My Favourite Sitcom’s Storytelling Approach
This week was unique from a training point of view. In my 9 years of training, it’s the first time that I’ve had full-day sessions on all five days of the week.
Monday-Tuesday was for a sales-leadership team in Mumbai, Wednesday was a set of tech leaders in Bangalore and Thursday and Friday’s batches were analytics managers (for the same company in Bangalore).
Have I told you this? In my experience, Quarter 2 (July, August and September) is the busiest quarter for a trainer/coach. In Q1, people might be on summer vacation and the year’s plans are being made. In Q3, we have the Diwali and Christmas breaks, restricting available dates. And Q4, especially March, is focused on meeting targets.
So Q2 becomes the month when there’s most action in a trainer’s life. 🙂
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And now, on to the newsletter.
Welcome to the one hundred and twenty-eighth edition of ‘3-2-1 by Story Rules‘.
A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:
- 3 tweets
- 2 articles, and
- 1 long-form content piece
Let’s dive in.
𝕏 3 Tweets of the week
As Joan Didion said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”
Passion+ability is a killer combination.
Over the years, I have progressively reduced the content in my workshops!
📄 2 Articles of the week
a. ‘How Social Media Shortens Your Life’ by Gurwinder Bhogal
In this hard-hitting and profound piece, Bhogal shares deep insights on how social media can have such an insidious impact on our lives.
Gurwinder talks about the concept of chronoception and how the perception of time differs based on context:
… we must understand time perception, or chronoception. Even outside of our heads, time doesn’t move at a constant pace in the universe. It is, for instance, slowed by gravity. This is why the Earth’s core is 2.5 years younger than its surface. Just as massive objects can slow objective time, so weighty experiences can slow subjective time. It’s why people tend to overestimate the duration of earthquakes and accidents (or in fact any scary situation).
The holiday paradox is a great example of this difference:
Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past.
Social media has a unique feature – it speeds up perception of time, and yet leaves us with no memory:
Now, a sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.
Did you know that casinos and supermarkets have something in common:
Supermarkets have long been designed like mazes, with everyday items like milk and eggs deep in the heart of the maze so you must pass by countless other products to access them. The purpose of this layout is to evoke the Gruen effect: the moment when a shopper loses track of what they entered the store for, and begins aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.
Friedman argued for a similar strategy: to arrange casinos like mazes, where even the paths to toilets and exits would spiral and meander through rows of enticing games machines
Casinos avoid right-angle turns:
A key component of Friedman’s mazes was for pathways to have as few right-angle turns as possible. This is because sharp bends jolt pedestrians into awareness, since a decision must now be made to change direction. And when someone has to decide where to go, they’re liable to think about the time and whether they should in fact be heading for the exit. Thus, Friedman advocated for curvilinear paths that had no discernible corners, beginnings, or ends, and could thus be perpetually navigated on autopilot.
Similarly social media uses the endless feed:
… the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function. We now know that these features impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.
I loved this point about a story being a route through time:
The opposite of a maze is a route, and a route through time is a story. This is because stories are linear and syntagmatic — each moment of the tale semantically follows from the previous — and this collective meaningfulness anchors the whole thing in memory. This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorising information when it’s presented in narrative form.
And social media is the opposite:
… your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.
Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.
A solution might be to quit social media. But Bhogal warns us that there are newer traps we can fall into:
…the time people saved by quitting social media was often just spent browsing other apps, which are increasingly emulating the time-warping features of social media.
Take, for instance, chatbots. They are inherently mazelike; not only do they frequently hallucinate red herrings, but they’re also prone to “verbosity compensation”, which means they frequently ramble and equivocate in their responses, raising more questions with every answer, and creating a kind of verbal Gruen effect. They also have a tendency to validate users’ delusions, leading them further down deceptive and dangerous rabbit-holes.
Bhogal shares some great ideas on how to tackle these temptations and ends on a rousing, poetic note:
Seneca once wrote, “Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” Social media makes you do all three. But you have the choice to do the opposite, and to expand time, for living long is not just about maximising the days in your life, but also the life in your days.
b. LinkedIn post by Hamilton C
This post is a good example of framing and the use of contrast in language:
A white man named Sebastian lands in Nairobi with a backpack, two phrases in Swahili (“Jambo” and “Asante sana”), and absolutely no intention of leaving anytime soon. He’s immediately dubbed an “Expat”. A global citizen. A digital nomad. A pioneer in avocado toast economics.
Now, enter Kwame from Accra, wearing a tailored suit, holding a PhD in Agricultural Systems, and coming to Germany to work on climate resilience. He’s labelled an “Immigrant.”
More contrast in these sentences:
The “Expat” gets a welcome package:
Airbnb in Kilimani,
Yoga on rooftops,
Weekend trips to Maasai Mara,
And a LinkedIn bio that reads: “Helping Africa reach its full potential.”
Meanwhile, the “Immigrant” gets:
Endless interviews where he’s told he’s “overqualified”,
Border control officers who look at him like he’s smuggling morals into the country,
Rent discrimination (“Sorry, the house is taken”),
And eternal suspicion for daring to eat ugali better than locals.
🎧 1 long-form listen of the week
a. ‘How to Write Freakishly Fast — Steven Levitan’ on the How I Write podcast with David Perell
Modern Family is my favourite sitcom (even over Friends, Brooklyn Nine Nine and The Office). The way the show uses wit, warmth and great storytelling with a set of diverse and lovable characters is exemplary.
As one of the co-creators of this show, Steve Levitan is an expert who’s at the top of his craft, and, in this conversation, offers some great thoughts on creativity, humour and storytelling.
In writing a script, Levitan states that the most important task is to fix the plot story (of what will happen), and not the actual writing of the screenplay and dialogues:
…stories are gold. Stories are everything. There’s an old story about two screenwriters talking and one of them says, “you know how’s your new screenplay coming?” And he goes, “Well, I just finished the outline and I’m about to start the first draft, so I’m 90% done.” Right? And that’s the way I think we all looked at it. Like the drafts are easy. (The story outline is) everything, the hardest part of the job.
Perell makes an interesting point about modern sitcoms—they are not joke-focused. They are story-focused:
… the thing that surprised me most about talking to comedy writers is they’re like, “Dude, story is king.” Over and over and over again. And I don’t know why. This me just being naive. I was like, “Oh, no. Joke is king. You’re a comedy writer.” No, the best jokes, the best laughs come out of character, first of all, so that it’s just natural behavior.
Story-writing is hard work! In this portion, Levitan describes how figuring out the plot would be like solving hard math problems:
… it was just endless story breaking and it felt like doing math problems all day like word, you know, math word problems…
I’d come home at the end of the day and… my brain would just be throbbing, fried. And my wife would say, you know, how’s it going? What are you working on? (and I’d be like) don’t get me started. I just need to not think about it …, and then I’d go to I’d watch TV…. or we’d go out whatever.
And I wake up at 3 in the morning and I’m thinking about that story because if we didn’t fix it we can’t get it. And sometimes… a story would break really quickly… and sometimes you’d be five days and you have nothing and it’s really frustrating and it’s by far the hardest part.
Levitan tries to increase the contrast between characters (contrast is a key storytelling technique):
I have this sort of theory. I call it two points in a line. And you start with a point and that’s a character. So let’s say that’s Oscar. And Oscar is messy and he’s single and he doesn’t care about much and he’s got a lot of other habits. Okay. And now we’re going to have somebody move in and it’s going to be about their relationship. So, we need to get make that… line between them to crackle like a high power electrical line.
And if it’s just like, oh, he’s got a friend and they’re buddies and they like to hang out and they talk sports. It’s a line. They’re friends, but is it crackling? So, how do you make it crackle? Okay, well, Oscar is the messiest person you’ve ever seen. Felix is the neatest person you’ve ever seen and persnickety and Oscar smokes cigars and Felix has allergies and on and on and on. And you just keep adding attributes to each character to make it more alive, to make that line more alive.
Being observant is a key skill in writers:
I always say as a writer, your antenna needs to be up at all times … (making observations like), “Well, that’s funny that that they did that or… like it annoys me that that guy was double dipping into the dip.”
Like that’s a thing that nobody else would see and make note of, but a great writer like Larry (David) sees that and says, “Oh, that’s funny. Like, that annoys me. That’s going in the book, right? That annoys me. That’s going in the book.”
And so, we would all say to each other in the room like “be observant this weekend.”
What’s the impact of a story? Life changing, if you ask some people. Modern Family has had massive impact in normalising gay relationships, especially in the eyes of older people:
… we’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years. And my two favorite versions of those would be the ones from either gay teens or whatever gay young people who said ‘because of your show, my family, my parents who were very conservative, they liked Mitch and Cam and they would laugh at Mitch and Cam and it opened the door for me to be able to tell them that I’m gay and it saved my life…’
Or from the parents who would say ‘I got used to having the idea of having a gay kid through Jay through what Jay was going through because he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it and we weren’t. And because of that, when my son came out to me, I handled it way better than I would have and it made us closer.’
That’s all from this week’s edition.
Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
