The Dow of Pooh

The Dow of Pooh

Chapter 2: A picture is worth a thousand words, but a story is worth a thousand pictures -
in which you learn to captivate with the art of a good sentence.

Many of my business clients are worried about their grammar, and they hand me emails marked redder than blood as their managers marked their prose to hell. The last angry red mark is usually something like “I don't understand this,” and sometimes in some rather strong language So my clients ask me, “grammatically, what's wrong with this?” Often, the answer is “nothing.” Technically, the sentences are often fine but completely incomprehensible. My clients get caught up in the details of how to write. “I'm worried about the subjunctive.” Or “should I have split the infinitive? I don't remember.” The grammar isn't the problem. I want you to let go of the technical exigencies of the English language – we're not linguists, we're trying to get things done. Stop thinking of grammar as a subject, a predicate, a direct object, a subjunctive whosimiwhatsis followed by an infinitive that you don't split. Think of your writing as a story, a story consisting of a setting, a character and an action.

I'm a playwright, a screenwriter and a business writing coach and a business writing instructor at NYU. You may not see the overlap, because writing drama or comedy and writing business are two very different activities. One requires that you say what you mean, and one requires that you say precisely what you don't. However, I'm not going to talk about the difference between the disciplines, rather the thing they have in common: story. All writing needs a story. I'll say it again: all writing needs a story. I don't care if you're writing a three panel comic strip about a beagle and a bald kid or you're writing about the necessity mark-to-market valuation of assets; good writing always has a story.

But when you look for “storytelling” in your job description, it seems to be missing. You say “I'm not here to tell stories, I'm here to state the facts, justify my actions and not get fired.” However, from instructions on how to hunt for wooly mammoth to the Bible to the best Annual Reports, information is best communicated through story. I'm not asking you to turn your 10-Ks into a fable about a moose, I'm asking that you consider every sentence of what you write as a story in itself, and every sentence part of a larger story. Every sentence needs a story. I'll say it again: actually, no I won't. But I will ask you consider how a sentence can be a story.

What is a story? A story is a process of thought that leads one person to imagine what another person is thinking. So what does a story do? It focuses one person into thinking like the other person by engaging the imagination. And how does a story work? We already know – stories are in our bones, our DNA, our blood. Pick a story you love. Think about it. What's the first thing you think of?

“Here he is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.” - Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne

“The sacred soil of Ilios is rent with shaft and pit...” The Iliad, Homer

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Star Wars, George Lucas.

What is the first thing you think of when you think of a story? The first thing is where and when. Where are we starting? For Winnie the Pooh, we're starting “here.” For the Iliad, “the soil of Ilios” and of course we know where Star Wars starts. Stories need context, and the context that most grabs the imagination is the setting: the time and place. Every time you indulge in a memory of your childhood, what gets you started? Place and time. Every sentence should start with context, a way for people to place the story. And there's no better context than place. Orient your reader first. The setting might be the discussion of earnings, or it may be a galaxy far, far away, but align your readers to the where before moving on to the next part of the story.

What is the next part of the story? Every story has two things in common: people and action. People doing. It's that simple. In a sentence, people act. Remember that sentence: “in a sentence, people act.” Consider that sentence. The context, the where is “in a sentence.” The next step in any story is the who: “people.”

Human beings are social animals; we couldn't survive without other people. To us, people are the most important things on the planet. And yet we constantly forget to include them in our sentences. Too frequently we'll start with an abstract concept that seems to rise ex-nihlo, or out of nothing. “Customer service is a top priority at CompanyCo,” is not a powerful story. The star of that sentence, the one who's out there doing stuff (in this case, not much - 'is') is customer service. In the movies, I've never seen Customer Service is never played by Harrison Ford. In your childhood, do you remember customer service ever coming to your rescue? Did customer service ever buy you ice cream? “At CompanyCo, we value our customers,” is a much better story.. We start with a setting and then comes the who. And next, we come to the meat of the sentence – the action.

The point of every story is the action. And it's the last thing people remember. In a PowerPoint presentation, the last slide is generally “Next Steps,” or the action you want the group to take. When you read correspondence from a colleague the one thing you want to understand is “what do you want me to do about it?” And that's what you remember, the action, the last portion of the email. When your colleague closes the email, the last thing you want him or her to read is what they're supposed to do. And so it is with every sentence, the meat comes after the salad. Where, who and action.

So a sentence is a story, and each story consists of “where,” “who” and “do.” It's that simple. Setting, character, action. See? When you cast your stories with humans they're more interesting. When they do stuff, we follow them. Try to give every sentence some human interest. Or at least give every sentence a more interesting subject than “Customer Service.”

The Stakes

In screenwriting, when we submit a script that people won't read, it's accompanied by something called a “logline,” or a one-to-two sentence summary of the entire two-hour picture. You have to distill every action, motion and character into two (preferably one) sentences. And every screenwriting textbook will tell you to give the buyer a setting, a character, an action... and then something very important – the stakes. Stakes are a reason to care – in screenwriting stakes are life and death. In business, stakes are time and money. When you write to a customer, a colleague or manager always keep in mind “so what? What if I don't listen to you?” We'll talk about the So What in the next chapter and how to get people to listen and hang on your every word.