“So what I finally decided was, art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being—literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you’re experiencing that piece of art, you’re not alone. You’re connected to the arts. So I feel like that can’t be too bad.”
Steven Soderbergh, on the importance of the arts
“The people who were interesting told good stories. They were also inquisitive: willing to work to expand their social and intellectual range. Most important, interesting people were also the best listeners. They knew when to ask questions. This was the set of people whose shows I would subscribe to, whose writing I would seek out, and whose friendship I would crave. In other words, those people were the opposite of boring.”
Scott Simpson, You Are Boring

Steven Soderbergh on personal stories

Vulture has a super interesting interview with director Steven Soderbergh on his retirement from Hollywood. I especially liked this bit on his ability to get films made:

On the few occasions where I’ve talked to film students, one of the things I stress, in addition to learning your craft, is how you behave as a person. For the most part, our lives are about telling stories. So I ask them, “What are the stories you want people to tell about you?” Because at a certain point, your ability to get a job could turn on the stories people tell about you. The reason [then–Universal Pictures chief] Casey Silver put me up for [1998’s] Out of Sight after I’d had five flops in a row was because he liked me personally. He also knew I was a responsible filmmaker, and if I got that job, the next time he’d see me was when we screened the movie. If I’m an asshole, then I don’t get that job. Character counts. That’s a long way of saying, “If you can be known as someone who can attract talent, that’s a big plus.”

Randy J. Hunt on storytelling and the handmade philosophy

It’s a short read but there are tons of great quotes from interview with Randy J. Hunt the creative director at Etsy. Being a topic I’m endlessly fascinated with, I especially enjoyed what he had to say about storytelling:

I operate from the belief that design does not rise above content. One of the most compelling forms of content is the narrative, a story. In this sense design is inherently tied to storytelling, as stories are a powerful mechanism for delivering content, and the design operates in service of content. (Yes, there are times when design is the content, but that’s for another day.)

Additionally storytelling becomes helpful in doing design work itself. If you can tell a story about your ideas, your rationale, and your thinking to a collaborators, client, customers, or even potential hires, you can help make the work compelling and get people excited about it.

And then this bit about handmade is fantastic:

“Handmade” as a worldview is really about prioritizing a set of values. Handmade is about intimacy – a closeness between people, things, our environment. And it’s about things operating at a scale in which meaningful connections and relationships are possible. So in this case “handmade” is really a metaphor for “human scale”, which is a more durable idea. In the broadest sense, it’s about a distributed, networked view of the world as opposed to a consolidated, hierarchical view of the world.

(If you have not listened to Randy’s interview on Design Matters, it’s an absolute must-listen. One of my all-time favorite DM episodes.)

“World history, after all, is not a chronological list of every damn thing that ever happened; it’s a chain of only the most consequential events, selected and arranged to reveal the arc of the story—it’s the arc that counts.”
Tamim Ansary, from the preface of Destiny Disrupted
“Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings.”
Paul Ford, Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?

The spot

It’s 11:00 on the uptown R train. At the 23rd St. stop, an older gentleman steps onto the car and pauses in the doorway as he scans the half-empty seats. A smile slowly speads across his face. Whispering, as if talking to himself, he slowly walks towards the woman in the corner seat. She’s smiling too, their eyes are locked. He slides into the seat next to her and she removes her headphones as they lean in for a kiss.

I quietly observe this interaction from the other side of the car. Something about these few minutes seem strangely ritualistic. I like to think they do this every night. After a long day at work, they’ve arranged to meet here.

In that seat.

In this car.

At this stop.

On this train.

At 11:00pm.

The corner seat on the uptown R train is theirs. In the middle of the huge city, they’ve carved out a spot to meet so every night, at 11:00, they know where to find each other.

When I got off the subway a few stops later, they were exchanging stories about their days. I smiled as I stepped out of the car onto the platform. The city is moving all around them but to those two that seat in that car on that train was their universe. Because every night at 11:00pm, that’s the only spot that matters. Everything else fades away.

Russell Quinn is the world's most wired storyteller

I devoured this Wired profile on Russell Quinn, a software developer and designer from California who is releasing his first novel, The Silent History, later this year. What makes The Silent History so interesting is that it’s a completely iPad and iPhone native story, utilizing the strengths of a digital device:

Now after a string of behind-the-scenes successes, Quinn may be about to transform the art of storytelling itself. This summer he will launch The Silent History, a sprawling electronic novel that plays with the mechanics of how stories are told, taking full advantage of the tablet’s GPS and touchscreen, along with platform features like in-app purchasing.

Up to this point, ebooks have been little more than digital translations of the printed book, adding little new to the act of storytelling. By embracing the digital medium, Quinn includes maps and location data and ways for readers to interact with the book by submitting their own “field reports.” The novel will be released serially, a new chapter is automatically downloaded to your device every weekday for a month, and designed to be read in 10 to 15 minute chunks, catering to how we often read on such devices.

One key difference in how this e-book works is that the narrative is serialized — reminiscent of the days when novels were introduced in magazines and newspaper episodes before they were published in full. The serial is broken into six parts, each one spanning several years in fictional time. (The story begins in the summer of 2011 and ends in 2043).

Readers can join at any time and absorb the back-story. A new episode is quietly synced with your device every weekday for a month and each piece is designed to be read in 10 to 15 minutes — on your commute to work, say. There’s a month break in between each of the six parts, so the entire project will take a year to unfold.

What I love about this is it’s completely embracing the device without trying to hold on to the traditions of the printed medium. “I love the printed book,” Quinn says. “But I’m not romantic about the book, either.” I’ve long felt that if digital and printed books are to co-exist, they both need to play on and emphasize their inherent strengths. Quinn’s The Silent History seems to be pushing us in the right direction.

Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development

Sarah Doody on product development and storytelling:

A product is more than an idea, it’s more than a website, and it’s more than a transaction or list of functionalities. A product should provide an experience or service that adds value to someone’s life through fulfilling a need or satisfying a desire. The ultimate question then becomes: who identifies that value? After the executive or stakeholder identifies the initial idea, who in the organization ensures that the product and experience deliver value to the user? Maybe it isn’t the product manager, marketer, technologist, or designer; perhaps what we need is a new role: the product storyteller.

Story is the context for which we view the world, a framework through which we shape our experiences. A good story connects us to each other and a product with a story will feels more compelling.

Crafting stories is not about assembling facts. Instead, according to [Daniel] Pink, people who understand story have “the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.” The impact to story in business is that, “like design, it is becoming a key way for individuals and entrepreneurs to distinguish their goods and services in a crowded marketplace.”.

Story is less about the how and and more about the why.

“Glass is a writer’s writer, or more aptly a writer’s radio host. He understands how narrative works, how to build tension, how to place words within sentences and sentences within paragraphs, how at the end of a story a character must be transformed. Every good writer knows that the most important, most evocative information should come at the end of a sentence or paragraph, and even in conversation he does this. Take his earlier words, for example: “They’ve chosen, as their medium, food. I love that.” He doesn’t say: “I love that they’ve chosen food as their medium.” Because he knows — probably instinctively — that what comes last will carry the most weight; he knows where inside a sentence the power lies — or rather where inside a sentence lies the power. And so even in his speech you hear the pregnant pauses, the places where, if he were writing the conversation, he would use colons, semicolons and dashes.”
Rachel Louise Snyder on Ira Glass from her 1995 Salon profile on the host of This American Life.

Pixar Story Rules

Pixar story artist Emma Coats has been tweeting a series of story basics she’s learned from senior Pixar employees on how to craft good stories. Here are some of my favorites:

Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later.

You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?

“But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest—for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both—must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.”
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

I quoted a bit of this video in yesterday’s piece on story, but the entire thing is worth watching. Documentarian Ken Burns discusses the power of storytelling, where 1+1=3, or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. His enthusiasm is contagious and the short film is an inspiring insight into the art of story and what it means to be human.

The Eternal Thread

“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” —Muriel Rukeyser

The oldest recorded constellations are from old Babylonian astronomy, beginning in the Middle Bronze Age, somewhere around 6th century BC. Constellations consists of the grouping of starts, their proximity to one another, and the patterns they form. These patterns have created Leo the Lion, Taurus the Bull, Orion, and Scorpius. What’s interesting is the idea of constellations is man-made, created out of the seemingly random shapes we see in the sky. We make sense of these stars by layering characters and stories on top of them.

Story is how we relate to the world and to each other.

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Reflections on Reviewing Portfolios, or, some suggestions to help you get a job

I was honored to be asked by Northampton Community College, a school where I spent a year and half, to come back and critique portfolios of the current graduates. I remember what it was like to be on the other side of that table showing my own book, thinking how much I thought I knew while also finding the feedback and response to my work incredibly helpful.

I’m not sure I was as helpful as I would have liked to be, though I tried to give constructive criticism and feedback and generally challenge the students to think about why they made the decisions they made. I found myself saying a similar things to a few students and thought it might be of help to write them down to share here. These suggestions are less about actual design concepts like typography (it’s too big) or layout (use grids—obviously) and more about presenting your work in a thoughtful and intelligent way.

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