Storytelling for Academics

1. Course Introduction: Answer me this question. What is it? Turns a mild mannered academic into a raging rockstar. Okay. Look, it's a slightly frivolous question, but it's actually very serious. We live in the age of the celebrity, public, intellectual, academics, sometimes journalists, and those people from other backgrounds who have a huge following, who are big ideas and you have a massive influence over our social narratives. What is it about these individuals that plucks them out of relative obscurity and gives them fame and celebrity and maybe most importantly, influence. Okay, if you've seen the title of the course, you have a clue. It's all about the story. Welcome to storytelling for academics. My name is Damian Walter, and over the course of the next hour and a half or so, we're gonna be taking a dive into how you, as an academic or an expert in a field or anyone with knowledge you want to share with the world can empower yourself with the art and craft of storytelling to help you do that. I am a writer and a storyteller. I've written for The Guardian and BBC, independent eon Magazine, many other really great publications. I'm also an independent researcher, formerly Director of the certificate in creative writing at University of Leicester. And I am fascinated by stories. And by storytelling. I spent over a decade researching the material that became the rhetoric of story. Of course, that now has over 35 thousand students worldwide online. My work as a writer and did not begin with such great achievements. Actually, my first writing gig, I had a paper route and the local Indian restaurant that I delivered my papers to want it, it's flyer put in the newspaper and I suggested that it needed to be written better, so I rewrote it for them. And I want £50, which at the age of 12 years old was a mighty sum of money and persuaded me I could make money as a writer, which indeed I have. Since then, I really got into writing when I was at university, I first had access to the Internet. And I began before there were blogs, I had a website and I was blogging through my website and I had to look at the web server statistics to see how many people were reading. But at the time I got a lot of readers and I started to think about, and in fact wrote my undergraduate dissertation about the ways in which writing and communication storytelling work on the Internet. And that led me into professional blogging, journalism, feature writing and other areas for many publications. And it was a truly fascinating area to get into in the early 2000s. But what I thought about a lot in that process, on the early Internet, there were things like flame wars and constant disagreements in forums. And it was often occupied by people who have very strong opinions but didn't necessarily have great communication skills. And I was interested in how we show up in digital spaces and in our communication more broadly with authenticity. And I tried to carry that through my work as a writer and as a storyteller. And I mentioned this because I'm absolutely certain that if you are thinking about how to communicate your ideas to the world, you want to do this with authenticity. And you may wonder if storytelling means authentically communicating or is it just making up stories? And that's a totally valid question. What I would say in response is the overall of my experience working wherever I've now worked with dozens of expert individuals. I work with big businesses, tech startups, and corporate brands around the world to develop their storytelling. When I see storytelling with authenticity, it's because the individual or the business involved understands their story and understands the techniques to tell it. It's when don't have these techniques. It's when we don't understand the story that we're telling, that we are tempted to show up in authentically, whether it be online or in other places, we attempted to try and communicate our message in ways that will simply gain attention. And that's why I was so eager to work on this course and think openly about how we can be authentic in our communication. 2. How to be a Rockstar intellectual: I think it's fair to say that we live in the era of the rockstar, public intellectual. They have a course always being academics, researchers, thinkers, public intellectuals who have had that impact upon our public discourses, and a broader sweep of history as well. But today, these individuals seem to have more reach and influence in our society then ever before, if we think about a few names, Malcolm Gladwell, with his huge number of bestsellers now, Blink The Tipping Point. Many others introducing ideas like 10 thousand hours to mastery and many more into our public discourse. Gladwell is a brilliant researcher of the social sciences and he's books are filled with science that he didn't necessarily, or I think in any case develop himself. Here's the popularizer of that science. And what's he doing? He's contributing to our narratives about how with a book like blink or the tipping point, or David and Goliath. How do we as individuals use these ideas from the social sciences to be felt and heard in the world. Bernie Brown, wonderful academic thinker from the social sciences. Her stupendous TED Talk was a phenomenon. I believe that her to TED Talks have been viewed by well over 10 million people worldwide. Best-selling novels, very successful consultancy, business and brand a brown as well as contributing to the narratives of our society. Bringing into those public narratives, issues like shame, how hard is it to talk about shame and Brennan Brown brought that into our discussions. If I think about Sam Harris, the neuroscientist podcaster, initially famous as a member of the new atheist movement, now public speaker on many matters including Buddhism and freewill and other related issues. Why is it that so many people are interested to engage with the ideas of Sam Harris. Again, he's contributing to our public discourse. He's bringing the defense of rationality, the defense of what he might call classical liberalism. And there's a whole audience of people who want these values advocated. And these are just a few of the names I mentioned, Ibram X Kendi, I could mention Steven Pinker. Dozens more, hundreds more, hugely influential, interesting, engaging public intellectuals. What are they all as well? They are all storytellers. They're great storytellers in the traditional sense. Malcolm Gladwell's books are great pieces of storytelling. But they are also aware that they are participants in the stories of our society, of our cultures. And this is the focus of storytelling for academics. How you, as an academic, as an expert in your field, as anyone with knowledge to communicate, taking part in the broader narratives of our society as a storyteller. And I want to give you a set of skills, a way of thinking about story to really make your storytelling clear. Why? Some, some academics, I might say, bad at storytelling. There's a wonderful romantic comedy called smart people from the 2008, starring the very charismatic actor Dennis Quaid. Although he's playing someone less than charismatic in this movie, he's playing an English literature professor called Lawrence whether hold. And he's been through some disasters. He's grieving for his wife. I'm trying to look after his family. He's also trying to write his magnum opus from the discipline of English literature. And he sent it to every publisher or an editor or an agent in New York and it's being rejected over and over again. And his daughter, at the time played by Alan Page, now Elliot Page. His daughter, sends the book to the last big agent in New York, but she has secretly changed the title because Lawrence, where the whole played by Dennis Quaid has given it some kind of long for looting, typical academic title. And she has changed the title. Lawrence whether held finds himself in New York, enemy eating opposite the agent who's like braces, cigar. He's big and assertive. He's able to go out and deal with the world. He's the kind of person that you do meet working as agents. And he says that he hated the book until you close the cover and saw the title and then he shows the title. So Lawrence, whether hold the title is, you can't read. Because inside all of the ideas that this particular academic was communicating to the world was one story, a story about how we read, whether we can read. And whilst it's slightly condescending title, it captures the story at the heart of it, you can't read. This is so commonly the task for academics because we are trained to search for specific trues. We're looking for the facts within our field, however you want to define them. This is our task as an academic to look at quite a small detail portion of the world and understand it whether we come from the hard sciences or social sciences or the arts or whatever it is that we're studying as academics. We're trying to develop expert knowledge in one area. It's not automatically the case. In fact, in many ways were trained against the task of identifying general trues or even universal truths. And storytelling is about the general and the universal. It's about the massive people and people in large numbers and what their experience is. That English Academic? The experience of people he's talking to is that reading for then is intimidating? They have not read all the books that he has read. And he can communicate out to that general story. And this is what we're thinking about in the course. What are the general stories, the universal trues that we as expert thinkers can tell us stories to appeal to. Until very recently, most academics or expert thinkers or anyone trying to communicate their message to the world, would have been entirely dependent upon people like successful New York literary agents to help them in that process. Both to help them find their message. In the way the Lawrence where the hole was helped to find the message you can't read. And also to make the contacts and to have access to the infrastructure of publishing and of the mass media. That until very recently, we were all dependent on. You can point very powerful literary agents like John Brockman, who is the founder of the edge Foundation and has represented over the years people like Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, I believe, possibly Richard Dawkins. I'm not certain about that. But certainly many of the leading public intellectuals of the day. And it would have been essential to find a king pin of the public intellectual game in order to break in. But in the last 2010 years, five years, even this has completely changed. Digital technology, social media, all of the new options of self-publishing, podcasting, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, you name it. There are now an almost limitless range of ways to get yourself heard. This also means the competition to be heard is intense. Which ever Avenue would you want to take to communicate your message, whether it is being published in The New York Times. Getting onto the TED Talk stage, having a best seller in water stones are on Amazon. There are thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of other people trying to access these routes. And what will make the difference? This isn't a course about how to blog, although we'll mention that a little bit, It's not a course about how to podcast or the technical challenges of using social media. Whatever you want to take, what you need is a story, unique, compelling storytelling. And if you have your own story, if you take on board the techniques that we're working through in this course to find and communicate your story. You no longer need John Brockman. You no longer need an agent, an editor, a publisher. You can still walk or these people, if that works best for you, or you can chart your own path through new media or new technologies. And all of this is facilitated by knowing your story. You may be asking and it's a completely valid question. What Is a story. What do you mean by storytelling in relation to the work of academics and expert thinkers? Stories are how human beings understand the world would continually overwhelmed by a world that is far beyond our ability to easily understand. And especially in the year 2021, we are swamped with information about that world from traditional media books, publishing, newspapers, television, the radio, or social media, the Internet. We're not short of facts about our world. But to understand facts, we generally have to place them into the context of a story. To give you an example, in 1988, the physicist Stephen Hawking published a brief history of time. It was not only a huge bestseller, it really defined a new category of popular science writing. And the scientists, and specifically the physicist as Storyteller about the origins of our universe. Because for some decades at that point, physics and other areas of science have been showing us a very different idea of what our university is and what our existence is within that universe. And there was all kinds of information about the expansion of the universe, the nature of gravity, quantum physics, how black holes work. But this all needs to be brought together as a story. And then a brief history of time. Stephen Hawking, who was an expert in his field, one of the greatest physicists of his generation took on the role and the mantle of the storyteller to place all of those desperate facts from the realm of science into formats that human beings can easily understand and place ourselves within. You might also be asking but aren't stories for children. And of course, one of the great consumers of storytelling and children, because early in your life, you're being told all kinds of stories to orient you in the world. And it's amazing. But I can't go into it in this course exactly how deep the meanings in children's storytelling. So I don't mean to dismiss children's storytelling at all. But imagine if we were talking about physics. And somebody said, but isn't physics just pinball tables? And of course, pinball tables are great exercise and a great way to understand many of the laws of physics. Physics itself. And in the same way. Whilst we can enjoy Marvel movies and the cinema or video games are great storytelling or young adult novels like Harry Potter. These are just implementations of storing. The basic principles of story and storytelling are what we want to talk about to help you communicate your ideas to the world. If you want to launch a rocket to the moon, you're going to use physics. If you want to communicate to the heart and soul of human beings in large numbers, you're going to use story, social pedagogy. Thus, this social work in Poland, pacifism and social justice in the teaching of Jesus and the early church. The best kept secrets. Welcome to the new dignity. Saved to library. Who gets the top jobs? The role of family background and networks and recent graduates, access to high status professions, safe to library. How about we look at psychology? Does mindfulness belong in higher education? An eight-year study of humans experiences, I like it. As you might be able to guess. I am looking for a almost random piece of expert academic knowledge from the fantastic academia.edu websites where they have millions of journal papers. And I will be demonstrating how the techniques of storytelling can be used to take almost any piece of expert knowledge and communicates it to a general audience and green infrastructure. It pays to cheat. Tactical deception. In a cephalopod social signaling system. Show me more, paste achieve tactical deceptions. Cephalopods, social signaling system, biology letters 2012, column brown signals in interest. Specific communication should be inherently honest. Otherwise the system is prone to collapse. Very predicts, however, the honest signaling systems is susceptible to invasion by cheats. Can I make a compelling TED Talk from the desk on a lying of cephalopods to find out the answer for sure. Continue to watch storytelling for academics. 3. The Engine of Story: The first rule of storytelling when we are trying to communicate our ideas, our perspective to the weld. And I've told this rule to every one of my clients. I have stood in the boardrooms of major corporations and repeated this role. I use this rule for all of the expert thinkers and professional fault leaders who I have worked with. And the rule is this. When we are trying to tell stories that communicate our perspective to the world. It's not our story that we're telling. We're not telling our own story. We are making ourselves part of the story of others. Everyone in the world is living within stories. Stories that we've across our society and our cultures. And we're all living within our own story. However intelligent, you are, however good, your ideas are, however, vital and central the message that you want to communicate to the world. We are all living within our own stories. And the key to successful storytelling is to take what you see and to make it a part of the stories of others. And I emphasize this because if you don't understand that and if you aren't able to implement it, nothing else from the storytellers toolkit will help you. You often see examples of brand storytelling, expert storytelling, for instance. But someone simply telling their story. And you might indeed relate the events of your discovery to an audience that would be quite valid, but only for the sake of making your ideas part of the story of the people who are following you. My course, the rhetoric of story, began as an exploration of a new pedagogy for teaching creative writing and storytelling. And I realized that story I'm writing well often conflated. And I wanted to take the idea of storytelling and look at it in isolation from the act of writing and in the process of researching that for over a decade, I came to the conclusion. That story has a rhetorical structure. When we tell a story in words on a page, in moving images, on a screen, in sprite, some pixels in a video game, shadow puppets, paintings on an ancient cave wall. There are many mediums we can tell a story in a rhetorical structure of the story remains the same. And it works because it mirrors how we think, how we perceive reality is shaped by stories and storytelling. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to claim that we think in stories, that structure of story, that rhetoric of story has a number of Pods, number of elements, seven in total, that we can use in any setting to understand how to tell really great engaging stories for people who want to listen to us. The first four of the seven parts are called the engine of storing. Every story has these parts in different measures. And the more strongly these parts exist in your story, the more engaging that they will be for the listener or the reader or the viewer. In the year 1999, climate scientist and researcher Michael Mann published what would become the most iconic image of the urgent and climate change movement, the now famous hockey stick graph. This single image published in Michael Mann's research paper was distilled. From years of research, a huge amounts of data and a very specific methodological process. Few people who can tell you about the hockey stick from rarely tell you about the research that underlies it. But it came at a time when the world needed a way to think about climate change. Michael Mann's now iconic hockey stick graph was the act of storytelling that allowed millions, arguably billions of people worldwide to understand what we meant when we talked about climate change. The first part of the engine of story is change. We live in a world that is constantly changing. And we as human beings are wired to be constantly looking for and trying to understand the changes going on in the world around us. The physical changes that we see with an issue like climate change. Stories help us understand the changes going on around us in the world. And very often the public intellectuals, the expert thinkers who we most value, or those like Michael man, who helped us as a culture and a society. Understand what these changes. Think about. One of the major changes happening around us at the moment in the workplace, automation and the rise of artificial intelligence in the Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson did a fantastic job of placing this specific change or workplace automation into the context of what they called the Second Machine Age, the rise of machines for our society. We'd had the Industrial Revolutions, the first machine age, and now we're in the information revolution, The Second Machine Age, they told a story. The gave millions and billions of us context for this profound change that we're living through in how we work. Consider the environment, of course, climate change and all the writers for, and even a few significant ones against the idea of climate change. All of those people who've helped us understand this as a change going on in our world. Health. Of course, at the time of recording, we are within a major global pandemic and COVID 19. And the people we have valued other people who tried to tell us the story of this coming pandemic. One of the all-time most watched TED Talks is by the industrialists, the technologists, Bill Gates. And the next outbreak where he quite accurately predicted the pandemic that was to come. He was making a major contribution to the storytelling that was needed around issues of health to try and prepare us better than it turned out we were prepared for a pandemic that only a few years later became a reality. So ask yourself the question. What changes your audience experiencing? What changes are they trying to understand? The bigger the change that your expert knowledge that your research can be linked to via storytelling in the way. But Michael Mann linked his data to the issue of climate change in the way that Andrew McCarthy and art Brent Olson linked their insights to the issue of workplace automation. What changes does your specific data, your specific insight? What changes does it link to our general or universally true for everyone in the world at the moment. Cast your mind back if you can. The 1970s sex and to the publication of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins would go on to become arguably one of the most famous public intellectuals in the world. And the reason The Selfish Gene was so successful was two-fold. One reason, of course, that the expert knowledge within It was very good. It's very useful. Richard Dawkins was addressing a specific argument within the area of evolutionary biology about whether evolution served the individual or the group. Dawkins answer to this question was very innovative. He said evolution was serving the gene, hence the selfish gene. But there's a double meaning to that title. Because Richard Dawkins also related this to the argument about altruism. And he used his knowledge of genetics and evolution to make the argument or to ask the question, can humans be genuinely altruistic or are we always selfish? And if I remember correctly, Dawkins does make a good defense or the possibility of true altruism. In the selfish gene and two meanings of selfish. The gene is selfish, but are humans innately and ultimately selfish? This is a question of societal change. As human beings, we are embedded within a society. We are fascinated with power, status, relationships, community, friendships, family, all of the ways that we interact with our society. This is the second part of the engine of story. Other we have changes in the world and then we have others, the other people who we are engaging with, living with, working with, competing with, cooperating with. And we're fascinated by our place in society and we need stories that help us understand all of these complex social relationships and example. Much more recent example, the documentary, The Social Dilemma, featuring the expert speaker Tristan Harris, formerly an ethicist, and Google now probably the leading expert in what social media is doing to us. And this was the dilemma at the heart of the social dilemma that we had in a very short space of time, built these tremendously powerful technologies, these huge new corporations that exclusively own and control these technologies that we're faced with, the dilemma of the benefits from social media to the ways that social media manipulates and controls us. That we're only just really beginning to understand as a general public. A hugely important piece of storytelling that took a lot of very complex issues and told them as a great story. That isn't just a great piece of storytelling that turns the discussion across one of the great narratives of the early 21st century technology, the tech giants and social media. Ask yourself, with your research, with your expert knowledge. What social structures are your audience within? What social dilemmas to the people that you would like to talk to face. How do your stories help us as human beings better navigate the complexities of society? Part three of the engine of storing hot one, change. The change is going on in the world around us. To the other. Social relationships structures that we're living within Part Three. Self, self identity are the stories that we're telling about in life. As humans beings. All of us, nearly a billion of us on the planet have our own unique in our existence, our own experience, our own identity in the world. And we're always trying to understand it. As some of the thinkers, the rockstar public intellectuals, Europe become most famous of the peoples who talk on this subject. If we go all the way back to the turn of the century and the work of Sigmund Freud and his seminal paper, the ego and the ID. And I can mention the super-ego as well. I'm Freud's work made these terms the ego, the id, the superego, and the unconscious, which was his core theory about human life. Sigmund Freud storytelling into society that made these terms universally known, which of us don't talk about unconscious and our unconscious motivations in the world. And this developed across almost our entire global society a completely new way of thinking about a life that we have, a conscious life that might be relatively small in relation to the huge depths of our unconscious. But you only know about the work of Sigmund Freud would have remained otherwise obscure because in many ways Freud himself was not a great storyteller. But it helps a member of Freud's family, Edward Bernays, was a fantastic storyteller. He was in fact, the inventor of the public relations industry, which was in a classic acts of public relations. Edward Bernays name for the propaganda industry. But now he's openly about propaganda and how in Western democratic societies he was an American. He lived in New York. We have influential individuals who use propaganda to shape public opinion. And Bernays popularized the ideas of Sigmund Freud to sell his business in public relations and propaganda. And in fact, the public relations industry continues to use ideas of the unconscious Vigo in it to help its task of influencing people. Though other examples are there of storytelling for academics around the area of self. We think about personality. Somebody like Susan Cain and the power of introverts. How many people in the world struggle with introversion, or believe they struggle with introversion until Susan Cain reversed the topic in a great act of storytelling and the power of introverts. Kind argues for the strengths the introverts bring to society, to themselves, to businesses, to organizational structures on how introverts think and work differently. There's great expertise in Susan Cain's writing, but it's the storytelling, the made it one of the best sellers, the air, creativity, your elusive, creative spirit. A very famous TED Talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, who is both an author and an intellectual, who today doesn't struggle to fulfill their creativity. Who is that? It doesn't want to write a novel, compose a symphony, perhaps, become a dancer, do all of these things. Beyond this, found the business be an entrepreneur. All of these areas and creativity in our life. And Elizabeth Gilbert captured a great act of storytelling. Many of the ideas which have been discovered by modern science about how we can improve and sustain our creativity. One of the most eye-catching bestsellers of recent years in the self help genre, an entire genre of nonfiction dedicated to the self and how to help the self. The subtle art of not giving a bleep by Mark Manson. Huge bestseller. I'm absolutely sure you've seen it. Mark Manson's ideas of very specific, in many ways he is resurrecting stoicism in the world and a few other philosophical ideas. This is quite specific and specialized. Why would the world by amnio stoic handbook? Because it's related in the subtle art of not giving a bleep to a much broader picture. How do we deal with a world where our concerns is so constantly tagged out into the world where we may be asked to think about climate change, to become an activist, to engage politics. This is the experts storytelling at the heart of Mark Manson's success. To take his own individual personal perspective, his insights into psychology, philosophy, self-help, and to place them into a context of this broader story about how we stopped giving a bleep. Great title, great storytelling. Ask this question to find the story within your own expert thinking, within your own research to dig out these kind of nuggets of gold are expressed in a great title. When we think about the self, we are in a constant process of wondering Who are we becoming? What is our self? What's our status in the world? Can we reach beyond status? Are we on some kind of spiritual path? What is our philosophy of life? Who are we becoming? And ask yourself, who are your audience becoming? Who are the people that you want to communicate to? In the process of changing themselves into. The answer to that question will help you find you're storing. The fourth part of the engine of story, change, other self, and conflict. If you have been thinking about the ideas that I've talked about so far in this course. It will have occurred to you that there was a lot of conflict around all of these ideas. And I would say almost inevitably. Anyone who places an idea into the world that is significant to somebody will face a conflict. And this doesn't have to be a problem. If we know the conflicts that will surround our ideas, we can use this as part of our storytelling. And we can make stories part of the war of ideas that's constantly being fought around us to go back even further than Sigmund Freud. To the work of Karl Marx, philosopher agitator, radical. Marx is remembered in many ways in his day. Marx was actually, in his early career something of a popular writer about technology. If you were to bring marks into the 21st century, he might be a writer for something like Wired Magazine, speculating on tech giants and the role of social media and the Internet. Monks was thinking about something different though in the early 1700s. He wrote, of course, the Communist Manifesto and his masterpiece, Das Kapital. And what did he do? In the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, Marx created the major work of storytelling for the biggest ideological conflict or the century that was to come that would unfold late 1800s into the 1800s that would define the political and ideological conflicts of most of the 20th century, arguably until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. And it was communism and capitalism. We associate Marx with communism. But really Marx was the person who described capitalism and the way that many, especially among younger generations today, as we see a resurgence of interest in this dichotomy between communism and capitalism was probably beyond Karl Marx's wildest imagination. That the Communist Manifesto endoscopy towel, would provide the driving narrative for revolutions across Europe and Asia. I am would define the major political conflicts of the 20th century. I don't expect that Karl Marx could have seen this coming at all. But today, we as thinkers, academics, researchers, anybody with expert knowledge to give to the world. We can see that these conflicts continually surround us. If we think about one of the major conflicts unfolding in 2021. The conflicts around identity. How do we balance the many different identities that intersect in our contemporary society? Racial identities, political identities, sexual identities, gender identities, whichever identities you want to talk about. And if we look at a very significant public intellectual of our day, Ibram X Kendi, who in How to Be an Anti-racist, did the storytelling for the conflicts of identity politics that we find around us. And the idea of anti-racism. Professor Kendi contributed to all public narratives. I think the same scale of idea was Karl Marx did in talking about communism and capitalism. And the many other great stories that came out of Marx's thinking, we are today surrounded by the War of Ideas. Ask yourself this question of your research, your expertise. The people who you want to communicate to, the people you may want on your side. What conflicts are they fighting? In? What ideas are turning the narratives of our society and in some cases, determining the winners and losers of those stories. We're thinking about lying cuttlefish, or indeed this on it's cephalopod. We've been talking about the engine of story, which has four parts, change other self and conflict. Now when you're working with the engine of story, you don't need to identify all four of these necessarily, but the moral of these levels of the engine that you discover, the more likely it is that your story is going to be compelling to a large number of people and to a general audience. So let's have a think through how we can find parts of the engine of story that will take the dishonest cephalopod and use them to talk about a wider story that many people are experiencing. How about if we start off with chain reason? I instinctually felt this might have a Ted Talk in it, is because I think there is something about the Internet and the way we construct identity on the Internet. A huge change in our society, of course, the construction of the Internet. I think a bit more specifically in terms of other social relationships that we're working with. There's something about social media. And the way people are dishonest on social media. Perhaps about the presentation of their identities and the way that cuttlefish. And if we go a bit deeper, I think that there is an issue of our own personal identities and our personal presentation on social media. And then stemming from that, can we find conflicts there? The way that we have identity conflicts? And here I think I have a good engine for storytelling. All beginning with the honesty of cephalopods and those darn lying cuttlefish. 4. The Substance of Story: Every story has at its heart, an engine that drives the narrative. Along. The engine of story is made up of four parts. Change the things that are changing in the world which the story is about. Other social relationships that are at the core of the story. Self, our own inner lives and personal experiences and identities as they play out in the story. And of course, conflict. There is no drama without conflict and there was no story without drama. What are the conflicts that the story turns around? But once we have the engine of story, we need the material of story and a form of storing. Ask yourself this question. What is story made of? I always put this question to my students when they come to my storytelling workshops and lectures. And it gets a whole variety of answers. Some people say stories of might've words. If you like reading books, it's not a bad answer. Some people say stories might have pictures. These both mediums that stories can move through. Some people say stories are made of emotions, not bad. We're gonna get to that one. What stories are really made of this substance of story, according to the great story theorists, Robert McKee. Events. Think about any story that you may have watched. What are the parts of the story is made up of the events. And at the heart of an event is a change. So if you think about a fairy tale like Jack and the Beanstalk, I'm not going to tell you the whole fairy tale, but think about what happens in jacket the Beanstalk. What's the first event? What's the first change? Jack is at home sleeping or playing Xbox on the couch as mother comes in and says no food, Jack, you have to go and sell our cow. Event number one, a change has occurred to Jack and Jack and the Beanstalk. And these events continue to unfold and this is the substance of the story. Do we, as academics, as thinkers, as public intellectuals, find the events at the heart of our story. Let's look to the example of one of the great and in some terms most controversial public intellectuals of today, that is Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine, which in recent years has illuminated many people about the nature of our social relationships and how they connect to our personal lives and the changes that are going on in the world around us. And here's one way to look at the events that the Shock Doctrine is made of event one. Neoliberal policies have become dominant. Here you can see the change that we've gone from some set of policies to new neoliberal policies and they say is a social change. But these policies don't benefit most people, they probably don't benefit you. This is a personal change. We've gone from policies that may have benefited you to policies that no longer do. Governments and corporations use disasters to rush in neoliberal policies despite them not benefiting people or to social change. Again, some of these disasters are in arguably natural, I'm inclined uses the example of the giant tsunami that hit parts of Southeast Asia. This is a physical change and how that physical change was used to bring in neoliberal policies. But argues clients, some of these disasters may be manufactured. Klein uses the example of the Iraq war, a social change specifically to usher in neoliberal policies. The effects of these disasters are to confuse and weaken you as an individual to prevent your resistance. So the policies that are being brought in back to a personal change. And finally, these policies, the implementation together or the Shock Doctrine, the title. Naomi Klein's very excellent and quite controversial recent work of creative nonfiction. Events in a cause and effect process that create the substance of your story, however, you're going to present it. One other way to think about. The events at the heart of your storytelling is as talking points. And this is an increasingly important way to think about it because whilst we're focusing in this short course on things like feature articles, books, or course, the TED Talk. Increasingly, the ideas from the work of a leading public intellectual are presented in interviews and podcasts, in public discussions and debates on new social media platforms. And thinking of something like clubhouse for instance, which at the time of recording has recently launched. If you understand the core events of your story and you can communicate them as talking points. Then you are able to very flexibly interact with interviewers, with large audiences, with online social media crowds who may be coming to do an ask me anything with you on Reddit or other similar platforms. Because when you're asked a question, and this is a simple kind of media training that I'm going to run you through very quickly at no extra cost. As a question comes in, you always answer the question. So let's pretend that I am the fantastic Naomi Klein. I know it's a leap of imagination to take. And I'm being interviewed and the interviewer says to me, isn't it true that people prefer capitalism, people get to choose and capitalism, and I might say, yes, we're able to go and shop at the shops that we want to I'm answering the question. But then I'd say, but these businesses are so much more powerful than us that they can rush in the neoliberal policies that they want to. I get back one of my coal talking points. And you can do this on any kind of media in these new interactive forums where so much of our storytelling and are most compelling storytelling. Now happens. Think through what are the major events of your story and how are they linked by cause and effect? These two questions, what are the events? How they linked by cause and effect will give you the material of your story that you can use in all of the traditional forms of media. Books, documentaries perhaps, and also in the new interactive formats, podcasting and social media. If the material of your story comes in the form of events linked by cause and effect than the foam of your story is about three things. I have three words for you. Structure, structure. And structure. Structure might be the most important idea to understand. For great storytelling that goes beyond the simpler kinds of stories. If we want to tell complex, highly persuasive stories to our audience. If we want to go from a simple nighttime story that you might tell your child to a Blockbuster Hollywood movie that's gonna be broadcast onto screens in front of billions of people all around the world. We need to understand structure. This is an example I use with all of my creative writing students. And also when I go and talk to professionals and people in businesses and major corporations about the idea of structure. Imagine I gave you the task of building a Gothic cathedral. It's arguable that Gothic cathedrals built around the 13th century across Europe was the most impressive structures in human history because they were so in advance of the technology that we actually had available to us at the time, these things were made of stone with simple wooden building structures, simple cranes for instance. And yet we're able to make structures that still stands today and is still arguably much more impressive than most of our modern day buildings. If I gave you the task of building a Gothic cathedral, would you just go and find some stones and start stacking them on top of each other? No, of course you wouldn't. Of course you would want to fully understand the structure of a Gothic cathedral. There are hundreds of Gothic cathedrals. They all look different, but they all have the same structure in the ways our stories are made of events. The basic structure of the Gothic cathedral is not the stone, it's the arch. A cathedral is the practice of building arches upon arches into walls, transects buttresses, flying buttresses are king ceilings, towers, spires. And once you understand the structural principles of the Gothic cathedral, you could go about making your own Gothic cathedral. To understand storytelling, you need to understand the structures that stories work in. Let's take a moment to dive into a structure that is used in some of the most ambitious creative nonfiction storytelling. This structure you will find in top flight feature articles that you might read in the New York Times or the Guardian or other similar publications of that level and caliber. Whenever you're reading a story that is. And the two to 3 thousand word range, this is a feature article, is not simply reporting the facts to you. It's telling you a story. It's bringing you in to the actual experience of the people that the story is focused on. And it's also used in the increasingly popular category of creative non-fiction best sellers. And one of the things that defines the bestseller in that category is the quality of its storytelling. If you remember The Big Short, it was produced as a very compelling Hollywood movie that was based on the creative nonfiction book of the same name by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis is a superb storyteller. He also has a fantastic grasp on what's going on in the world. And in the Big Short in combined both of these to tell us the story of the 2008 financial crisis. And to do this, he uses one of the most powerful storytelling structures taken straight from the Hollywood blockbuster movie. And it is the three act structure. I want to outline the three-act structure for you not because I'm recommending that you will necessarily use it. If you did want to use it, you'd have to go considerably deeper into it. Then I'm going to go in this example. But it does help to understand how structure works. Act one, act two, act three, beginning, middle, and end. Introduction, complication, resolution. Those are the, what each of the three acts does within the free act Structure. Act one, you introduce the characters. In The Big Short, my Michael Lewis. We meet a set of financial investors, hedge fund manager, venture capitalist, technology startup. We follow these characters as they hit their inciting incidents, which is as each one of them discovers, the subprime mortgage vehicles that are going to spoiler alert crashed the global economy, That's the inciting incident. Act one concludes with them finally, figuring out that the subprime mortgage crisis is about to come upon them. And then we head into act two, complications and rising action at each stage for act to, the action that these characters meet becomes more intense as they dig deeper into the subprime mortgage crisis. Halfway through act two, we hit the mid way turning point, which is where the characters who have been receiving an influx of events as the financial crisis builds and have been responding to those events. Now, turn the Midway turning points and they begin to act proactively to deal with those events. In this case, is they start investing, they start betting on the financial crisis happening and against these subprime mortgages. This takes us out of Act two and into act three. The resolution where we hit the crisis climax and resolution the crisis is the subprime mortgage. And financial collapse actually happen. Our characters, the investment banker, the VC, and the startup, have to meet this crisis. We hit then a climax, which is how they deal with that crisis and all of the different fallout of it. And then a resolution which is what happens after the climax, which is where we find about where they went onto in their various lives. That's the briefest possible explanation of three-act structure I can give to you. But if you go and look at almost any Blockbuster Hollywood movie B at the recent Marvel blockbusters, Lord of the Rings, when they are adapted to the screen. Nomad land, recent Oscar winner for more serious kind. They all have this three-act structure. Act one, act two act free introduction, complication, resolution beginning, middle end. The inciting incident, the Midway turning point, the crisis climax and resolution and the mounting action in-between. Once you understand that structure or any structure that kind, you realize that it's much, much easier to create the kind of stories that you might want to. It's important not to confuse structure with content. This is a very common form of confusion across all kinds of creative activities. And it leads us to reject the idea of structure because we think it's going to determine the content. We think if we use that three-act structure than our film will be the same as every other film, which isn't a toll the case. Your content can be infinitely diverse, but it must, on some level, have a structure. Why is this? It's because we, as humans in our creativity, are always building upon what came before. And these are the structural elements. No single individual learnt to build the Gothic cathedral. The hundreds and thousands of structural ideas that are in the cathedral were developed by hundreds and thousands of people over a course of time. When you learn structure, you are learning from all of those great creative people who came before you. And this is no different as a storyteller. Every apparently talented, great storyteller is using well-worn structures that came before when you get really good. When you've learned the form and when you've mastered the form, then you can break up the phone, but not until them. To understand the structure of your story, to find the structure that you're working with. I advise you to steal like an artist. Steal like an artist. This was a statement from Pablo Picasso who said that amateur artists borrow, great artists, steal. You go and you find the stories that are compelling to you and that are similar to the formats that you want to work in. Fine, the great creative nonfiction bestsellers find the great TED Talks, find the great feature articles. Then flagrantly rip off not the content, but the structure. The next part of the course, we're gonna go into more detail about the structure of a TED talk. And we create a compelling TED Talk from expert knowledge about low down lying cuttlefish. To continue answering that question, we're looking at the final three parts of the rhetoric of story events. I've laid out a simple series of events and a cause and effect. But we'll be exploring further in the TedTalk itself. For the TED Talk, we're gonna be using a simple structure that you will find often in talks at public events. No. Help your audience get to know you. Like. Give your audience reasons to like you. Trust. Allow your audience to trust what you're saying. And then have the courage to challenge your audience. To give your audience a perspective that doesn't simply agree with them, that challenges their perceptions on what you're saying. And finally, fifth, close your audience. Complete the torque. By closing your audience on the idea you are presenting to them. We will show these five stages at the structure in the TED Talk itself. Finally, I want to talk a little bit about emotion in storytelling. You may feel that it's not necessary to trigger the emotions of your audience when you're presenting factual information. But more often than not, it's emotions that decide how we're going to believe or trust information and facts presented to us. In the TED Talk. We're gonna be using a simple way of provoking emotions from our audience, the setup, and the payoff. Whenever I'm talking about storytelling with audiences, I like to use examples of stories. Most people are, everybody knows. If you've ever seen the original Star Wars trilogy, then you will know the greatest setup and payoff in storytelling history. In the first movie, we are told that the young Luke Skywalker is the son of a Jedi Knight, Anakin Skywalker, who was murdered by Darth Vader. We learn that early in the first movie. That is the setup. And then at the end of the second movie, over three hours of screen time later we received the payoff that Anakin Skywalker actually became Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker's father. And the emotions that are summoned by this setup and pay off our amazing. So we're going to be using a setup and pay off. In the TED talk. Watch out for them. When you watch the TED Talk itself. Can we turn low down line cuttlefish into a compelling TED Talk with the seven parts of the rhetoric of story. I think we can. 5. Talk like TED: Let me ask you a question. Could the cuttlefish help us make the Internet a less toxic place? In the early years of the Utopian Internet, we dreamed of an alternative digital dimension where we could adopt any personality we wanted to. We could dive into digital worlds and be the hero of our dreams. But is it possible that to make the Internet a less toxic place, we could learn a lesson from the cuttlefish about the lies we tell around our identities. Picture a crowded bar and a young, handsome man walking up to the girl of his dreams, after a few minutes of conversation, he realizes that this isn't the girl he fought. He was talking to a tool, and then another man turns around and he realized on the back of the man was the imagery of a young woman, whereas on the front is all the imagery of a male. My name is Damian Walter. I am something of an expert in the deceptions of online communication. While I'd never seen this scenario in a barroom, I have seen very similar things happen on the Internet, but in the undersea realm of the cuttlefish, cephalopods practice this kind of deception if not regularly, them much more frequently. We might know, does it pay to cheat? In a 2012 paper from Macquarie University, Callen brown documented the unfaithful and dishonest signals used in cephalopod signaling systems. The story is almost unbelievable. Cuttlefish with their amazingly adaptive bodies will signal on one side the patterns used by female cuttlefish while signaling on the other, the patterns used by male cuttlefish. They will however, only do this in specific circumstances when dealing with one female and one male. The huge brain of the cuttlefish understand social situations so well that it can expertly deploy its deceptions. The cuttlefish is an amazing being. It is colorful, it is big-brained, and we can learn incredible lessons from it about our own capacity for deception. I'd like to be clear that I did not go swimming with cuttlefish to discover this information. But when I did stumble upon the paper, I was fascinated by the parallels with deceptions I had seen in online forums and communities. When we calculate The Game Theory of signaling systems and the honesty and deception that keeps them working. We can determine a few things. One is that for any signaling system to work, it must maintain a majority of honest signals. However, it's also clear that cheats can enter a system under quite specific circumstances. Cheating cuttlefish and cheating humans. Look for opportunities where it is cheap to write to the signaling system. For a cuttlefish, it's extremely easy to change there, getting patterns. As a good example. Cheats also look for opportunities where they will face low-level or no reprisals. If they're deception is discovered. Cuttlefish, again, are able to quickly escape from situations where they have attempted to deceive other males and rarely face any consequences for their actions. Big brained, socially focused creatures, the cuttlefish, the chimpanzee, and the human being, are all capable and indeed highly skilled at perpetrating deceptions. The game theoretic opportunities are correct for us to do so. After many years writing for online communities, I've realized that these game theoretic circumstances often, in fact frequently apply to the Internet. Since the early 990s, the Internet has given us a proliferating number of signaling systems. Internet Relay, Chat, bulletin boards, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, new entries like clubhouse to the world of social media. The disturbing truth is. These Internet signaling systems fulfill the game theoretic criteria that allow us as human beings to commonly perpetrate deceptions. The cost to write to Facebook and Twitter is low. The consequences of being caught in the deception are minimal or nothing. We have with the Internet bread, the perfect circumstances for human, big-brained creatures to easily and frequently deceive one another about our identities. Since 2016, we have seen the seriousness of the weaknesses in our internet signaling systems, the loss of trust that has rippled through our communities. As we have discovered, serious issues of interference by foreign agents in our democratic systems, the very systems that are signaling systems should be trustworthy and allow us to work through with confidence. Think about the number of times you may have deceived others knowingly or unknowingly in small or large ways about your identity while online. In the 20 or more years that many of us have now been denizens of the Internet. We found dozens or hundreds of ways to perpetrate effective identity deceptions. How many times have you found yourself in an argument? A flame war on a bulletin board, a comment thread on a newspaper think piece, or a Facebook post, where you have an exchange claims to have knowledge that in fact you quickly googled and found on Wikipedia, it may seem trivial. But when we multiply these deceptions by the millions of individuals who are now on the Internet. We see the problems of dishonesty was our early dream at the freedom of identity on the internet. Far too utopian. I would like to suggest that if we want a less toxic Internet, if we want more trustworthy signaling systems, we must make it more difficult to adopt false identities. This is the lesson that we can learn from our colorful big-brained lying cephalopod friends, the cuttlefish. While we still have the opportunity to, in 2020, it was declared that the cuttlefish was now an endangered species. The true cost of our dishonesty is the destruction of all we hold most dear. Let us have more honest signaling systems. Learn the lessons of our cuttlefish, big-brained cousins. So we can also save them from our worst habits. Thank you for joining me on this journey into storytelling for academics. After a number of years working with expert thinkers, businesses, brands, It's been really, really good to put together many of the techniques and ideas that I've used to do that work. And I hope it's helpful to you as an individual is professional in your work, in your career. To go out there and take your expert knowledge that you must have spent years developing. And to place it into the form of story that can make it engaging, compelling, relevant, and influential to the largest possible audience of people. Thank you as well for your patience and indulgence in my improvised TedTalk using a piece of expert knowledge from academia.edu, I'd like to acknowledge that this talk is somewhat inaccurate. I have not fully researched the behavior patterns of cuttlefish and other cephalopods, their interactions with Internet communities. But I hope that in it's exaggeration, It's a slightly exaggerated form of storytelling that it helps to illustrate many of the points that have been made in the course and that you are able to follow through the talk and see where we used things like change, other self conflicts, the parts of the engine of story where we were able to do the events in their chain of cause and effect and how it was all fitted into a structure as well. Because of course. This is the idea for you to take your expert knowledge and to place it into the formats of TED Talks, of course, potentially bestsellers, feature articles, and also into the other media that so many of us are now working with, podcasts, social media, YouTube, and so on. All of this using the power of story, if you take any one thing from the core sets the necessity to find the story within your expert knowledge. It's been my aim in this course to give you the meatus story, to give you the tools that you can shape your own story with. I just want to be clear that you don't have to use the specific forms of those tools that were used in this course and in my own improvised TED Talk. You don't have to use three-act structure. You don't have to use no, like trust challenge, close. These are only two of a whole diversity of narrative storytelling structures that you can use. You don't have to use a setup and a payoff to trigger the emotions of your audience. These are merely examples. And you can go much deeper into the techniques storytelling if you'd like to do that, you can find my co-host, the rhetoric of story, simply Google the title and you'll find many places where the course is hosted. In this course, I moved quite swiftly through the seventh part of the rhetoric of story, emotion. We saw that it was used in the TED talk. We looked at one way that you can work with the emotions of your audience. This was rarely for quite a specific reason. Emotion, understanding how your stories interact with the psychology and hence the emotions of your audience is rarely the true art story. The other six part of the rhetorical structure of the story are all relatively easily understandable and with some practice, we can implement them. But emotion is the true art of the storyteller and there's so much depth and how we work with the emotions of audiences that it was really best just to leave it as a touching subject to subject that we briefly touched upon within this course. But I hope that if you are engaged and interested in the task of storytelling for yourself, more broadly, the whole art of stories that you will think about, ways that you can feel your way into the emotions of your audience. This is what I mean by being the art of the storyteller. We only rarely understand how the emotions of audiences work for looking inside ourselves, our own emotional responses to the stories that we're telling. I began this course by talking a little bit about the problem of authenticity. How we show up authentically in digital spaces like our new social media, orange, traditional media forms, book publishing, TED Talks, whatever they may be. I'm more broadly how we act authentically in our communication and the seeming conundrum of the storyteller. Because storytelling as a kind of lying, we can effectively communicate whatever we wish and we can hopefully persuade people of our ideas for effective storytelling. But a real challenge for us as academics, thinkers, public intellectuals, experts, is to be authentic in our storytelling. And that's really all about you and me. How honest and open and truthful in our storytelling we choose to be. And I hope I've made it integral to the course. But for your storytelling to really be strong, for it to go out there and engage the largest number of people. It does have to be authentic. We can all tell. When we're being told stories that aren't entirely true, we know it. We may for some reason choose to accept them. Some of us sometimes do that, but we have an inner radar for what is authentic in the storytelling of others. So perhaps is the final piece of guidance to your storytelling. Try at all times to be as authentic, open, honest direction, straightforward in your storytelling as you can it be final. Thank you to academia.edu sponsoring the creation of this course. I'm very happy to come on this journey with me. My name is Damian Walter. You can find me at energy water.com. I'm quite fortunate to occupy the first 40 or 50 pages of Google for my name. So you can find me very easily in that way as well. If you have any questions, please come and talk to me online. I look forward to seeing your expert knowledge, making it into the world in the form of stories, bestsellers, feature articles, and of course, TED Talks, thank you very much. This course was filmed in my Bella in barley. And if you didn't happen to see to animals running around in the background. These were my two cats, William Blake and Christopher Marlowe duck. So thank you for their help in the production.