#re3storyhack

We're two hours into day two here at Re3StoryHack. Teams are all heads down, polishing their ideas and getting ready to show off all their hard work later today. 

The Abuse of Solitary Confinement

Emergent stories: Back to the Shutdown

Well... it's 9:30PM on a Saturday. Teams have been working, pretty much non-stop, since 10 this morning. We've had all team check-ins, all 19 of them. We've drank 12.5 gallons of coffee and ate an untold number of scones. Yet still, people are working away on their storyhacks.

Even the team that looks like they are marching away in the picture above, are not leaving the hack to go to bed, but instead are off to do wall projections in Williamsburg while collecting interviews with people on the street. Other teams are heads down at their tables, and some are still pointing and staring at the drawing boards.

Some of the most exciting things about hackathons are the unknowns. Everything from, Will people show? to How will projects live past the weekend? run through the minds of hackathon organizers all the time. At Re3StoryHack, we added a purposeful unknown with the Emergent Stories breakout group. 

We are only an hour or so into hacking here at Parsons and already the Emergent Stories room is full of energy and ideas. We are really excited to see what come out of this room at the end of the weekend.

Jonah Sachs is one of our storytelling heroes. From The Story Of Stuff to The Meatrix to campaigns for some of America's leading non-profits, he and Free Range Studios have created compelling, moving stories that have reached tens of millions.

We invited him to share his wisdom with our Hackers, and we're proud to share with you too!

Social change begins by changing stories. Any battle over policy can only be resolved once the battle over the underlying story is won. The big societal shifts we’ve seen (positive or negative, depending what story you believe) — civil rights, gay rights, marijuana de-criminalization, the recent removal of taxes from the wealthy, the wars of the last decade — all happened because a new story took hold in the mind of the public. The change followed, reinforcing that new story.

So, crafting new stories is what I spend my life doing. I began doing this in 1999 when I realized the internet would allow people to claim the tools of broadcast themselves to share the messages they were most passionate about. I saw this as an epochal shift. I thought that someone needed to figure out how to arm these new choirs of passionate citizens with messages that would travel. I’ve been exploring how to do that ever since. What I’ve found: compelling stories travel. Facts and proclamations don't.

What I didn’t anticipate back in the last millennium was that the future wouldn’t just be about preciously crafting stories and then offering them fully-formed to the world. I hadn’t yet heard about crowd-sourcing, re-mixing, mashups, failing cheaply or hack-a-thons. Bringing together the policy wonks, passionate activists, artists and the intended audiences into one space gives us a chance to create stories more quickly and dynamically — and it offers the key role of storyteller who any who will claim it. I hope what you’re doing becomes a template for storytelling in the future.

So as you set out here are five bite-sized tips to keep in mind (if you’ve got way more time read my book Winning the Story Wars where these and others are fleshed out.) All of these tips work from the basic premise that we are no longer in the Broadcast Era. Too many of us communicate as if we are, because those are the stories we were raised on. Our new social era looks much more like an oral tradition where everyone owns, curates and comments — where audiences decide what messages live and die.

Don’t make your cause the hero of the story. Your audiences are the heroes. This one is simple but so often overlooked. If you talk about how great you or your cause are nobody will care. If you talk about how great your audiences can be in relationship to you, people will take notice. For more on this, check out Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the template for myths across cultures that made audiences see they could change the world.

Don't fall in love with your facts. Start by laying out the emotion you want to convey; then bring in your facts to bolster your cause. Nobody will remember your stats. They will remember how you made them feel.

Don’t try too hard to fit in. It’s critical that you create your story in a way that’s going to make it part of the conversation your audience is already having. I learned that in 2003 when we turned a factory farming message into a viral sensation by spoofing the Matrix when it was about to come out. But we also had to focus on our own authenticity. We built the connection around some key metaphors that proved that factory farms really were like the illusory world of the Matrix. So we had something to say. If we just had slapped Honey Boo Boo on top of our message because we thought it’d make it relevant, we would have been an embarrassment. You get the idea.

Don’t speak in the voice of god. Have some personality. In the broadcast era, you could just order audiences around in a booming voice because you’d paid for the time on the radio or tv and dammit they had to listen. “Hurry in now before it’s too late!” Now people demand to be spoken to human-to-human. Don’t put yourself above your audiences; find a tone that makes you more a peer or a kind mentor. (You want to be like Obi Wan teaching Luke not like Yahweh booming at Abraham.)

Bring your stories to the human scale. For a communication to be a story it must play out in the lives of individual characters living in a physical world. These characters need to be relatable and also surprising to hold our interest. They need to face conflict. And they need to overcome their challenges so that we, the audience, believe that we can overcome our own.