Lulu Miller’s Five Ss of Storytelling

We knew we were in for a treat when she exclaimed “Go Warriors of the Human Spirit!” while congratulating us on our launch and our passion for creating human centered experiences. We asked Lulu to talk a bit about the alchemy of storytelling and its power to create empathy and in turn change the way we think about the world. In a fun bit of alliteration, she laid out her “Five Ss” of spellbinding storytelling… Or the secret sauce of very smart storytelling as she called it. Here they are excerpted from a transcript of Lulu’s talk:

Suspense

• Every good story needs to have some element of suspense.
• The guiding light of a story is a campfire. You can sneak in a complex idea and a surprise ending, but in the end what people really want is to be moved by stories. 
• If you want to hold people’s attention and really keep them there, you have to give them enough context so they don’t get lost. Building suspense gets people hooked and excited to see where a story goes (a lesson learned in the days of radio productions where folks can switch channels or come in at the middle of a story).
• There is an element of seduction to good suspense. Dangle a question and get people to wait for the answer. Keep them hooked.

Surprise

• Another way of thinking about surprise is the idea of whiplash. Sometimes to honor your listener you need to tug them around a little, they need to feel toyed with and held. It shows the audience that maybe you are anticipating where their mind might be going and you take them someplace completely different. 
• When researching a story, rather than going straight to the perceived expert, go three steps beyond your first intuitive choice for sources. Get further and further away from your own intuition and the typical Google search trail. Who do you know?  Who is the obvious choice to speak on this subject? Now go three steps removed from this person to bring in unique and unexpected perspectives. 
• You can flip the idea of expertise. Who actually is an expert here?

The Surreal

• We can all sometimes feel that the world is sort of bleak and we can at times have despair about humanity. Little glimmers of the surreal can be really healing. We find relief by just imagining that there is a world beyond the one we are stuck in and that there is the possibility of a different way of being. 
• Look for the kinds of stories that tickle the same cilia that great fiction writers tell. Think to yourself, wouldn’t it be cool if things worked like this or like that. 
• Be vigilant in every single word choice and musical choice when crafting your story. Radio is so visual. How would you render fireflies in a radio story when they actually don’t make noise? How would you conjure the light of a firefly with words and sounds? There is this ambiguous space in between identifiable sounds in the world like steps, machines, etc and music. Rendering something as a little more ambiguous and augmenting it with a little music can help someone get there and feel the visual essence of what you are trying to describe. 
• You can nudge people with little gestures and give them an experience that feels other worldly. 
• When interviewing, to get people beyond a typical description of events, you can make the story more emotive and feel a little more surreal by asking about physical details. Sometimes the doorway into people’s own surreal telling is to start asking questions like what color was that pickup truck you mentioned. This jogs the memory and gets people actually thinking about the experience. They fall into a different place where they aren’t necessarily making meaning; they’re exploring the experience again.

Silence

• It is so rare when we are with people that we allow for silence. We rush to fill it in with words in journalism and in storytelling. We believe we are wordsmiths and that our only tool is words. However, like with drawing, where there is black and there is white, silence can create a negative space. Silence is its own instrument that you can use really muscularly and really beautifully in storytelling.
• Silence is a break from words. If it is used at a moment where it is earned, where the listener is feeling an emotion or considering a question, there is almost nothing that feels so good. That silence can feel like an oasis from life. If you have done the work of storytelling, of getting someone to wonder about a question or feel the suspense about what’s about to happen next or to care about somebody, then when you deliver that silence, it is like the listener is getting a break from the noise of their own heads. 
• Silence doesn’t have to come just at the end of a story. Maybe there’s two or three pools of silence along the way. 
• Silence can be a gift that we give to one another. It is so beautiful because the other thing that happens, when the voices in the head, the loud voices in the head are all quieted, a listener can emerge with new eyes and see the world more clearly for a minute or two. 
• Silence can be powerful. It can be hilarious. It can be transformative.

Stochasticity

• Stochasticity or randomness, the things you cannot engineer yourself in a story is really important. 
• This is particularly true as we all face a profound and overdue reckoning of the systemic racism that guides our stories, that guides our reporting, that guides our editorial processes and our hiring processes.
• My compass is broken. The places that I go to seek stories, the things that I think make a good story are forged by a system that is riddled with blind spots and riddled with value judgments. I have so much unlearning to do, but what do I do right now to move forward? What do we all do right now to move forward? If all we have is our intuition to guide us and our intuition is broken, it is going to lead us astray. 
• I don’t have the answers, but right now I think the biggest thing I know for sure is that we need to invite more people into the search, increase the randomness, increase diversity in every single way. We have to find ways to bring in as many people as possible, people we can’t even think to think of, to get us to the people and the stories and the ideas and the perspectives that our own intuition is never going to bring to the surface. 
• Bring more people into the search and pay them for their expertise.
• Collaboration is the way forward. We need to get out of our hermetically sealed chambers. There are so many studies that show how this increases the rate of discovery. 
• We see this in Darwin’s work. Healthy ecosystems are diverse. So when we think about how to get to good storytelling, we have to think about the kinds of stories we want to tell, who we go to as an expert or a source, what we value, and what we call surprising, suspenseful, and surreal. I think that the way to the best stories, the best work, the best kind of revelations for a listener are just to build in these diverse elements to create exchanges and conversations.That is the way to get to not just good stories, but a healthier society.