GIFted Storytelling

I wrote a piece the other day about storytelling and our innate drive to both give and receive the gift of a good story. The piece proved to be a lesson in its own right which is what this post intends to explore.

A GIF of the late presidential contender Jeb Bush was my cold open on that first post. In referencing the GIF I added an asterisk leading to a footer annotation that jokingly tongue-lashed readers who mistakenly pronounce “GIF” with a “J” instead of a “G.” I told them to have fun with their peanut butter while making sure to keep away from my posts before ending with “You’re a cancer to Internet culture.” You know, light-hearted joke-y stuff like that. :|

You’re a cancer to Internet culture. — Me

Clearly not serious, right? …Right? Even if I did feel so strongly about the G/J conundrum, I don’t have enough readership to sacrifice anyone on the altar of pronunciation.

Jeb! John!

The funny thing about all this is that in the midst of trying to stress the importance of having a clear and strong story communicated to whichever audience is before you—contra Jeb!/Geb! Bush—my message’s clarity was seemingly muddied at best. At worst it was mostly lost.

How’d that wind up being the case? Because the strength of the message’s intended filler content—You’re a cancer—became a message of its own. No matter how jokey it was intended to be, it overtook what was suppsoed to be primary.

Huh. Funny that. Jeb! would be proud.

One More Example

To borrow a lesson from yet another presidential hopeful: I Trumped myself. Attempting a bit of showmanship caused the thing(s) of substance to be eclipsed. Whether partially or fully is really besides the point. Any amount of distraction from the actual message is detrimental to the entire exercise, isn’t it?

No amount of back peddling does anyone any good, either. Unless, of course, you actually are Donald Trump. Then you can say whatever the hell you want and back peddle it or change it as many times as you’d like. Just this morning he tweeted that strong comments concerning President Obama “founding ISIS” were sarcastic. Earlier this week walking back strong rhetoric that Y’all Qaeda types would gladly rally around. (And, to be fair, you could simply avoid back peddling by way of bald-faced lying a la the Hillary variety.) This isn’t about politics, though, and I can’t help but notice I’m at this very moment dancing on a wire of repeating the very mistake this post is supposed to be concerned with.

Pointedly

Let’s attempt to put the vase back together, shall we? The lesson we can take away from the inadvertent and ironic result of the first post is this: communicating a story effectively requires a great deal of focus.

The best storytellers get their point across both clearly and powerfully even while weaving together various subplots, twists and turns, and seemingly unrelated items into a unified whole. Bad ones—*cough cough*—can’t even get a joke in without possibly causing an implosion. Clearly I need to bone up on my former trade.

So, don’t be unclear like Jeb! or overly heavy-handed and boisterously distracting in all the secondary things like a Trump or Blythe (#Blythe2016). Clear and powerful. You need both, and you need a healthy amount of focus to achieve both.

Naturally, we should conclude with one more Graphical/Jraphical Interchange Format image, or GIF/JIF as the kids say.

Get pissed at distractions and then focus on getting the valuable work done: tell your story.