Recast Your Story
Melt. Turn. Form. Repeat.
More and more of my work is recasting. Telling an old story in a new way: finding the locus of interest for today, for these people, living right now. These people who don’t care how the story used to be told—it meant nothing to them and seemed irrelevant if not invisible.
My industrial-controls client wants a new way to talk about a neglected product. I write to find the words and the approach to make it interesting for today’s audience. My medical client wants to recast the backbone of their selling proposition with proper science and citations (versus just their own internal studies, which were not wrong, just limited). A consulting client wants to turn their expertise into a broader story that pulls in people outside the narrow audience with which they’ve been successful.
My process is to play with the story element. That’s why writing often seems like play or goofing off. It must be so: that’s where key discovery happens. Sort of like the process in my daily failures at Dumb Sketch Daily. I don’t know what’s right until I draw it wrong.
It occurs to me this recasting process is going on all over my life. Writing and faith and parenting and exercise are all changing before my eyes. A new story keeps getting told about each and it is important each story is told—telling and retelling the story helps me understand life. Maybe the retelling is all about making meaning.
What’s changing in your life and what story do you need to recast or retell? And who might benefit from that retelling?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Note to My Bearded Self: Perhaps, Unbeard?
Daughter: “You look like a different Daddy.”
Wife: “I feel like I’m cheating.”
Mrs. Kirkistan often laments the stages of beardom: from unsightly to “Ouch!”
Via Adfreak
“You Disappoint Me” & Other Nonstarters (DGtC#30)
Don’t Make Everything a Crisis Communication
Regular old talk has a way of lining things up. Steady, routine conversation between spouses, friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues can have a gentle, restorative quality.
Does that sound like an overpromise—especially given the mundane nature of so much of our talk?
Regular talk helps grow people along similar lines
It’s true in this way: like keeping roads open for traffic. We depend on open streets to drive to the grocer or to pick up our returning student from the airport. And sometimes we use those roads to race our pregnant wife to the birthing center.
Hard conversations are hard because of some urgency. Something needs to be said right now or else bad things will happen. Often we put on our formal language when we intend to communicate some crisis point:
- “I’m disappointed in…X” is a way corporate managers temper the screaming in their skulls.
- “We need to talk….” Is the time-honored way spouses bring up all sorts of unpleasantness.
But if those conversational roads have been open for traffic for some time, and relationships have been established, sometimes those formal words need never make an appearance. Talking about things can be handled on the fly, in normal conversation, in small bits. That’s because trust builds with the word traffic. And those conversational roads can carry quite a lot of weight.
Talking is a wonder.
Who would have guessed?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
How to catch elusive thoughts
Tell someone. Or just tell yourself.
Check your web of relationships early and often, before those thoughts vanish.
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Image Credit: Kirk Liviingston
Trump is the Id of the Republican Party
I thought he was a joke. He is—and he is also pure emotion.
“We’re all fired.”
Freud’s “id” was the part of the psyche responsible for uncoordinated instinctual trends. That is also a fair description of Mr. Donald Trump.
If you listen to Trump’s actual words at all, you don’t come away thinking “This man is rationale and thoughtful.” Instead, you come away with an emotional response:
I hate him.
Or
I love him.
Though likely capable of rationale discourse, he would likely choose not to engage in that direction. His traveling theater has always been about emotion and first impressions. Trump says the bias-first stuff that people think before they have actually considered their response. That’s why the media cannot quit him. He’s the clown people cannot stop watching—the guy who keeps poking himself in the eye and lighting his hair on fire.
And—unfortunately—we love it. He’s the perfect foil for our entertainment-obsessed drive to national office.
Our nation deserves a Trump in this race.
Our nation will not survive a Trump in office.
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Dumb Sketch: Kirk Livingston
If you order my book, I’ll kiss you.
No I won’t.
But I’ll be grateful.
Another friendly sculpture from Lakenenland Sculpture Park
A friend emailed today that he ordered my book and thought my title and description worked well. I felt like hugging him. Mind you, I’m not a big hugger. Nor a big kisser—apart from the lovely Mrs. Kirkistan.
But there is something about finding people who resonate with my story that makes me weak at the knees (figuratively). I’m fascinated by all the crazy wondrous stuff that happens in even the most mundane conversations and now I’m starting to run into others willing to be fascinated as well. People are now telling me about the big life direction changes that came from random (seeming) conversations.
As I start to look for venues to talk about the book: book clubs, radio shows, churches or small groups, I am grateful for the opportunity to have conversations about, well, conversation.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
How to Talk to Yourself for Fun and Profit (DGtC#29)
How can you learn something?
It seems like teachers stand and teach. But the truth is more like teachers stand and talk. Teachers try to arrange words so students will grab an idea and monkey with it themselves. The learning is in the student, not the teacher. Same with preachers and CEOs: when they blather on endlessly, chances of some party line changing anyone’s mind diminish greatly.
Copywriters and artists and comedians and sculptors and storytellers know this. So they trim their words/images/jokes/granite/story to the bare essentials. Among those bare essentials must be something that resonates with your experience. Something among those bare essentials must ring true—otherwise you won’t listen and you’ll go back to playing Angry Birds. Those few bare essentials stand the best chance of actually engaging you to work with the idea and even try it yourself.
Talking to yourself can build a way to let light in.
Successful communicators want you to talk to yourself. They want you to ask questions and to question assumptions and to wonder how your old behaviors fit your old assumptions. Working with an idea is part of processing an idea. The end result of processing an idea is a change in behavior.
But it comes back to talking to yourself. Even when talking with a friend or spouse or family member, you are also talking to yourself: testing words to see if they are true. Processing life stuff. You are even listening to and learning from what you say.
People who find a way to hold a conversation with themselves about what they see, think, hear and believe are some of the most interesting people you can run into. They are interesting because their self-talk and interior questioning boomerangs out to project a different way of looking at those things we thought were a done-deal. Their self-talk often resonates with the questions ambling about in our own minds.
Where is self-talk leading you? And with whom does your self-talk resonate?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
See Also: Dummy’s Guide to Conversation
Thank you.
Really–Thanks for stopping by.
No. Thank you.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Q: My friend has lost all desire and curiosity.
What can I say to bring him to life again?–Lazarus’s friend
Dear conversation is an engine
My friend has lost all desire and curiosity. What can I say to bring him to life again?
–Lazarus’s friend
Dear Lazarus’ Friend:
Your friend may be depressed. Does he look at his smartphone a lot—that could be a sign. Tell your friend to hie unto a physician for a thorough physical–because it could be physical. It could require a counselor or mental health professional.
But from a friend’s perspective, find ways to be present. Take your friend out for coffee and get him to spill the beans: what’s going on? Friendship is about talking all the way through your friend’s understanding of life just now. Touch on what he fears and what he hopes. Touch on what next steps he might. This will take time—maybe many cups of coffee over a long time. Or take a long walk together–do something that takes the pressure off talking.
Being present with your friend may look like conversation. Or it may sound like silence. But being there, whether or not words show up, that is the first point.
Start there. Because showing up may be just the glimmer your friend needs.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 