The Storytelling Craze

Before we begin, just a heads up.

This episode contains a bit of foul language.

Once upon a time, I knew a storyteller.

My name is David Paskin, and I'm Willa Paskin's dad.

So who are Emile and Sarah?

Emile and Sarah are gloves that lived in the top of our closet.

When I was little, my father would tell me stories about Emil and Sarah, a pair of make-believe gloves on the walk to nursery school.

It started as a way to get me out of the apartment and into the stroller, but then it just kept going.

A new adventure every morning.

I remember that they were leather and there was one where they fell in a bathtub.

Is that right?

Do you remember that?

Yeah, I think so.

They kind of mushed together.

I certainly remember one under the radiator.

I think they had been scared somehow.

You know, there was the hardest time trying to convince them to come out.

Was it hard?

I find it really hard to tell stories to the girls.

What's surprising is it wasn't hard.

You enjoyed them so much, and I enjoyed inventing them, your expression on your face when I was telling the stories.

You were so engaged.

You were in the story.

The stories faded out after I started elementary school.

We carpooled in the mornings and there was always other people around.

But I remembered them.

And I think for years after, if someone had asked me what a storyteller was, the first thing I would have pictured was someone like my dad, by which I mean someone telling a story, a fiction, to children.

Frankly, though, I didn't hear the word storyteller all that much until about a decade ago.

But by that point, something about it had changed.

Do you want to know what the oldest marking technique out there is?

It's storytelling.

The very act of telling a story makes people trust you more.

The people who have the most influence on this planet are good storytellers.

These are just some of the countless videos on YouTube, which you'll be hearing from throughout this episode about the power of the story and its effectiveness as a tool for grown-ups.

Marketers, publicists, influencers, journalists, CEOs, entrepreneurs, activists, architects, doctors, bakers, and winemakers all call themselves storytellers now.

Storytelling has become a buzzword, and I wanted to figure out what's what's the story with that?

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

I love stories, and I've always loved stories, and yet I now view someone describing themselves as a storyteller with a certain amount of skepticism and impatience.

What do you really do, I think?

And why not just say that?

Something we have done for our whole existence as a species has become very trendy.

And so in this episode, we're going to look at where that trend comes from and where it's going.

It's a streamlined near history of a vast ancient practice and looking at it changed the way I think about stories.

And I hope it might do the same for you.

So today, on decodering,

how did storytelling become a product?

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So the story of the storyteller begins a long time ago.

Since the dawn of man,

we like to get around a fireplace and commune in story together.

I'm kidding.

I mean, it's true as far as it goes, but I'm not trying to go all the way back to prehistory.

Besides, you probably know this: that since the dawn of man, we've been telling stories around the campfire to help make sense of the world and each other, to share meaning and myth, because we are storytelling creatures who tell ourselves stories in order to live and who have evolved to respond to narrative in all of its primal power.

And where I want to start is with one of the things that popularized these very ideas.

The first Star Wars movie arrived in theaters in 1977.

It was obviously not the first movie to tell a story, but its creator, George Lucas, spoke frequently about where his story came from.

My last mentor probably was Joe, Joe Campbell, who asked a lot of the interesting questions and made me very interested in a lot more of the cosmic questions and the mystery.

Campbell was an English professor and mythologist who in 1949 wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

In it, he put forth the idea that there was a recurring story in Western mythology, the hero's journey.

Lucas followed its structure beat by beat in writing Star Wars.

Campbell himself came out of the academy, where the study of story had been growing since the 1920s.

In the 1960s, the French structuralists founded the field of narratology, the study of narrative structures and their connection to human response.

Led by theorists like Roland Barth, it rapidly expanded its influence beyond the literary disciplines in the 1970s and 80s.

But it was Star Wars that was the pop face of the idea that we might be hardwired to respond to stories and to certain story structures in particular.

Ones that would just work on people, move them, captivate them, and sure, make billions of dollars in the process.

And as this idea that there might be a story cheat code was percolating through the 1980s, there were two men telling stories to the public whose skill in doing so was becoming their defining characteristic.

Steve Jobs, I think, really what set him apart.

He was extremely good at telling a story.

Margaret O'Mara is a historian and the author of a history of Silicon Valley called The Code.

One of its chapters about Apple is called Storytellers, and it's become a common place to hold jobs up as a master corporate storyteller.

Part of the reason for this is that Apple is one of the first places to be self-aware and strategic about telling its story.

Just compare it to its early competitors, computer makers selling to other businesses using ads that were dense and technical, while Apple was trying to reach individual consumers with flair.

You have this new sort of awareness of if we want to sell to people,

we need to tell them a story about how this product is going to make you better, make you more creative, make you more fulfilled.

The company ran a number of playful ads to get this point across, but the most famous is a Ridley Scott-directed commercial that aired during the 1984 Super Bowl.

In it, gray men in gray clothing are rescued from their mindless Orwellian existence by a young woman who hurls a sledgehammer through a screen blasting Big Brother's commands.

We shall profail.

Only then is it revealed to be an ad for Apple.

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.

And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.

Apple isn't just selling you some other computer, it's setting you free.

That's its story.

And while Apple is doing that, there's another Raken tour around.

And I could say that it reminded me of a story, but

actually, I wanted to tell the story whether anything reminded me or not.

It was about a fellow that was driving down a country road and and that's President Ronald Reagan speaking at a fundraising dinner in 1985?

You can hear from those indulgent laughs that he's famous for telling folksy anecdotes.

And as they did for Apple computers, these stories distinguished him from stiffer politicians who just talked about policies and laws.

They made him seem to a majority of the electorate more authentic.

And yet Reagan was not called the great storyteller.

He was called the great communicator.

Storytelling was in the air, but it wasn't a buzzword just yet.

In the mid-1990s, though, a TV show would help make it one.

Michael Simon, a director, was walking around the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens some years ago with a friend.

It was a rainy May day, and we saw this guy in front of us with like a long flowing white beard.

And I remember elbowing my friend and going, he's going to tell us wondrous tales.

And that, in my mind,

was his storyteller.

In 1996, Simon directed a concert movie for the music channel, VH1.

It featured Ray Davies, formerly of the Kinks, who had just released an album called The Storyteller and was on his storyteller tour.

Davies had started telling stories while performing a few years earlier.

It started off as a prank, really.

I had a book out and it was an autobiographical thing.

And I did readings.

Then I did readings with songs.

When the network decided to turn this one-off concert into an ongoing series with Simon as the director of many, they decided they ought to keep the name.

The series was called VH1 Storytellers.

If I could tell the error just one thing in the pain, they're all okay.

Each episode was a concert in which famous musicians performed before a small, intimate audience and told stories, usually about the lyrics of their songs.

My grandfather passed away recently, and

he was up in Alaska, and I couldn't make it up there because I had to do a video shoot, which sounds really, really crummy, and I felt really crummy.

VH1 Storytellers would air for nearly two decades in heavy rerun, featuring artists like Billy Joel, Melissa Etheridge, Jay-Z, and Jewel, who you just heard.

I think it elevated that term.

I really do.

I mean, at least for me, at least for me, it was this almost silly term, which then became oh but look who's doing it the show helped spring the word into the cultural echo chamber but was that a moment the culture was ready to hear it i think about storytelling as a reaction to something francesca palletta is a sociologist at uc irvine who studies how storytelling affects social movements And to me, it has to do with something that sociologists have talked about a lot, which is the growing power of numbers and commensuration and rankings.

In a world where everything is test scores and automation, where computerization is on the rise and data rules, stories feel like the opposite, like a reprieve.

And in the years around the premiere of storytellers through the new millennia, you see a burst not just in the use of the word, but in storytelling itself, with special attention being paid to the person doing the telling.

This is when This American Life and the Moth get started, radio shows and live shows that foreground the tellers of stories, in the moth's case by putting them in front of an audience.

It's when TED Talks, which have been taking place since the 1980s, get a new owner and start expanding and eventually going online.

It is also not for nothing when we all start going online, where new publishing tools make it easier than ever to tell and distribute our own stories.

And it's also when something new begins to happen on TV.

Not only are adults falling head over heels for a set of serialized dramas, they are paying closer attention than ever to the person behind the scenes telling that story, the showrunner.

So just to start, can you tell me your name and what you do?

I feel like that's a trap.

My name is Damon Lindelof, and I'm a storyteller.

No, I'm not.

What would you say if I wasn't asking you for this episode?

I'm a writer-producer.

Damon Lindelof's first big show, Lost, premiered in 2004.

I reached out to him because I distinctly remember him describing what he did on that show as storytelling.

One of the first times I'd seen the term in that context.

There's a weird surreal quality to any writer who is suddenly like having to kind of describe how they see themselves beyond just I'm a writer.

What I would say is that I am much better, in my opinion, verbally, the talking process, you know, what we refer to as the writer's room.

That's where I've always felt that I am best.

And so there's a direct sort of synonym between telling and the verbal action of speaking, you know, storytelling, the oral tradition that I find very romantic.

Think about being in this position.

You need a good word to explain what you do.

And at this time, storyteller had a lot going for it.

It's unassuming and approachable.

It's easy to understand, but it does have these romantic, mythic associations, plus all these connotations of intimacy and authenticity and connection and fun.

And when a word, when a concept is capturing all of this, when it's being used by famous musicians and TV makers, when it seems to be something people crave, you know who notices?

Capitalists.

That's who.

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So imagine it's the turn of the millennium and you run a big global company.

You have a giant far-flung staff and you need them to be on the same page to get the company culture and care about it.

And maybe you also want your company to feel like and even to be more than a giant money-making machine.

So you bring in a bunch of consultants to address these problems and they return with a solution, storytelling.

Nike had used storytelling to onboard new hires for decades, but in 1999, they did some press about how they had storytellers on staff, including a chief storyteller, and other companies followed suit.

My name is Steve Clayton, and I am the VP of public affairs at Microsoft, but also chief storyteller.

Steve Clayton has worked at Microsoft for the past 25 years.

But when he started, he could tell people didn't think it was particularly hip.

Other companies were being seen as the most innovative tech companies.

And I'm sat inside of Microsoft saying, wow, there's a ton of amazing things in here.

I wish people knew about the company.

And I thought, well, I can solve that.

I'll write some stories.

So about 14 years ago, he started a personal blog blog as a hobby about the place he worked.

Eventually, the communications team asked him to start doing it for the company.

He now oversees a team that publishes stories about what's going on in Microsoft for internal and external consumption.

My team of storytellers, our job is not to sell product.

Our job is to sell Microsoft.

Increasingly, I think we're in a world where people are identifying with companies.

People are saying, do I have a values match with this company?

Do I believe in this company?

My job is to help people believe in the company.

And while more and more companies were drawn to the potential upsides of storytelling, the way those companies used to communicate with the outside world was imploding.

So advertising was a magic trick for 100 years.

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and teacher.

He's also the author of a number of books, including 2005's All Marketers Are Liars, which has since changed its title to All Marketers Tell Stories.

No matter how bad your ads were, they worked if you spent enough money on them.

And advertising when there were three TV networks and 20 magazines was a miracle because you just bought a lot of ads and you would make money so you could buy more ads.

And 20 years ago, that stopped working.

What happened 20 years ago, of course, is fragmentation.

First with the arrival of cable and then with the arrival of the internet.

Suddenly, TV advertisements couldn't be relied upon to reach most Americans.

You had to reach them some other way with a message they would hopefully not hate.

And one thing people don't hate that in fact they love and spend lots of time and money on is stories.

When it comes to getting your message across and connecting with your audience, storytelling is one of the most powerful tools available.

That's just one of the videos aimed not at big corporations, but at small businesses and individuals.

It's part of a cottage industry that pushes storytelling as the ultimate marketing strategy.

Would-be entrepreneurs are being sold on the idea that they need to learn how to tell their story in order to sell that story to other people.

By the mid-2010s, the pitch about the power and effectiveness of the story has become pretty well formulated.

Stories.

For centuries, we've told them.

We tell stories around the campfire.

We write plays, we write novels, shorts.

When you listen to a story, your entire brain starts to light up.

That good storytellers are seen as significantly more attractive and are even considered more important.

There's a Native American proverb that says, the one who tells the story rules the world.

And if you buy into this at all, then you absolutely should employ a storyteller.

On LinkedIn, the number of people describing themselves as storytellers jumps from about zero in 2011 to half a million in 2017.

And one of the people who started describing themselves this way was Everett Cook.

I remember the day that I woke up and was like, oh my God, I'm turning 25.

Like I have to get my own health insurance.

Like that was a very real problem for me.

Everett had this problem because after graduating from college in 2014, he'd gone to work at a newspaper.

He loved it, but the pay was bad.

So he started looking around for writing jobs in the business and startup world.

I applied for stuff for a couple months and just nothing.

These were like entry-level content writing jobs and I wasn't getting any feedback back at all.

He didn't know what to do.

And then he remembered something a newspaper editor had said to him.

No matter what issues you have with the industry, if you can tell stories, you'll be fine.

Now, he wasn't fine, but he had been seeing the word storyteller all over job listings.

I changed the word journalist on my resume to storyteller, and I got a job like four days later.

He was hired to be the chief storyteller at a startup in San Francisco that was like a Kickstarter for investments, raising money for companies through the crowd.

I would help some of these companies like tell their story basically, right?

So there was like a like a nuclear fusion company that wanted to raise on this platform.

So it was like interviewing them a couple times and then creating a narrative arc of their company, what challenges they had to go through to get here and like who doesn't believe in them and who their doubters are.

20 years ago, the story of how a nuclear fusion company had to fight through various challenges would have mattered less than the question, can this company do nuclear fusion?

And can it make money doing so?

But by 2017, they needed to have a story to get anyone to give them money.

Everett, who has since returned to journalism, had been hired to do something that had become necessary and crucial to raising funds.

But that also meant that storytelling had become another box to check.

You're basically just writing content, right?

And I think content that isn't particularly deep because it doesn't have to be.

These stories that are supposed to be humanizing and authentic and persuasive,

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So where are we in this story?

It's the mid-2010s, and we're as story mad as ever.

We're thinking of everything from Oscar races to presidential elections in explicitly narrative terms and beginning to binge TV shows in earnest.

Every company website now has a page for our story, and Snapchat and Instagram roll out stories features.

And these are just two of the many social media platforms enabling us to tell our stories more easily and directly than ever before.

Stories that are often viewed as little engines of connection.

The children's television host, Mr.

Rogers, always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story.

I'm not sure this is true, but it's a lovely sentiment.

It comes from a 2012 TED Talk about stories given by Andrew Stanton, the Pixar director.

Google liked this TED Talk so much they used it for a 2014 commercial.

We all love stories.

We're born for them.

They can't be artificially evoked.

This commercial is called We're All Storytellers.

Think about this assertion for a moment.

We're all storytellers.

Not only are stories an innate, fundamental way for humans to connect with one another, not only do we all have our own, we're all capable of telling them.

And if you believe Mr.

Rogers, that can make people love you.

Of course, everyone wants to be thought of as a storyteller.

But just because we want to be storytellers, just because we all are storytellers, does that mean we're all good storytellers?

Like recently, I read an interview with somebody who designs roller coasters and he referred to himself as a storyteller.

This is an Austrian graphic designer named Stefan Sagmeister in a video with 300,000 views.

No, fuckette, you are not a storyteller.

You're a roller coaster designer.

And that's fantastic.

And more power to you.

But why would you want to be a storyteller if you design roller coasters?

Or if you are storytelling, then the story that you tell is bullshit.

It's like this video is from 2014, which is around when what I think of as the storytelling backlash begins.

A backlash that has only grown as the storytelling craze has continued.

I think, you know, the term has been co-opted by basically every industry at this point.

Rachel Handler is a writer at New York magazine.

It feels like this really, really transparent way to try to be like folksy or something.

They're selling you something, but they're pretending that they're not.

And it's just, I just find it really more than most sort of like euphemistic, weird advertising words, I just find it incredibly like repellent.

Even Steve Clayton, Microsoft's chief storyteller, is a little down on the word these days.

I think the term has become incredibly diluted to a point where there is definitely some skepticism and some cynicism around it.

What's the version that makes you roll your eyes?

Just the one that has no substance.

So, you know, when you say to somebody, like, I'm a storyteller for X or Y, and you go, great, well, tell me the best story.

Well, either they can't really answer that immediately, or it immediately becomes a sales pitch.

Stories are magical, but they're not a magic trick.

Just using the word story doesn't cast a spell.

The story has to cast the spell.

And a sales pitch is not enchanting.

But the problem, if you're in the business of storytelling, is that as we've become more familiar with this technique, a story might not be enchanting either.

This was underscored for me when Steve said he was going to tell me.

The best story I've ever been involved in at Microsoft, and it happened on July 29th, 2015.

And if I'm getting my dates right, was the day that Microsoft launched Windows 10.

That day, I was stood in a village called Nanyuki in Kenya.

And I was stood there with our CEO, Sachinadella.

And we were stood at a school called the Gakawa Public School.

And there's a photograph of

two women at the school.

One is the principal of the school.

And the other lady in this photograph is Tabitha, who was one of the students at the school at the time.

And next to them is a piece of technology or behind them, sort of set

against this steering backdrop, is it basically brings wi-fi uh to a to a space now if you think about the wi-fi you have in your home you have this little box called a router or a you know a gateway and that probably gives you wi-fi in your house and that wi-fi technology has and

the impact is this that the day that technology was switched on it changed 30 000 people's lives because 30 000 people in the community of nanuki suddenly had access to the technology that we take for granted

they suddenly had access a few months ago one of the people i met on the trip and I stayed friends with sent me an email and they said, hey, Steve, I just thought you'd might like to know that Tabitha graduated from university.

But that,

that to me is, is a story.

No,

I mean, it's actually a very good business story.

Like it's...

But why is it a business story?

Why is it not?

What is

that story not just about

a great accomplishment of Microsoft's?

No, it's about the mission statement of this company.

The reason I say that's the best story I've ever been involved in is because that day it illuminated the mission of the company to me, empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

This story clearly meant so much to Steve.

It was personal for him, as is Microsoft.

But to me, It was just a thing a giant company did.

And it does sound pretty good, though who knows what Tabitha makes of it all.

But it didn't get me excited.

And to be honest, I don't know that there's any story about Microsoft or any giant business that could.

Another way to say this is I did not find Steve's story persuasive.

But as it turns out.

Often stories are not persuasive.

They don't work.

The research on how effective stories are is really, really mixed.

Francesca Paletta, the sociologist again.

This kind of faith in the power of story rests on the fact that we've all heard terrific stories.

We've all been moved, inspired, persuaded by a story.

What we forget is how many stories we've heard that we ignore, that we don't believe, that we reject.

And so much of what we reject has to do with what we already believe, the stories we're already telling ourselves.

You just heard that happen.

My personal belief, my narrative that companies are only out for themselves, met Steve's story of a school in Kenya.

But sometimes the stakes are much higher and prejudices lead people to judge the tellers and subjects of stories quite harshly.

It's often easy to blame people for the problems they face.

And so hearing the story about an individual who's become homeless or is addicted to drugs or been raped, it's really easy for an audience to blame that person rather than, as the tellers want, lead them to feel a sense of empathy.

Unfortunately, Mr.

Rogers might not have this one right.

Just as stories aren't always persuasive, they aren't always engines of empathy.

And they also aren't always benign.

Despite all their good connotations, you only have to look around to see some stories that are really pernicious.

I've been doing stuff on conspiracy theory and COVID for the past two years.

Ian Brody is a professor of folklore at Cape Breton University.

And, you know, one of the basic things is that no matter how preposterous, no matter how amoral, though no matter what the flights of fancy that are required, conspiracy theories are awesome stories because it's good and evil.

Conspiracy theories of all kinds are conspiracy stories with every piece of information made to fit into a riveting narrative.

A narrative that is totally insensible to things that don't fit its arc.

If the story of QAnon is the way you organize the world, every new piece of information is just another plot point in that story, or the story of a stolen election, or a story about how COVID is a scam.

Life isn't actually a story, and treating it as such can take one to some pretty frightening places.

I talk to a lot of people to try to tell this story, the story of storytelling.

And my sense from pretty much all of them is that storytelling as a tool isn't going away anytime soon, but the craze has definitely crested.

A team of political scientists at the University of Cincinnati just did a study this year on the perception of the word storyteller in a TV news context.

They ran a survey that in part asked people what they thought of the word.

70% of respondents felt negatively about it.

It made them feel like journalists who called themselves storytellers were untrustworthy, telling tales.

So a lot of people actively don't like it, at least in certain contexts.

It seems inevitable that we'll move on to some other word, that some other idea will take hold, whether it's data, straight up sales pitches, or vibes, as I saw someone suggest.

No buzzword, buzzes forever.

So much of what bugs me about the contemporary fixation on stories is the focus on outcome, on what stories and storytellers can accomplish, what they can make the person who hears them do, buy, feel, believe.

We might even approve of the things a storyteller wants their story to do, but it's such a narrow way to think of stories as a tool.

When I think back to, say, those moments with my dad, what's meaningful about those stories is not that they got me into the stroller.

It's the connection between me and him, the moment he invented this new way of looking at the world, these stories about gloves who go on adventures told to a nervous little girl.

Another way to say this is, my cynicism about storytellers as a business strategy is just the flip side of my idealism.

My gut feeling that storytelling is about more than making us do stuff, that they are this ancient, genuine, unruly, unpredictable thing that can bind us all together.

And part and parcel of that idealism is that I also believe telling good stories is really hard.

Should I read you guys a story?

Yeah, Princess Alita.

What's Princess Alita?

A few years ago, my older daughter split her chin open on the sidewalk and when we were in the emergency room to distract her, I made up a story about Princess Alita who had to solve the mystery of who stole all the candy in her kingdom.

It worked.

She held it together through the stitches.

And she has been asking for Princess Alita stories ever since.

And I wish I could say I told them all the time, but I don't because I find making them up really hard.

Stories are magical, but they are also a minefield.

When they're done well, they can seem effortless and they feel authentic, but they are crafted and they take skill and hard work.

Most nights, we read other people's stories to her and her sister instead.

Okay, do you want to pick a book?

I want to do

If You Come to Earth.

Oh, I like that book.

Those stories are also toiled over, edited, revised, and revised again.

Thank goodness for the people who made them.

Thank goodness that every night we can take their words

and be storytellers too.

People mostly live on land in big cities

and small towns or tiny villages

or just in the middle of nowhere.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Decodering is written and produced by Willa Paskin.

This episode was edited by Dan Coyce and produced by Elizabeth Nakano.

Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts.

Merrick Jacob is our technical director.

So many people took the time to help me muddle through and clarify my thoughts about this topic.

Thank you to Brian Calfano, Sonal Choksey, Bill Baker, Adam Fisher, Marilyn McPhee, Linda Kaplan-Thaler, Peter Brooks, Josh Glenn, Leo Marks, Lisa Miller, Brad Rika, David Boji, and Grace Ann Roseal, Melanie Green, and everyone else who talked this one through with me.

You can find me on Twitter at Willopaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

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