412. Storytime 📖

The latest books I've read about storytelling

Apr 03, 2023

Hi there 👋

Have you read any good books lately? I just started a new one called Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. I can’t vouch for it yet, but it did get me thinking about a handful of books I’ve read lately on the topic of stories and how we are influenced by the narratives around us. Check out my list below. And let me know of any personal picks of yours for favorite books!

Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan

(ᵔᴥᵔ)

Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.

Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.

The stories we tell

Often, I’ll like to read two complementary books at the same time — for instance, a Mark Twain biography and a Mark Twain novel, or a non-fiction book about city design and a fiction book about cartography.

But somehow I ended up reading at least four books recently that all had a similar theme of story.

They were:

(Don’t worry, I do read plenty of light fiction, too. It’s not all serious stuff.)

I thought I’d pass along some of my Cliff’s Notes about these books and explain what I’ve learned — namely how important storytelling is for our everyday lives and our marketing work.

From Rising Strong …

This was my first Brene Brown book (I know, what took me so long!!). I’m not sure if she meant for me to take so many notes that I’ll apply to marketing, but so much of what she had to say about courage, persistence, and creativity seemed to resonate with how I go about my work.

For instance, I believe that the best marketing work happens when you create an environment where people feel safe to take big risks, even if they fail.

Daring is not saying, “I’m willing to risk failure.”
Daring is saying, “I know I will eventually fail and I’m still all in.”

And I believe that empathy and openness are huge elements of successful leadership:

The most transformative and resilient leaders that I’ve worked with over the course of my career have three things in common:
First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception.
And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.

But back to storytelling …

This is her tried-and-true framework for storytelling, both in big-picture Hollywood movies and in our day-to-day personal lives. Stories are told in three acts:

Act 1: The protagonist is called to adventure and accepts the adventure. The rules of the world are established, and the end of Act 1 is the “inciting incident.”
Act 2: The protagonist looks for every comfortable way to solve the problem. By the climax, he learns what it’s really going to take to solve the problem. This act includes the “lowest of the low.”
Act 3: The protagonist needs to prove she’s learned the lesson, usually showing a willingness to prove this at all costs. This is all about redemption—an enlightened character knowing what to do to resolve a conflict.

Like with most stories, the way you tell the story makes all the difference. This emphasis on perspective is one that I hold near and dear to my heart in my personal life and one that I come back to often when I’m putting together brand strategies, content strategies, and marketing plans at work.

As the poet Mizuta Masahide wrote, “Barn’s burnt down / now / I can see the moon.”

From Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire …

We want what other people want because other people want it, and it’s penciled-in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the nth circle of hell where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift, over and over again.

This quote from Dayna Tortorici opens the book. “We want what other people want because other people want it.” This is at the heart of a lot of marketing storytelling, be it social proof, case studies, testimonials, reviews, etc.

Even something like product positioning is about mimetic desire, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden:

The serpent suggested a desire. Suddenly, the fruit appeared irresistible because - and only after - it was modeled as a forbidden good.

We have these mimetic models all over our everyday life, and oftentimes we marketers are the ones creating them.

Models are like people standing a hundred yards up the road who can see something around the corner that we can’t yet see. So the way that a model describes something or suggests something to us makes all the difference. We never see the things we want directly; we see them indirectly, like refracted light.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, provided you know yourself well enough and recognize why you’re drawn to certain products and people.

Models of desire are what make Facebook such a potent drug. Before Facebook, a person’s models came from a small set of people: friends, family, work, magazines, and maybe TV. After Facebook, everyone in the world is a potential model …
There are always models of desire. If you don’t know yours, they are probably wreaking havoc in your life.

…

Every once in awhile it’s good to deconstruct the mimetic layers behind someone’s authority and think seriously about how we chose our sources of knowledge in the first place. We might find that the road to our favorite experts was paved with mimetic influence.

Since mimetic influence is so prevalent, it gives marketers a chance to go against the grain. This is where a lot of the best marketing and storytelling comes from:

If you understand the systems of desire that color the choices of people around you, you’re more likely to see emergent possibilities by daring to look in different directions.

Same thing with leadership.

Shift gravity. A good leader never becomes an obstacle or rival. She empathizes with those she leads and points the way toward a good that transcends their relationship - shifting the center of gravity away from herself.

From Trust Me I’m Lying …

Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one …

I’ve found this to be very true in the way that I’ve invested in PR and communication strategies for early-stage startups over the years. PR is a channel for building (as well as protecting).

There are many, many manipulative PR strategies out there today — I’m sure we all have a handful of them awaiting our reply in our inboxes right now. I try to steer away from them, but I do find them to be a fascinating insight into how today’s media machines work. For example:

“Trading up the chain” is a strategy that manipulates the media through recursion. I can turn nothing into something by placing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for a story by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets. I create, to use the words of one media scholar, a “self-reinforcing news wave.” …
It’s a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter is doing is popularizing it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions.

… and …

I once had a client who had been subject to a complete hit job of a piece by a major newspaper. The writer of the article had actually been running their own hater blog about the company that they “objectively” reported on. When the client complained to the writer’s editor, the editor shrugged it off. To reply, I simply had the client write a long e-mail to his staff explaining what happened and laying out the complete (and embarrassing) case against the article. Then we forwarded that e-mail to a media reporter at a different outlet, who published it in full. The e-mail read well and was quite damning - because it had been written for the express purpose of being made public. The original outlet had no choice but to respond and will hopefully think twice about a hatchet job like that in the future.

My biggest takeaway from Trust Me I’m Lying is that the media needs stories, lots of them. Sometimes this works in a young startup’s favor; other times, it works for the general public’s disservice.

A former VentureBeat blogger: “I wrote an average of 5 posts a day, churning out nearly 1,740 articles over the course of 20 months. That is, by all objective standards, insane.”

I’m now a lot more skeptical.

When you see a blog begin with “according to a tipster …” know that the tipster was someone like me tricking the blogger into writing what I wanted.
When you see “we’re hearing reports,” know that “reports” could mean anything from random mentions on Twitter to message-board posts, or worse.
When you see “leaked” or “official documents,” know that really means someone just e-mailed a blogger and that the documents are almost certainly not official and are probably fake or fabricated for the purpose of making desired information public.
When you see “sources tell us …,” know that these sources are not vetted, they are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention.
When you see someone call themselves a “bestselling author,” know that they probably mean their self-published book was number one in a tiny category on Amazon for five minutes and the same goes for every “top-ranked” podcast and “award-winning” website.

From The Stories We Tell Ourselves …

Words matter.

The phrases “we know” and “I am here” – uttered at the right time, in a sensitive tone – may replace the patient’s desolate experience of “nobody knows except me.”

Over to you

Have you read any good books lately? Feel free to hit reply to let me know what you’re getting into.

About this newsletter …

Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster. I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:

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Kevan Lee