3 lessons in storytelling from Ken Burns
- Wed, May 23 2012
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
My colleague Caryn Stein sent me this great interview with documentary filmmaker and master storyteller Ken Burns. It has three fascinating insights on one of the most critical parts of our jobs in nonprofit marketing, fundraising, or just about any form of selling and persuasion: telling stories.
1. All stories are manipulation. People tell Ken Burns his work moves them to tears. He says the stories move him, too. He puts them together to do just that. He says that means he is in the business of manipulation, however sincere. I often hear people say it’s manipulative to set out to touch people about our causes. Fine, call it manipulation. Like Burns, let’s be honest: We should be in the business of moving people and making people care. Stories that don’t elicit emotion aren’t less manipulative anyway - they are just really bad stories.
2. Emotional truth is something you have to build. And it comes from showing people in all their complexity. Ken Burns talks about his mother, who was sick with cancer his entire childhood and died when he was eleven. He says that’s what drives his work - an urge to wake the dead. He has devoted himself to continually bringing alive people from the past - a compulsion born of his own past. That’s an emotional truth he builds for us in telling his own story.
3. We coalesce around stories that transcend. Ken Burns made a film about baseball. If you were a racist Dodger fan and you saw Jackie Robinson join the team, did you quit baseball? Change allegiances? Or change? People can change, and that’s a story that transcends.
Do your stories move with an emotional truth? Do they transcend? Watch this video and be inspired to tell that kind of tale.
Comments
I understand what he is talking about. My wife and I produced a documentary called “Women in War” that allows 5 women to tell the story of life before during and after being in war. They range from WWII to Iraq.
As director I paid attention to what they said and made mental notes about what I wanted in the story. I planed it so the real story of how it affected them and the aftermath, especially of the Vietnam, Desert Storm and Iraq wars. I planned it so that people got an understanding of the possible consequences of being in the military and going to war. Prescreening had men tearing up as well as women. I accomplished my mission.
As a disabled Vietnam vet, I have a hard time watching it as the memories come back and my heart aches.
I hope people watch the video; it’s tremendously well done. Thanks for the summary. You’ve done a good job of capturing the primary points.
So profound, lucid and simple that most people won’t be able to do it. They’ll say “Oh, I get it”, but they’ll never make the changes in their everyday storytelling to accomplish what Mr. Burns outlines with such compelling skill. That’s because the doing of the thing requires so much more courage than the getting of it.
Fascinating video and article. With the rapid rise of social media and mobile platforms, great storytelling is often replaced with simpler and easy-to-digest information. It’s important to remind us every so often the true power of an amazing story.
I found your comments and ken Burns interview greatly incitful as I am trying to build a bank of stories around carers and their family members to help services improve their relationship with carer and care recipient.
Awesome post! Thank you for sharing. Ken Burns is definitely an effective storyteller. Integrating narrative and story into policy and advocacy work is critical. I am taking a leadership and communication class that addresses this very point. We have to make people care and use humanity to make the data and numbers matter.