When I said "Make it brief - I didn't mean THAT brief!"

When is a story not a story? When it's the plot of an opera, perhaps! I've always been puzzled by my total failure to remember the storylines of operas; I read the programme note, and then as soon as the curtain goes up, I literally lose the plot. I always thought it was just my inattention. But I gather others have the same problem. So, having started this blog, I had another look at the way the plot is laid out in a typical programme. Here's Act 3 of Janacek's "Makropulos Case", 35 minutes of action, in 129 words (from ENO's programme, 2006):

Prus has spent the night with Marty. Bitterly disillusioned by her coldness, he hands over the document. But although the prize is in her grasp, her control of events is on the wane. Prus is overwhelmed by news of a personal tragedy, caused by Marty’s callousness; Janek has committed suicide. Hauk-Sendorf enters. He has stolen his wife’s jewellery and plans to escape with Marty to Spain. She consents, but the others arrive to call her to account for her actions and to explain her past. As they begin to discover elements of the truth - for example the document dated 1836 which Marty sent Kolenaty has been discovered to be a forgery – she decides the time has come to reveal her identity and the secret of her tormented existence.

It's a pretty complicated plot, but no worse than any other opera. If you tried reading it and then got someone to ask you what happens, I would defy you to remember very much - it's worse than memorising a shopping list, because it looks like a story, and yet, is just a jumble of facts. A reminder, if any were needed, that storytelling needs more than just a plot if it's to be memorable!

storytellers wanted?

An envelope came through the door this morning. On the outside it said "storytellers wanted". Intrigued I opened it - it turned out to be from a car company offering me a test drive - "the story (of this new car) starts in June. Where it ends...is up to you." A bit weak really, I thought. An intriguing start, wasted. It's ironic that someone was so keen to get in the use of the S-word, that they committed the cardinal sin of blowing out the candle they lit too quickly. Another interested reader was left wondering why he bothered.

It says something that the S-word is now so prevalent that advertising copywriters are using it too. The sentiment is the right one too - storytellers are wanted - but good ones please; storytellers who can keep their audience, as well as attract them.

"Where it ends....is up to you"? In the bin this time.

using the senses

One of the many thought-provoking moments in Sol Stein's "Solutions for Writers" is the idea that in good fiction writing, a passage which evokes one of the senses is stronger, more memorable, than one which doesn't. How somebody looks, how a place sounds, what an event smells like, all make for better description.

This set me wondering what radio news would sound like if every story made reference to at least one of the senses. It occurred to me that relatively little writing for radio does use the senses - the eye may be there by implication, but there's not enough explicit reference to the look, feel, sound, smell of an event. And when there is - boy, is it powerful!

Of course, we have to take care not to create empty cliches - like the earthquake we're told felt like a bomb going off, and the explosion which felt like an earthquake. After the Tsunami in December 2004, one evocative despatch from Bali (I think) mentioned the smell. An event as devastating as that does force people to search for new ways of bringing the horror to the audience - the worry is that there are too many everyday events which get reported in colourless ways - senseless reporting!

the medium is the message - revised version

Marshall McLuhan's much quoted phrase "the medium is the message" is out of date isn't it? The new version should read - "the format is the message". With so many media, and all the new sub-species on the web, the impact of a story depends more than ever on the format: some web-based stories need a picture; indeed without illustration the story is near meaningless. Others, particularly the whole page centre-spread in The Guardian, may be told only as a picture, with barely any text. Yet others need to be told in short form on the radio, while others may flourish as downloadable "extended version"s on the net. It all depends what the story is - and what the format is.

know what you've got

This story appeared on local TV news a while ago. The way it was told really got to me:

CCTV Footage –

REPORTER It’s the image police hope will be good enough to trace the armed raider. He’s seen followed into the office by an unwitting member of the public. The CCTV camera clearly picks up the moment that he brandishes a handgun at the counter. In the ensuing moments seven staff members ran into a safe room. Two others and the customer made their way out into the street.

Bystander: “This guy was so quick. Grabbed me from the door there.And just grabbed me into the Bull and Beck. Someone said “oh the bank: armed robbery. Being robbed next door.”

What were your feelings while this was going on?

Shock. Complete and utter shock.

REPORTER A 50-strong police team was mustered, including armed officers and a negotiator.

Detective: The initial information we’d been given was that there had been an armed robbery. That the people insider the bank were of the opinion that the man who had committed the offences may still be inside the premises. Our priority at that time was to make sure that everybody was safe.

REPORTER In fact the raider had escaped into the street within minutes, with about £1500 in cash. But it was well over four hours before staff were brought out and other people allowed to leave shops, a pub and businesses. Shocked staff members were at work today although the branch is to remain closed until Monday. A reward of up to £15000 is being offered for information leading to a prosecution.

Look again at the ending. What has happened? The police have just besieged a bank and brought a high street to a standstill for four hours, but the thief is long gone. If it weren't for the distress caused to the bank staff, this would almost be a funny story. It's at least a tale of mis-communication and misunderstanding leading to hours of disruption to people's lives. You might even want to ask what went wrong. But the reporter tells it so straight that the "what happened" is buried in one line near the end. What a waste....

teasing the audience

What was it the Army used to say were the rules for lecturing? Tell 'em what you're going to say, tell 'em, then tell 'em what you've told them.

That worked in a certain age, but people's expectations have changed. Some radio journalists haven't changed with them.

The start of the Da Vinci Code trial was a good example - made all the more memorable because the story was about a story, which had been turned into a thriller: what a great opportunity to talk about the case using the rules of good storytelling..... This is what the BBC broadcast on the radio that day:

Two writers have begun an action in the high court in London for breach of copyright against the publishers of the best-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code”. The novel’s American author, Dan Brown, is in court to defend claims that he stole the theme of an earlier book, “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”. Mr Brown’s novel has sold more than forty million copies worldwide. Our correspondent ……was in court

He’s reputedly the highest paid author in the world but today Dan Brown was in court to defend himself against a charge of plagiarism. He’s accused of stealing the central theme of his phenomenally successful religious thriller, The Da Vinci Code from a book written more than twenty years earlier. Mr Brown’s publisher, Random House, is being sued by two authors who say he copied parts of their book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Lawyers for Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh argued that although their book is a work of historical conjecture and Mr Brown’s is a murder mystery novel, there’s a clear theme running through both.

It starts from the theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalen. They had a child, and their bloodline continues to the present day. Random House insist that Dan Brown copied nothing. It claims that he wrote The Da Vinci Code after reading many sources that put forward the same idea. It says copyright law does not protect ideas. The judge, Mr Peter Smith, will hear evidence from all three authors next week. Today he questioned whether he’d have to order the destruction of millions of copies of The Da Vinci Code, or stop the imminent release of the Hollywood film, should he find against the book. Counsel for Mr Baigent and Mr Leigh said there was no intention to be commercially unreasonable.

***

The cue makes it worse - it tells virtually everything you need to know about the story in the first 20 seconds. You need listen no more. What would happen to the sales of thrillers do if publishers wrote the blurb so that you could find out the ending without reading the book? It doesn't matter who the correspondent was, or the person who wrote the cue - 99 out of 100 people in today's radio news industry would have written it that way; which is a pity.

This blog seems to have got the idea

vehicles and jokes

Some stories are difficult to tell - especially if you need to be brief. You can't tell all the background and give all the analysis in a minute, let alone 40 seconds. Some long-running stories are like a voyage on a ship - there's a departure, and one day, in the future, an arrival. There may be stop-offs en route, but for 99% of the voyage there's just sea.

Economics is one of several subjects which are like this - nothing ever really happens in economic life: trends occur, or change, but identifying the day or the hour when these changes actually occur is impossible. So economics journalists have to find a vehicle to carry their report, and to allow them to note the trends: they might survey the state of a particular area of the economy, or show how sales of a particular toy, say, are a symptom of the country's economic health. The good ones - like the BBC's Economics Editor, Evan Davis - will almost never lead a story on "today the government announced a record trade surplus/deficit", or "inflation fell today by 1 percentage point" - they find better vehicles to tell the story.

It's about being memorable. One of the reasons why storytelling is such a buzzword in business, and strategy, as well as journalism and writing skills these days is that so many people have realised that human beings need to make sense of everything - and they do this best when there's a pattern to help them understand, digest, and then recall what they've learned. If you were learning a language, wouldn't you find it easier to remember new words if, instead of being random, they had a theme - "buying a bus ticket", "going to the doctor" etc.

So it is with stories in the news. Often the most memorable stories aren't the big headline, top stories: the down-bulletin stories, if well told, are the ones people actually remember. And, like all good novels, stories need atmosphere, characters, plot, suspense. So many of the "classic" news stories don't lend themselves to such treatment - and the pressure of 24 hour news won't allow people the time to develop the stories in such a way as to make them become memorable.

I often compare good storytelling with telling good jokes. Here's a lovely simple story as told by the Irishman, the late Dave Allen -

"This character arrives in a very rural part of Ireland. It’s a town. And he’s aware of the kind of atmosphere of the town even before he gets to it because there’s a stillness about the town – and normally towns are full of bustle and cattle and markets, and gossip and neighbours. And there’s nothing. There’s no movement at all. And as he walks down the streets of this town all he sees is occasionally the curtain of a house moves as he passes by and little faces looking at him as he goes down.

Until he eventually comes to the square, and in the square is a funeral entourage, which is made up of a coffin being carried by six men in black. And behind it is a very very tall, extreme looking man. By extreme I mean his face looks as if it has been cut from granite, cold eyes, a great chin. And on a lead he has this enormous Irish wolfhound – extraordinary, even double the size of a normal Irish wolfhound, and its tongue is lolling out and its eyes are red and bloodshot – it’s a fierce looking dog.

And behind the dog is another man in black, and behind that man is another man in black, and there’s just a line of people walking behind the coffin. And the stranger is totally enthralled by this, and he can’t curtail his curiosity, and he runs up to this great looking man with the granite face and he says “excuse me. What’s happening here?”

He says, “I’m burying me wife.”

He says “Oh --- this is your wife. Dead.”

“Yes.”

“Obviously she was a deeply loved person – by the atmosphere of this funeral.”

“No. She was the most despised person in the whole town. Everybody hated her. Everybody prayed that she’d die every day. And she didn’t.”

“Nobody liked her at all?”

“Nobody liked her, nobody loved her. She was a despised person.”

And he said – “well obviously the dog. This was her dog. At least her dog loved her. The dog going to the funeral. …”

“The dog hated her. The dog killed her. The dog bit her throat out…”

And the stranger said “could I buy that dog?”

And he says – “get to the end of the queue.”"

***

It's barely 400 words. It takes about 2 minutes to tell. When Allen told it he took his time, built up the tension - the "what on earth is going on here?" - and had the audience hooked in seconds. It's beautifully constructed. There's character, tension, atmosphere, some progress, and a pay-off: the punchline.

If the events in that fictional town had really taken place, most radio newsrooms would reduce the story to something like this:

It's emerged that a Cork woman who died on Thursday was killed by her own dog. At the funeral of the woman, Frances O'Connor, her husband, Kevin, told our correspondent that the dog had hated her, and had bitten her throat out. Our correspondent says that by the end of the funeral a large crowd of men had formed, all of them interested in buying the dog.

.....Even in the current culture way of doing news journalism, there's probably no alternative to this way. And telling stories well takes time, in preparation as well as on air: but which would you rather listen to, or watch?

The BBC Radio 4 programme Home Truths - loved and hated by people in almost equal measure, is actually just a celebration of storytelling: at its best it's full of people with crazy stories about life today. Not one of their stories would make the news bulletin. Home Truths is preceded by a News bulletin on a Saturday morning, which is also made up of stories. Which ones do I remember later? Have a wild guess?