WRITING SAMPLES FROM THE CONTENT WORLD
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
An Episode of a Podcast
A TV in Every Pocket
From a White Paper for The Storyteller Guild
The great social media revolution isn’t about everyone having a tiny television in their pocket – it’s about everyone having a television station. We have all now become public bodies, celebrities with our own little one-person reality shows. As such, we have all learned to be photographers, graphic designers, publicists, marketers and pollsters. We create moments, stage promotions, check the analytics, and adjust accordingly. So we all know how this works. We know that no one is actually the person they appear to be in the photos they post. That bit of smiling perfection, on a endless holiday of waterfalls and nicely plated food, is just an image we're trying to project, our personal brand. So the world is now populated entirely by branding experts. And, as experts, we can all see right through the artifice of traditional advertising. We all know that there's a bunch of real people with a real agenda hiding behind the logo's and slogans and mission statements of every business and thought-leader and non-profit, just as we're hiding behind our own. A corporate brand now becomes a part of each of our personal brands, turning purchases into mergers and making every exchange an act of trust. Look at the terminology we use: network, chat, fan, story, influence, follow, friend, link, like. Those aren't words that describe transactions, they're words that describe relationships. And relationships are made, whether at a booth in a pub or on Instagram, when we tell each other our stories.
The Crazy Power of Telling a Story
From a White Paper for The Storyteller Guild
Storytelling is man’s primary evolutionary trait, the single attribute that carried us to the top of the food chain. More than a tool for entertainment or explanations, a story is a little repository for information - culture, lessons, and instructions - allowing us to pass it down through the subsequent generations to help ensure that there are subsequent generations. Stories are also the way we organize those generations. Shared mythology is what bonds thousands of people together into a single army or millions into a nation, making stories the basis of all human civilization. And as enormous as that is, stories serve an even bigger and more fundamental purpose - they're our device for making order out of chaos. The stories of the Big Bang and Genesis are templates we lay over the universe to make sense of what is otherwise just a lot of atoms bouncing around in a void. Like a pair of decoder glasses, a story reveals and hides things until clear relationships emerge between what happens (the plot), to whom it happens (the characters), where it happens (the world) and why it happens (the theme). When these pieces fit together, we have a story. And when that story is told, a common truth is recognized and something entirely new is created. It's something powerful and almost magical that can’t exist within any single one of us but only in between us - meaning.
