Cover image from Shaun Tan’s The Arrival
Steve Jobs famously described how “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
“Storytelling” sounds juvenile, but a good storyteller doesn’t have to tell fictitious or embellished stories to capture and sustain the audience’s interest. Effective storytelling is a universally useful tool since telling your story uses the same kind of narrative structure as any book. As preferences of story form and length change with the rise of short-form digital media, knowing how to tell your unique story has never been more valuable.
Recently, Mike and I sat down to discuss effective storytelling techniques by using The Arrival by Shaun Tan. A unique choice for discussion because it’s a book that's telling a purely visual story. So what storytelling lessons can be learned even without any words?
Below are a few excerpts from our talk.
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Mike: What are your thoughts on the visual aspect of storytelling because you picked a story that’s almost entirely visual? What’s the power you think in the story that comes through because of that visual element?
Craig: Something very visceral about it just being visual is how there’s an emotional level that gets added to the characters. Nuance and detail in everyone's expressions and features. You can follow the story beat for beat even without the words and understand what characters are talking about.
The world of The Arrival and the things in it are drawn in that hyper realistic graphite pencil style, all the people very much look like people, the locations and the vehicles also look very tangible. There’s even a few that are adaptations of old photographs that give this book a very historic yet current feeling.
You’ll have a very close-up image of the character and then it will take a step back, and another step back, and another step back and you realize you’re seeing him through a window, a window on the side of a boat, a boat in an ocean, an ocean eclipsed by this massive cloud they’re approaching.
It makes it a very intimate human story, but it contextualizes it as only one story amidst a sea of other people that are going through the same thing.
Mike: History is always a matter of something we’ve experienced right? Something that’s happening now vs something that might in the future. What did you mean when you talked about it being deep history but at the same time current?
Craig: I’d probably define history a little bit differently in some ways. While I know that ‘History’ is all that’s preceded the current moment, my history started in 2001 when I was born. Everything that occurred before I existed is my history insofar as I wasn’t there, I didn’t exist yet so it’s ALL stories to me. While I’m sure you have very distinct memories of the 90s and 80s I can't have those. There’s this weird part of me that can’t grapple with the fact that that world existed without me in it.
So this story, because it emulates that old photobook look of our great grandfather making the crossing in 1910, it’s kind of timeless. It does a good job removing itself from the real world while still being inhabited by people with different histories and cultures.
The New Country, 2004-5, graphite pencil, digitally coloured, 60 x 40cm
So currently debates around immigration and nationality and who deserves or belongs to be where they are becoming increasingly relevant. It’s a story that stuck with me so much because as a kid reading through it ... it definitely instilled a new level of empathy in me in that I’d never had to go through something like that. So I’ve always wanted to protect and spread that message.
Mike: Shifting a bit, I’m curious about analogous storytelling. Is there a shortlist of different storytelling methods analogous being one of them?
Craig: Well there's definitely Fiction and Nonfiction, but you also hear about ‘Creative Nonfiction’ in things like journalism and reporting when people are writing a factual account of a story but try to make it more interesting by drawing attention to certain elements.
Analogous storytelling is more of an overarching universal theory that I like to invoke because I think that most storytelling comes from a desire to tell fables to each other, to give people an example to learn from or have take-aways from. You can try to create a meaningless movie but no one’s going to watch it. You can create a sequence of flashing colours and images but even that people will try to analyze and draw meaning out of. It’s not just one way to make a story but it’s an inescapable element of storytelling that people will put a bit of themselves and their beliefs into it. Suggestions about how they wish the world was, or observations about how they see the world is.
Mike: And do you think that as a model for storytelling, is there a way you'd describe the beginning, the middle, and the end? Is there a special flow to The Arrival that all of that visualization hangs on?
Craig: There’s a lot in the book that doesn’t strictly speaking ‘advance the plot’. A lot of it is in service of building these emotions and relationships. There’s some pretty mundane things that you may not think are a very impactful part of the immigrant experience necessarily. But he goes shopping at one point and doesn’t recognize any of the food. It’s a very mundane moment but it’s in being stuck with all of these options that you don’t know how to evaluate against each other that you get this understanding.
There's a start in any good story of being very out of your element and being thrown into something where you don’t really know what’s going on. That middle being the learning experience and finding ways to connect with people and find those who are willing to help him. And the ending becomes the integration of these learnings and the comfortability with bringing his family because now he can pass those learnings on to them as well. Having that beginning, middle, and ending, the inexperience, learning, and integration is a pretty universal arc you see in a lot of stories.
Mike: Was it clear to you that on one hand, these are clear and deliberate things the author is trying to tell you through the story almost verbatim, and the other is a tableau of many different textured notes you have to look for?
Craig: Like any good story there’s going to be topical clear themes, and I’m sure a major one Shaun wants to get across is a feeling of human empathy.
Here’s something that readers can try for themselves: There’s a theory of communications that I like from Stuart Hall who talks about the Dominant reading of a piece of media, the Negotiated reading, and the Oppositional reading. If I took this book for example the intended reading would be ‘This book was written about an immigrant story to make readers empathise with immigrants in the real world and understand that they are people fleeing from things outside of their control to seek a better life.’ That could be a dominant reading.
An oppositional reading is often deliberately counter to what the intended message is. I do oppositional readings all the time with advertising (and I recommend that readers try this as well), with the oppositional reading you’re deliberately being a bit obtuse to get insight into how messaging can be changed through interpretation. The same thing happens with stories where we sometimes work with them and take away the authors intended but we also sometimes read into it and take away something they didn’t intend or even completely contrary to what they want us to learn from it.
When it comes to a negotiated reading we meet in the middle. Two people can read a book or view and ad and debate about its meaning or what a character's motivation is. The author might have a definitive idea in their mind so it’s not a failure of communication that everybody doesn’t get the same experience from the media, as much as debating is an inherent part of interpretation. Everyone's take-away will be slightly different.
Mike: What’s your opinion on people’s capacity to absorb a story? I think a story is a more interesting way to consume and retain information, but what’s your sense of human capacity? People are extraordinarily overloaded with information so are we losing our capacity to even follow a story?
Craig: I don’t think we’re having trouble with visual storytelling because they are to an extent more passive than active reading. This is partially why I loved graphic novels as a kid because they could focus more on the dialogue, people, and they felt more like watching an animated film one frame at a time. With short-form video content it’s so easy to fall into because we’ve gotten so good at refining down these single interesting moments that are just captivating enough to keep us watching. It never feels like a big commitment, while reading a book takes extended dedication to finish it and get that satisfying feeling of accomplishment. There’s no worse feeling than abandoning a book halfway through, not because it lost my interest or was bad, but because something else grabbed the limited time and attention we have to dedicate to it. Movies go on without you but books you have to actively engage with the whole way through.
Mike: So as we gravitate towards sixty interesting short stories is it more satisfying than one single story well told over sixty minutes? Where do you think the balance of the world is now leaning?
Craig: I’ve seen both. As a child of YouTube, there was an algorithm, and its dictates determined what types of videos it would prioritize and incentivize to be made. For a while people realised the most profitable were exactly 10 minutes long because they were long enough to go into the next ad tier, but short enough to keep people engaged. Over time there’s been a division between the two camps of micro-content and the rise of the video essayist. On YouTube there’s creators that go away for months. Any time they come back they drop a three, four, five-hour video longer than most movies. I’ve seen an eighteen hour long video retrospective on a nickelodeon television show that’s not really designed to be watched in one sitting. They're designed to be engaged like reading a book with chapters, because the speed you can convey information through video and audio is just so much faster than words in a document. So, while there is a tension between people willing to engage with this longform educational content, it’s more that the delivery system itself is updating.
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To our readers, we hope you took away some new ways to integrate storytelling into your own lives. The Dominant, Oppositional, Negotiated readings of Stuart Hall are a highly useful tool for media analysis and a great way for writers and readers to stress-test any public messaging. These excerpts are from an upcoming series of Blast interviews that will continue to delve further into powerful communications. Come back each week and learn how to boost your communication skills with Blast.
