Wyzga On Words

Driving Distracted Video Is Good Reminder: Hands On Wheel & Eyes On Road.

Perhaps like me you were taught to drive with your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.

Today we have our hands on the coffee cup, breakfast bar, newspaper, driving directions, CD changer, mascara brush, Big MAC, toothbrush, cell phone, iPad, iPhone, and the like while our eyes are engaged with what's in our hands and on our laps.

Studies - as well as the increasing wreckage on our roads and in our communities - continue to remind us that driving distracted is the new drunk driving.

Community Medical Centers Central California commissioned my friend and colleague Bonni Montevecchi to shoot a video on distracted driving as part of its National Trauma Awareness Month (May 2012).

Click here to watch this short and well-done piece on what happens in that split second when we take our hands off the wheel and our eyes off the road.  Maybe Montevecchi's work will help save a life.

Billy Wilder Knew How To Look Through A Lens To Get The Story.

 

Billy Wilder abandoned the idea of becoming a lawyer for the life of a reporter on a Viennese newspaper. He eventually came to this country in the 1930s and broke into American films creating some of Hollywood's classic and Oscar winning works as a screenwriter, director and producer.

He once gave the order, "Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award."

A few trademarks: His movies frequently started with narration.  His films feature a sharp wit and characters who frequently try to change their identity, as well as dangerous and manipulative women.

Billy Wilder, who said, "An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation." left a legacy for filmmakers and storytellers alike:  You gotta have a plot.  If you don't got a plot how you gonna make the story come to life? 

TIP:    The plot of your story goes like this:  Who * Did What * To Whom * Under What Circumstances (remember what I wrote about context on Q&A Tuesday?) * Toward What Ends * and, With What Means.

TIP:     Lay out the pieces and listen to how it sounds.

TIP:     If the situation doesn't ring true for you, do it over.

Who Here Remembers All Their Email & Website Passwords? Me Neither.

Time out of mind Monty Hall hosted a TV program called, "Let's Make A Deal."  The gist of the gameshow was playing with contestants who stooped to just about anything to win inane or valuable prizes.  Toward the end of the half hour program Hall would often walk into the audience and ask someone to repeat his or her driver's license number or even a Social Security number.  If you could do that, you would win a cash prize.

How simple.  

Today it takes a memory bank to recall the plethora of email passwords we use for various accounts.  If you have difficulty remembering yours, you are not alone.  Even the celebs are like us mere mortals searching for the password to defy all passwords, as reported in today's NYTimes,"It's As Easy As [email protected]"  Excerpt.

"Just a decade ago, an Internet user rarely had to do more than enter a simple, easy-to-remember e-mail password, recycling it for every online account. But as our dependency on the Internet has grown, so has the complexity of its restrictions.

The end result: a mind-boggling array of personal codes squirreled away in computer files, scribbled on Post-it notes or simply lost in the ether. Virtually any online user without a computer science degree now seems to be one failed login attempt away from a nervous breakdown.

Worse, are the dreaded security questions, which began simply enough (“In what city were you born?”) but have increasingly “moved from the purely factual to things that would require you to have a judgment,” lamented Jeffrey Leeds, the president of Leeds Equity and a fixture on the New York social scene."

Do all these letters, numbers, icons and characters help security?  Not so, say the experts.  Excerpt:

"But it is less clear to cybersecurity experts that having a password with extra numbers or special characters actually makes customers safer.

“People’s choice of passwords is not the real problem today,” said Dr. Joseph Bonneau, a University of Cambridge researcher who studies cyber security. “The real problem is typing in passwords to the wrong Web site, which is stealing them.”

So why are Web sites suddenly requiring users to add special characters or numbers? “It’s security theater,” Dr. Bonneau said. “So people feel safe. It makes the Web sites seem like they’re taking things more seriously, when in fact most of them have no control if you have malware. In absence of a way to tackle bigger problems, it’s easy to add restrictions. They don’t want to seem less secure than competitors.”"

So what are we supposed to do?  A few TIPS from the celebs who seem no better off than the rest of us. Excerpt.

"Courtney Love recommends using mnemonics, saying it was something even a simpleton like herself could use. “You use the lyrics to a song,” she said, for example, “ ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ — litswd-1 — and that way you can’t forget it.”

Still, she ran into trouble when she started using “Hey Jude.” “I kept forgetting if it was ‘Hey Jude, don’t make it bad’ or ‘Hey Jude, don’t make it sad,’ ” she said. “So I gave up on that.”

And the comedian Sandra Bernhard noted that a trick like this would not work for her Time Warner Cable wireless router, which comes with a preselected unchangeable password that ranges from 13 to 28 characters. “We have that one written down somewhere, but where it is I’d be hard pressed to tell you,” she said, adding that her relationship with the cable provider is “an S&M experience without the pleasure.”

Ms. Ullman recently consolidated her most important passwords on a Post-it note beside her computer. The inherent security risk of this was less troublesome to her than her sense of ironic defeat. “I thought the whole point of computers was, you were never going to have to write again,” she said."

Monty Hall would have a field day!  Let's make a deal:

Q&A Tuesday: How Does A Story Change By Revising The Context?

Q:    What changes when you change the context of a story?

A:     You can change the meaning.  The meaning can better suit your purpose. 

For decades now I have taught that a story in its simplest terms can be reduced to a formula: Content + Context + Value = Emotionally Meaningful Story. 

The content is all the facts, evidence, characters, relationships, and the like.

The context is the circumstances within which those facts took place, the characters came to be and how they related among and between themselves.

The value gives us the emotional juice so we can relate to the story whether it is about the Hobbit, a coach on trial for alleged sexual abuse or environmental changes.

It's all a story - and not just a story.

Apple is back in the news.  Not because it is launching another iThing but because its wages and payroll practices are pretty abysmal, "Apples Stores' Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay."  How would Steve Jobs change the context of that story?

Here's an example of how he created a "high ground maneuver" that set a new PR bar, as excerpted from the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. 

The iPhone 4 was dropping calls like crazy.  The reason was attributed to a glitch in the steel rim of the phone. If you held the phone a particular way or covered up the tiny gap that was part of the antenna mechanism, there could be some signal loss.  And it was a problem known to Jobs and the Apple engineers before the launch.

Media being what it is created "Antennagate" and Consumer Reports declined to recommend the phone after rigorous testing.

What's a CEO to do?

Jobs held a press conference.  He did not accept the advice of board members to show a little humility, damp down the pride a bit, offer an apology.  He changed the context of the story, "saying all cell phones had problems."  In a remarkably straightforward and neutral tone he said, "We are not perfect.  Phones are not perfect.  We all know that.  But we want to make our users happy."  Jobs denied the problem, dismissed the criticism, and spread the blame across the board of all smartphone manufacturers

And that was pretty much the end of that.

You could return your phone, but only a marginal few users did.

"Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon strip Dilbert, was also increduloous but far more admiring....Apple's response to the iPhone 4 problem didn't follow the public relations playbook, because Jobs deccided to rewrite the playbook," Adams wrote.  "If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs' words"  By proclaiming up front that phones are not perfect, Jobs changed the context of the argument with an indisputable assertion.  "If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhon 4 to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won't work if it comes in contact with a human hand.  But as soon as the context is changed to all smartphones have problems,' the humor opportunity is gone.  Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth." [page 523]

TIP:     Develop the context of your story to suit the purpose of your persuasion.

TIP:     Developing the accurate and appropriate context for your story is not lying; it owning the genius to persuade your listener or decision-maker.

TIP:    Lessons are everywhere we look. 

13 Minutes With Bill Harley - Storyteller - TEDx: Stories Out Loud.

Back in the day I fell in love with the storyteller Bill Harley.  But then so did many many many folks: storytellers and listeners alike.  We knew so many of his stories and song by heart.  Bill made us happy and nostalgic and giddy and wistful at the same time.

Over the decades, articles, blog posts, and presentations to thousands of lawyers, I've said the same things about the importance and power of story:

1. To make your story emotionally meaningful to the listener, you must marry content (facts) to context (circumstance).
2. We are wired to hear narrative, to sort matters out - even legal matters - in narrative.
3. Narrative is how we figure out the ways to carry on despite the problems in our lives.

TIP:    Click here to take 13 minutes to listen to Bill Harley in his recent TEDx talk on the power that stories have which no media, no social network, no list of facs (or factoids), no computer can match.

A few highlights:

TIP:    We are creatures of context.  Context gives order: what happened before and what came after.  Order gives meaning.

TIP:    Stories are how we assign meaning to our lives, and the lives of others.

TIP:    The stories we create are how we answer the riddle of the problem so we can carry it through our life without it dragging us down.

TIP:    We are not built to remember lists of facts - we are wired to recall narrative.

TIP:    Stories work because they are cognitive & emotional: safe to think about because it’s not about us: we take the story & apply it to us & take us & apply to the story.

TIP:    Know when to speed up & slow down.  Know which visual underscores the narrative.

TIP:    Rely on this: we are genetically encoded to pay attention to the person in front of us. 

AND, if the one in front of us is you, the storyteller, imagine what you can do with the power of story.

 

 

Laughter Is As Necessary As Food, Air & Water.

 

No matter  who we are or where we are; no matter our race or creed or gender; no matter our skin color or language - we all laugh the same.

We just don't do it often enough.  Maybe we forget.

The older I get I find there is plenty to laugh about.  As a former nurse I can tell you with certainty that laughter is the best medicine.

Art Linkletter thought so, too.  Time out of mind Linkletter worked in a TV station playroom asking children questions and listening for their responses.  As you'll see, what made it all work so  well was how Linkletter made the kids feel: as if someone was really listening to them.

Here are a few that might bring a smile to your face:

Kids Sat The Darnedest Things1

Kids Say The Darnedest Things2

Kids Say The Darnedest Things3

If kids are not your thing, perhaps The Laughing Buddha might be.

Or, if you prefer puppies, have I got the farm for you.  Juniper Moon Farm and Day #1 of their three-week old Maremma puppies on Day #1 eating solid food.  Kinda reminds me of growing up with 6 siblings.

TIP:     Laugh well and often.  It certainly makes folks wonder what you're up to.

How Is Live Opera Like Storytelling? Those On Stage & We In The Seats Hear 'BRAVO!'

The Theater!  The Theater!  How I love the Theater!

Story comes alive on the stage.  In its own way, story comes to life on the silver screen.  Both stage and screen are art forms.  But one relies on the audience participation and the other is impervious to it.  

Zachary Woolfe writing for the NYTimes, "The Screen Can't Hear You Yell 'Bravo'," laments a recent trend whereby folks attend a televised broadcast of a live opera while seated in a movie theater.  Excerpt.

"In last week’s Arts & Leisure section I wrote about how watching opera in cinematic close-up, with Dolby surround sound, changes the performance in ways large and small. But the most distorted and distorting part of the HD experience comes at the times when a live audience repays a brave performance with enthusiastic applause.

Without fail, some watching the broadcasts shout “bravo” with gusto. But most of the audience doesn’t quite know what to do, caught between the intensity opera elicits and the sobering realization that, well, they are in a movie theater, perhaps thousands of miles from what they want to cheer and even farther from the relationship live performance engenders.

For all the praise HD deserves, and it deserves a great deal, this disconnect is damning. What the audience in a movie theater experiences is not just the opposite of opera. It is the undoing of opera, an art form in which a present, active audience is fundamental.

“Operas in general,” the critic Marcel Prawy wrote, “can only be properly enjoyed when audience, orchestra and stage form a compact community.” Its history is a history of being there: of applause and booing and rapt silence, the symbiosis between performers and audience. An image, in high definition, 3-D or any other permutation, creates only the illusion of intimacy. It is a cooler, more detached art form."

So, too this "compact community" of teller, story, and story listener is what creates the storytelling experience.  Think of a story like a living organism - like wine, perhaps.  As I have taught for years, the teller brings the listener along in a virtual journey so the listener is actually participating in the life of the story.

The same is true when you are arguing your case, giving a presentation or lecture.  You are collaborating with the listener or decision-maker.  The outcome is determined by members of that "compact community." 

TIP:     To better assure your chances of getting the outcome, verdict or decision you desire, know your "compact community," address your story to their concerns, and invite them on the virtual journey to collaborate and resolve problems along with you.

 

 

Shakepeare In Iraq Reminds Us: Themes & Stories Are Universal.

Where were you when you saw "Romeo & Juliet", the 1968 movie?

I imagine one listen brings it back.

What chance that the themes of young love, fighting families and war could find an audience in Iraq?

Tim Arango writing for the NYTimes, "In Iraq, 'Romeo and Juliet' Portryas Montague and Capulet as Shiite and Sunni," reminds us that stories grounded in Truths with a capital "T" are indeed universal.  No matter where you go in this world, who you talk with, the stories you learn - one thing remains consistent: universal Truths apply to all places.  We recognize them.  Yes, this may be Shakespeare's centuries old story, but the audience in Baghdad sees their own story in the timeless one of the doomed lovers.  Excerpt.

"BAGHDAD — It is not poison or a dagger that takes the lives of the young lovers, but a suicide bomb. The Montagues and Capulets are divided not just by family, but also by religious sect. And the dialogue in the Iraqi adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” is sprinkled with references to Blackwater, Iranians and the American reconstruction effort.

After a recent performance here at the National Theater, where the dramatic arts were once degraded to serve as a dictator’s propaganda, the audience filed out buzzing over the return of serious art to the Iraqi capital. Cloaked as a Shakespearean classic was a lively rendering of their own lives over the past nine years.

“It was about our reality, the killing that happened between the Sunnis and Shias,” said Senan Saadi, a university student who was in the audience."

TIP:    No matter whether you are writing a trial story for a decision-maker, a marketing story for a buying audience, or an inspirational story to motivate listeners, fall back on what you know: the universal Truths we recognize.

 

"Capital Punishment Is Little More Than Revenge."

Mikhail Khodorkovsky writing for the Sunday NYTimes, "Notes From a Russion Penal Colony," relates a story about how one prisoner "refused to cut a deal with his conscience" and thereby helped Khodorkovsky, himself a prisoner in Penal Colony No. 7, Segezha, Russia.

Why is this story important to me?  Because of something a mother told me yesterday.  Apparently, her son is caught between dating two women - but only one does he really care for.  The mother told the son that it was not fair to the other girl and he should break it off if there was no future.  The father told the son, "Everyone dates around with multiple partners - no reason you should be different." 

To whom does the son listen?  That's not for me to say.  I can tell that there might be an answer in Khodorkovsky's essay:

"To cut a deal with one’s conscience — to lie, keep quiet, “not notice,” hiding behind the claim that it’s “for my family.” To convince oneself that “such are the times,” or that “everyone does it.” Who are we really dealing with? How do we find out that the other party — the conscience — refuses to deal? When we find ourselves face to face with disaster? Or later, when we are tallying up our life and become painfully aware that there’s no more dodging the raindrops, that there remain only memories? But by then you can’t change anything."

Along a similar theme - one's conscience - is a movie I watched the other night, Pierrepoint, The Last Hang Man. 

The movie is disturbing in subject matter but made all the more so by the plodding, methodical unfolding of the story.  It mimicks the methodical technique of the executioner.  After watching a few executions the viewer could become almost inured to death by hanging.  I still blinked when the rope snapped.  What saves the story is the hangman's role: he believes what he does is sacred work.  To him, the criminals have "paid the price" with death - the slate is wiped clean.  And he has a hand in that.  This is the power of the story whether or not you agree with his posture, or believe he is hiding behind an artfully crafted excuse to murder.

Who was Albert Pierrpoint?  He was a grocery delivery man whose father was an executioner for England.  Pierrepoint feels a calling to not only follow in his father's footsteps but to become the most efficient executioner England has witnessed.  He realizes that aim only to be reversed in his convictions about the benefits of capital punishment by one of his last hangings.  After 608 executions in 20 years, Pierrepoint writes, "Capital punishment is little more than revenge."

"'If death were a deterrent,' he wrote, 'I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them at the last, young lads and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown.

'It did not deter them then, and it had not deterred them when they committed what they were convicted for. All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder.'"

Which Is The Better Story? History Or Theater? It May Be History.

Wow!  What a story!

Dan Barry writing for the NYTimes, "Read All About It! Kids Vex Titans!", reviews "Newsies the Musical" on Broadway.  It's a great read about a story on stage.  And how facts are not drama. Excerpt.

Naturally, “Newsies the Musical” — which begins previews on March 15 at the Nederlander Theater — has taken liberties with the facts of the Newsboy Strike of 1899, as did “Newsies,” the Movie Flop of 1992 on which it is based. Pulitzer was in Maine, not Manhattan, when the newsboys struck. One of his daughters was not a muckraking reporter who fell for a newsie. And while Theodore Roosevelt was the governor of New York at the time, he had no bully-bully role in the episode.

“But facts are not what drama is,” explained the actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, based on the Disney film by Bob Tzudiker and Noni White. “I don’t care that Pulitzer was in Maine.” Mr. Fierstein is right, of course. Having won four Tonys in four separate categories, he has more than a passing knowledge of what works in theater. In the case of “Newsies the Musical,” which had a successful run last year at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., he said that he wanted to plumb the historical event for art, entertainment and essential truths, as when these striving children come to a liberating realization: “That they matter.”

But the truth of it is, I find the story of "what brung it all about" to be far more engaging.  It's real life drama.  Yes, facts can be drama.

As posted by Andrew Giddings on September 5, 2010, "Kid Blink and the Newsboys Strike," here's how the newspaper titans grew circulation and wealth:

"In the late 1800s, the two most powerful men in the newspaper industry were Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The USA was the cultural and commercial centre of the world, and it was through newspapers that Americans watched their country flourish.

New York City was the gateway to this New World; a seething, tumultuous melting pot where people of wealth and poverty, of hundreds of different and languages and cultures, having poured in from the docks, were crammed into the town.

Pulitzer and Hearst simplified the language in their papers and added more pictures, so that they could be read by the foreigners and the uneducated. Tactics such as these saw their sales rise to unprecedented numbers; Pulitzer’s New York World reaching seeing circulation figures of around 360,000. Most of these papers were distributed by ‘newsies’."

Who were the "newsies"? Ragamuffin, homeless, starving kids who bought a bundle of 100 newspapers for 50 cents to resell on the streets for a meager profit. What the kids did not sell worked against them - the titans would not buy back the unsold copies.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 increased the need for news.  And then as today, demand increased prices.  A bundle of papers cost the newsies 60 cents a bundle.  Sure, they probably made a slightly better profit measured in pennies.  But here's the rub: after the war the other papers returned to their pre-war prices.  Not Pulitzer and Hearst.  

"Their greed sparked a week-long strike that destroyed their profits and brought New York City to a standstill.

The Newsboys Strike of 1899  was headed by Kid Blink, an eyepatch-sporting boy in his early teens. “I’m trying to figure how ten cents on a hundred papers can mean more to a millionaire than it does to newsboys, an’ I can’t see it,” he said, “If they can’t spare it, how can we?”

Click here to listen to a podcast about the newsboys strike of 1899.

I love the theater!  But I gotta tell ya: The Newsboys Strike makes one riveting story.

TIPS:

1. When you are faced with a question about how to tell a story in a way that will grab the reader or listener by her lapels remember this: your facts take place in a context that carries emotional meaning when underpinned by a value. 
2. For example, a sketch for the newsies story could sound like this: "Newspaper titans' greed makes another dime off the backs of street kids."
3. It's as simple as what I've been teaching, writing and saying for almost two decades: "Storytelling thrives on imagination.  Images touch the heart and become sensations, sensations trigger memories, memories create meaning and meaning leads to listener action." [Diane F. Wyzga]
4. Start here.