Post #27 – Memoir and Fiction, Writing Alchemy – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
A Different Look at Storytelling
Storytelling. Say the word. Think about the word. What images are conjured in your head?
Memoir writers know that they are engaged in the most important type of storytelling — writing words that describe their lives, their emotions, their turning points, their highs, their lows, and a lot of what comes in between.
Storytelling is part art and part science. Over the coming months, we’ll be talking more about storytelling. Today, we want to share a few points about how the best leaders understand, intuitively or analytically, the value of storytelling.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been running into articles and books that focus on the intersection of leadership and storytelling. I haven’t sought them out. They just sort of fell into my lap (well, my computer).
Let me give you a few examples of a message that seems to be growing:
1. I’ll begin with the first example that drew my attention. Howard Gardner is a Harvard psychologist known for his landmark work on multiple intelligences. In his 1995 book Leading Minds: An Anatomy Of Leadership
Here’s a brief quote from Gardner:
“A leader is an individual … who significantly affects the thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors of a significant number of individuals.
“…leaders fashion stories–principally stories of identity. It is important that a leader be a good storyteller, but equally crucial that the leader embody that story in his or her life.”
2. Next I saw reference to Peter Guber’s book Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story
“…Guber seems to have intuitively grasped what I slowly learned over my entrepreneurial adventures, which is that the most profitable companies are those that form personal, emotional connections … with customers. In Tell to Win, Guber shows how the stories we tell — about our companies, our products, and ourselves — are what elecit people’s emotional reactions and drive word of mouth.”
So who’s Tony Hsieh and what does he know about storytelling? He’s the CEO of Zappos.com, Inc. and author of the New York Times bestselling book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
3. Next I ran into two more books — Mark Satterfield’s book Unique Sales Stories: How To Get More Referrals, Differentiate Yourself From The Competition & Close More Sales Through The Power Of Stories
So What Does Storytelling and Leadership Have to Do With Memoir Writing?
Memoir writers have a message that they not only want to share with others but that they want to use to persuade. Perhaps they (you) want readers to change a behavior, gain more knowledge, learn what to do in situations similar to what you’ve experienced. Or, in the words of Gardner — you want to “affect the thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors of a significant number of individuals.” You probably haven’t thought of yourself as a leader or your memoir as your storytelling tool to get others to pay attention.
But you should.
Furthermore, you should tell your story in a way that early readers will want to tell others about it. As Tony Hsieh says:
“Our philosophy is to take most of the money that we would have otherwise spent on paid advertising or paid marketing and instead invest it into … the customer experience, and let our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.
“In other words, we’re really just in the stories and memories business.”
Memoir writers need to think of their storytelling in terms of crafting their memoirs in a way that causes their readers (customers) to help market their book for them through word of mouth.
I’d like to know what you think of this concept. Leave me a note below in the Comments section.
