Hacker News Reader

Comment by z3n0n | Hacker News Reader

Pet peeve: I hate how the term “storytelling” is being used in marketing. No you are not “telling a story”, you are selling fucking shampoo and paper clips. The real art of storytelling in a literary sense has absolutely nada, zilch to do with this stupid framing of promotional language. Pray tell, does good literature “solve problems”? No it fucking doesn’t. In fact, one of the first rules of fiction is to always create more problems to move the tension along. It’s what makes a story interesting. So yeah, you’re just slimy advertisers, stop having Shakespearean allures.

View on HN

I feel your pain. I recently bought a book on storytelling and it contains no hints whatsoever on how to tell a story. Just like this article, the book it's all "connect with your audience by opening with an emotional story" but not a single paragraph on why (say) a joke told by a comedian has much more punch than when I retell it.

Obviously reading about comedy is probably like dancing about architecture, but nonetheless I'd expect some discussion on the delivery itself. Otherwise it's just "storyplanning".

Stories and jokes are made of, or at least delivered with, words. Architecture (and music, as Elvis was referring to) are not.

Yes. I've been trying to take about what makes good storytelling, or even stand-up comics who can keep an audience interested in a wandering story, and those skills are what I'd think would be valuable in a business setup. Seems like readable analysis of this sort of thing should exist.

"story" is used more abstractly then that.

Literary storytelling is one thing, but we also function in daily life by taking in raw information and then distilling it down to a simpler narrative, aka a story. Effective communication accounts for this and creates a narrative for you to latch onto.

Creating a narrative, aka, story telling. It's ready to see the inspiration for the phrase, although yes the result is an overloaded term.

I guess. But a story is different than a list of facts. It has a protagonist and narrative elements that imply a sequence of events and causality.

Many people do in fact try to tell people about products or services by just stating a bunch of facts.

But as humans we’re wired to understand stories, not lists of facts. We don’t really process facts without context, and if there’s no main character or narrative our brain instinctively fills that in.

So sure, marketing isn’t literature. It might even be a horrible thing that should not exist. But there is in fact substance to the conversation. There’s marketing that tells and story and marketing that doesn’t.

Storytelling is about making stuff up, including the meaning of words. If marketers are telling you a story that what they're doing is called storytelling, well, that's pretty clearly metastorytelling.

Everything has a story attached to it. And different people have different stories attached to the same things.

Intentionally composing that story and getting it into the heads of other people, for whatever purpose, is storytelling. Marketing, propaganda, self-promotion, employee culture, nationalism, the best version of yourself that you tell to other people. All of that and more.

You can faff all you want about the pretentiousness of it, but the process of composing a narrative is not sacred (we all do it), and it's not the exclusive domain of people who write books.

Furthermore, this "story" is actually a promotion for his book. It's amazing how many articles in legacy media these days are paid advertisements for someone's latest book.

> does good literature “solve problems”?

The last part of a story arc is called the reSolution.

> In fact, one of the first rules of fiction is to always create more problems to move the tension along.

In marketing, story reminds people of their problem. While the product they are selling offers a (re)solution to that problem.

> In marketing, story reminds people of their problem.

You mean creates needs, right?

I'm not sure I understand what are you getting at. Can you explain what you mean?

Not sure either :-). I guess I agree with the parent that I don't like all the noise people can make around "storytelling", when they actually sell a "new revolutionary kind of" paper clips to people who did not need them in the first place.

Ah, you mean convincing people they need something they don't. While that is true for some cases, there are a lot of needs people and companies already have.

I can feel your frustration, you must be a true literature lover. Think of it more as a narrative form of talking about your product in a relatable natural way vs listing features in a boring way.

A lot of good storytelling is about motivations, adversity and solutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com