Discussion 2 Assignment -Business Writer Part 1

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Instead of repetition, you need to have di!erent ways for your hero and the associated characters to take on each complication, to build tension. If the activities you identi#ed for your “Hows” in Chapter 6 are all di!erent, you can simply present the struggle needed to overcome each challenge. On the other hand, if those activities are similar, but necessary, you may need to work hard to #nd ways to identify signi#cant di!erences between the challenges. If you fail to make the hero’s sequence of actions clear and distinct, the tension will not build, and the audience will lose interest in wanting to know how the story will #nish.

Note that repeating an activity is very di!erent than repeating the reason why the hero has to act. You should repeat the reasons to act many times through the story, usually with the sense of urgency, which you will develop in Chapter 12, and sometimes with other factors derived from the work you did developing the “Whys.”

If you #nd that one part of your visual story is having to explain what just happened, you need to reverse it to set up the situation in such a way that the resulting action is an obvious consequence. For example, you don’t say the factory needs to close and then explain that it costs three times as much to produce there than in another location. You introduce the other location and its costs; then say you cannot compete, and the factory needs to close.

We have shown a number of di!erent ways to turn your content into a story, and on the following pages you will see how in the City University Hospital example Tom selects two di!erent basic plots to create two stories for his audience. This example will build to show how one visual can be used with two slightly di!erent stories to provide a consistent message to an audience that has two groups with di!erent reasons for each group to act.

Putting All the Parts Together At the start of this chapter, we talked about plot structure. On the basic three-act structure, we showed the red line of increasing tension to the climax. As you shape your visual story, ask yourself, “How can I build tension by making things harder for my hero?” Look for ways to bring out the key challenges and activities you identi#ed when you looked at the “How” and “What If ” to drive the story deeper into situations where commitment to act is required. To keep the attention of your audience, the story needs to build towards more and more con$ict, e!ort, or struggle.

Unless you are a master storyteller, the use of $ashbacks and a mixed up timeline will break the sequence of events and fail to raise the tension. When your audience has to guess why something has happened (or has not happened), even for just a moment, they will start to disengage. Con#dence that the outcome of your visual story is believable is increased with a strong sequence of cause and e!ect in the story.

Repeat the reason to act, not the action.

Repetition is the enemy of escalating tension. In Chapter 6 we talked about the use of complication and resolution to set the start and end for the activities you identi#ed as you developed each of the “Hows” for the story. If the resolution for each complication always involves the hero personally taking charge and working late to solve the problem, then you are repeating an idea. This repetition decreases in impact each time it is used.

Sykes, Martin, et al. Stories That Move Mountains : Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1040814. Created from capella on 2017-11-06 13:05:35.

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In a Hurry?

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Tom brought together a few people from his team and had a short workshop to test each of the seven basic plots with the ideas

for the visual stories. A first step was to accept that there were two interconnected stories, but with quite different goals. Tom has

made notes on three of the plots that seemed to have a good fit and to record why four were quickly discussed and rejected. Sykes, Martin, et al. Stories That Move Mountains : Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1040814. Created from capella on 2017-11-06 13:05:35.

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Tom and his team have not been able to find a good example organization that would work for a “Voyage and Return” plot, so decide

to use “Overcoming the Monster” and “The Quest” for the two stories. These plots have the same first and fourth stages where we

can synchronize the timeline in the stories but take different perspectives for each of them. Sykes, Martin, et al. Stories That Move Mountains : Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1040814. Created from capella on 2017-11-06 13:05:35.

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! ere is no rule for structure, but there are principles. #e di$erence is crucial. A principle describes what works. In this book, we provide a lot of models, frameworks, and advice. Treat them as principles, not rules. #ere is no one right way to create a foolproof visual story. Slavishly following rules leads to stereotyped stories, told so many times that the audience loses interest in the retelling. A great story may instead use the archetypal basic plots, building on the universal experiences, but introduce new characters and situations to create interest and action.

Are you making the story too positive? Why do some stories help us achieve our dreams? #e stories of explorers, sports stars, and top executives are popular not because they had an easy route to the top but because they show that it takes focus and e$ort to overcome the challenges, rather than hope for the best. Positive thinking or positive fantasies don’t make change happen or support hard decisions. In fact, they work against it. Positive visualization avoids dealing with the setbacks. A realistic plot with setbacks, challenges, tension, or struggle is far more meaningful to your audience.

Follow these steps to make sure you have a plot worthy of your story.

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C H E C K L I S TIdentify the basic plot (or combination) to form the basis for the

visual story.

Map the “Why,” “What,” and “How” to the plotline.

Identify visual patterns to support the visualization of the story.

Identify any subplots or nested stories to develop specific details.

Define when NOW is in your story timeline.

Identify the inciting incident.

Decide when to use real or fictional content in the story.

Check your cause and effect. Everything must

be caused by the event that came before it.

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A character is no more

a human being than the

Venus de Milo is a real

woman. A character is a

work of art, a metaphor

for human nature. Robert McKee, screenwriting lecturer and author of the screenwriters’ bible: Story:

Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

Character

To create great characters,

think of all your characters as

part of a web in which each

helps de!ne the others. John Truby, screenwriter, director and screenwriting teacher

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It is more often an emotional response, not a logical response that makes people act. When we see images of crowds during a famine, it can be hard to even consider where to begin, because a crowd is in many ways similar to a statistic. Although statistics of the number of children dying each day because of malnutrition are horri#c, many of us don’t respond by trying to help change situations based on statistics. When we see numbers, we start to become analytical, and this distracts from the $ow of the story. When we understand situations from an individual perspective, we become emotionally involved.

In #ve minutes of television programming, a news program might start with an interview of a lady cut o! by $oods, and then discuss the broader issues for the $ooded town. Next the program talks about an aid campaign, starting with the story of a refugee, before moving on to talk about the number of people displaced; an advertisement then shows a homeless kitten, followed by details of the number of pets in care. Are you seeing the pattern? We often see stories start with the struggles of the individual, the lives they lead, and the challenges they face. This approach builds an emotional connection, before the story moves on to tell you how many others are in the same situation. Finally, sometimes, the story tells the audience that they can make a di!erence.

To draw members of your audience into the world you create, you have to help them experience it. Use characters to help the audience experience the speci#cs of the world in the story and build an emotional connection; then form a link between the character and something you want your audience to care about.

Business thinking is full of abstractions and the turning of speci#c situations into generalizations. It is the way many people are taught how to work. Instead of looking at improving the process for a person, we look at the process for everyone doing a similar role. Instead of creating a small application for one person to create and record invoices, we build #nance systems and document-sharing platforms for enterprises. This is how economies of scale work, and it’s totally appropriate when looking at what to change and how to make investments.

But it’s hard to get passionate about an abstraction, or a generalization.

The characters in a story need to be individuals who the audience can identify with, not broad generalizations. In Chapter 8, we discussed how you can create personas that represent speci#c roles. These personas need details that make them real and speci#c. They need weaknesses, personal desires, and speci#c issues to deal with. A persona needs to be representative of the strengths and weaknesses of the people in the group it represents.

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We made a di%cult choice with CAST to use the labels hero and villain for the two key roles, rather than the more generic terms of protagonist and antagonist, because we have found that the perceptions and emotive words help the people creating visual stories (you) to develop more focused con$icts. You never need to tell the audience that your characters are heroes or villains, but knowing clearly who they are in your own mind will help you to describe the con$ict in the story with greater clarity and passion.

For our purposes, the hero is striving for the goal that you, the storyteller, want the audience to support. The villain is striving for a di!erent story

goal. There is no implied good or evil, right or wrong. There is no requirement for one character to be, by default, stronger or smarter. Both hero and villain could be paragons of virtue; they just have di!erent belief systems and di!erent motivations. The simple truth is that we need characters in con$ict, one for our goal, and one against.

Over the years, and especially for the standard #lm script, the hero has, by default,

become the good guy and the villain the bad guy. This helps to get the audience to champion for the hero, to create a positive emotional attachment. Unfortunately, because we put #lm stars in these roles, many stories have become about the character himself rather than about the goal. The impression is that the hero must be a somewhat reluctant participant when the inciting incident happens and the villain must at #rst appear stronger or smarter than the hero, making success for the hero more di%cult.

The Hero and the Villain Every visual story has a goal, or a desired future state. This is the ultimate objective that you want the audience to support. Giving the audience this desire to achieve the goal is key to the decision making process.

Characters take on the roles of hero and villain from the inciting incident, the point when an event begins the sequence of actions that will eventually lead to the goal of the story. Their roles come to an end when the climax of the story is resolved and the story goal is achieved.

The hero is a label we give to the character the audience believes is striving for the story goal. The villain is competing with the hero in order to bring about a di!erent goal. Objectively, the story is about the con$ict between these characters to achieve the goal. Every other character in the visual story is there to support or in$uence the progress of the hero or the villain.

Some people talk about these roles as protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist is in essence the lead character in a story, and the antagonist is in opposition to the protagonist. Like it or loathe it, the word ‘hero’ is perceived as being positive and ‘villain’ as negative. We don’t expect the hero and villain in a visual story about business change to represent good and evil as that extreme is not usually very helpful, but we do want them to represent su%ciently di!erent perspectives that the audience would rather choose to support the hero.

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