.  Declining murder rates isn’t one.

This is how I will be viewing the first Presidential Debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  There are plenty of things to listen for in the debate, but as far as narrative dynamics, these five may be the most important.

THE NARRATIVE INDEX.  I posted this video (edited by John Rael) on Thursday.

1) STORYTELLING

Ronald Reagan was of course a (supposedly) master storyteller.  I always thought his stories were hokey, but billions didn’t.  Neither of these candidates are good at it.  Hillary is too cold and fact-oriented, Trump is too impatient.  It would be good to open with a specific story of some sort set in a specific moment in time involving a single individual as the main character, but neither have ever shown much ability for this.

2) NARRATIVE (Problem/Solution)

This is Trump’s “strength.”  He is a dealmaker with a short attention span.  He likes to get down to business quickly, and it shows in his Narrative Index (But/And ratio in the video above which Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing did a nice post about).  Listen for this. But also see if he doesn’t manage to get through lots of narrative loops (And, But, Therefore) by cheating the system through over-simplifying (“we like the Mexicans AND we want them to be part of our country, BUT there are too many illegals, THEREFORE let’s build a wall”).  See if Hillary is able to answer questions by quickly getting to the problem being addressed, or if she goes off with little focus.

3) OVER-ARCHING NARRATIVE

They both have supposed themes.  Trump is Make America Great Again.  Hillary is Stronger Together (though it’s not clear who this is directed at).  See if they open with their theme, then close with it (coming full circle like the Monomyth).

4) QUICK OPENING

Hillary has a tendency to open with four paragraphs of thank you’s that destroy her momentum. Trump opens quick.  Watch for this. One would hope she would open with a focused fierceness and a tone of “this is no time for pleasantries.”  It would also be really nice if she were to open with an ABT structure along the lines of the opening of Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

5) HISTORY

The description of the ordinary world ideally involves drawing on history.   In the Gettysburg Address, before mentioning the civil war, Lincoln described the history of the nation: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, AND dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  He started his second paragraph by talking about the present problem, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war”.

Hillary could do so much by drawing on the history of equality in this country, but who knows if she will.

Hollywood instructors are discovering Hegel’s Triad (which underpins the ABT).  It started with Frank Daniel in the 1980’s, moved to the “South Park” guys, and now can be seen in what current screenwriting superstar Aaron Sorkin is teaching.  Sorky’s template is bascially the DHY, geared more towards for advanced writers and advanced audiences who are completely up to speed with the stories he’s telling.

AARON SORKIN TEACHES SCREENWRITING.  “You don’t have an idea until you can use the words ‘but, except, and then’.”   It’s what you’d expect from a sophisticated master — the DHY.

“BUT, EXCEPT, AND THEN” = B1B2B3

It’s time to talk narrative templates, which all track back to Hegel.  He was the boring philosopher of the 1700’s (seriously, he tends to be the guy philosophy students most dread having to read). He’s the guy who identified “the Hegelian triad” of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”

A century ago, students were raised on it.  Then it became uncool.  But I predict a day soon where everyone circles back to realizing that in a world of too much information, the triad is an essential tool.

In “Houston, We Have A Narrative” I identified the narrative ideal as being the ABT structure of And, But, Therefore.  I then laid out The Narrative Spectrum where we end up with AAA when there’s no narrative at work, and DHY when we’re wanting complex/potentially confusing, hyper-narrative content.  The latter is what Aaron Sorkin is preaching in his workshops, which is what you’d expect for the narratively challenging medium of television.

SORKIN LIKES IT NARRATIVELY THICK

Aaron Sorkin is a Hollywood icon.  He won an Oscar for the screenplay of “The Social Network” and was the creative force behind “The West Wing,” “Newsroom” and lots of other great shows.  Now he is teaching screenwriting.

Above is the trailer for his course.  In the middle of the trailer he brings up a triad of “but, except, then.”  Which is great.  But … it’s a step beyond the iconic ABT structure.  As I have argued in my essay on The Narrative Index, television demands A LOT of narrative content.  It won’t tolerate AAA, and is often comfortable with DHY when it’s part of an on-going show.  This is what Sorkin is teaching.

THE “BET”

So let’s talk about his BET template (But, Except, Then).  The first thing he’s doing is skipping the A of the ABT and just starting with the B (But).  You can do this.  You’re basically “cutting to the chase.”  It’s great for short attention span folks and TV audiences who want the start to start right away.  But you do it at the risk of losing much of the audience, which isn’t a risk at all if they have already watched three seasons of your show.

You also lose the chance to set up your story – planting at the start the overall context an understanding of why this is an important story.  If it’s just another episode of a TV show that we already have been following for lots of episodes, then it’s probably a good thing to not waste a bunch of valuable screen time.  But if you’re trying to write a world-changing essay, you probably don’t want to lose the exposition at the start.

Then he moves to the E (Except).  This is the same as Step 4 (“The stakes get raised”) of the Logline Maker that Dorie Barton developed in our book “Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking.” We established an initial source of tension or conflict with the B, then we add complexity to it with the E.

This means something like, “The father is found lying dead in his back yard and it looks like he shot himself EXCEPT the angle of entry of the bullet appears to have come from next door.”  So basically “the plot thickens.” And then Sorkin wants to thicken it more.

The third element Sorkin wants is a T in the form of “Then” instead of “Therefore” as we find in the ABT.  This means that instead of moving towards “consequence” he’s just wanting more conflict.  So we find the dead body, we realize the shot came from next door, THEN … we find out the next door neighbor just left town. Now we have a complex story to chase after.

All of which means he’s basically wanting a big chunk of DHY. Which is great for engaged, sophisticated audiences.

Sorkin is a brilliant writer AND I would expect nothing less than a bunch of DHY from him, BUT you’re going to lose people if you’re wanting to tell clear, simple narratives to audiences that haven’t been following your show for three seasons, THEREFORE you should stick to the ABT for now, and use it to understand more clearly what Aaron Sorkin is doing at a more advanced level with his BET template.

“Is the ‘And, But, Therefore’ Template the DNA of Story?”  That’s the title of the Reddit AMA session I’ll be doing next Thursday from 10 to 1 PDT.  It’s a chance to answer questions about the ABT, Story Circles and the upcoming fall schedule of Story Circles Demo Days at Yale, Genentech, Tufts, UCLA, AAAS, Smithsonian, and USDA.  The page for it will open a couple hours before the start time, allowing you to post your questions.  We did one last fall, it’s a lot of fun, so please join us! The link will be posted here on September 7th (the day before the AMA). 

ASK ME ANYTHING (AMA). My friend Park Howell at Arizona State said last year (and I quoted him in “Houston, We Have A Narrative”) that the ABT is “the DNA of story.” The more we work with the ABT in Story Circles, the more I am certain he is correct. I don’t think you can boil story dynamics down to anything more concise than “and, but, therefore.” It’s incredibly powerful and gives rise to everything you need to know about story structure — which I think meets the definition of being “the DNA of story.” This is what I’ll be exploring in the AMA.

WHAT’S A REDDIT AMA?

If you’re not familiar with it, a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) is a chance to basically ask me (in this case, Randy Olson, scientist-turned-filmmaker) anything.  We did one last fall following the release of my book and and the webinar I did with the Union of Concerned Scientists.  Now we’re getting ready for a very busy fall schedule for Story Circles, so it seems like a good time to share the details of what’s ahead and what we’ve learned so far.

Hope you can join us Thursday morning!

By “Big Buts” I’m referring to paragraphs that start with the word “But.”  It turns out the New York Times is very fond of them.  We followed the front pages of 5 newspapers for 21 days this month.  The New York Times averaged nearly 2 “But Paragraphs” per day (or “BP’s”).  In contrast, the Wall Street Journal and two small local newspapers had virtually zero BP’s.  Why is this?

FASCINATING, RIGHT? Here’s our data for the number of BP’s per day for 5 newspapers over the course of 21 days. On an average day, the front page of the New York Times has at least two paragraphs that start with the word “But.” BUT … look at the Wall Street Journal and tiny Huntington News …

HERE’S THE DATA, TAWK AMONGST YERSELVES

The data are cut and dried.  Pick up the New York Times on any given day (as we did for 21 days) and you will see upwards of 4 stories that have a paragraph which starts with the word “But.”  It’s usually the third or fourth paragraph of the story.

Why is this?

HERE’S THE ABT EXPLANATION

It’s as simple as ABT — our “And, But, Therefore” template — or more specifically just the AB elements.  The front page of the New York Times, being so widely read, reaching for the broadest audience, having earned the most Pulitzer Prizes, and having the strongest narrative voice in the world of newspapers, also is the strongest “selective regime” for narrative structure.

I’m guessing the editors who shape the front page are not about to let a story amble and wander non-narratively with the “and, and, and” boring structure I identified in “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”  To the contrary, they shape every story, making sure there is exposition/context at the start (the “and” material) then a clear start to the narrative dynamic with the word “but.”

Moreover, when you look at their guidelines, they state explicitly that it’s fine to start sentences with the word “but.”  Here’s a post from their “After Deadline” blog where they address the idea of starting sentences with “But” (their ultimate source is the NY Times Manual of Style):

THIS AIN’T TRIVIA, FOLKS

Journalists seem to shrug and chuckle at everything I mention about the ABT.  Most act like they already know all this — they learned it in grade school.  But they didn’t.

The ABT is the DNA of story.  It comes from Hollywood.  It is both new (never before formalized) and old (the same thing as the age old elements of narrative form, going back to the Greeks, it’s just a new, more concise statement of them).  It’s at the core of our Story Circles Narrative Training that is now going wide.

The ABT opens up a whole new world of text analysis, as we’re deep into now.  There will be lots more coming along these lines in the next few months.  All new.  Which means, no, you didn’t already know this.

THANKS

Big thanks to Daria Epakchi for data gathering and Steph Yin for the NY Times editing insights.