Storyteller Tactics Review: Abstraction extra
Storyteller Tactics Extra: The Say/Do Gap
Pip Decks helps explain the Abstractions card
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The Pip Decks Club
No, I don’t mean the Pip Club newsletter — excellent though it is — I’m talking about the Pip Decks Slack channel for customers.
Buy one of the products and you get an invite to this private world where the staff members, the designers, and the users hang out and talk to each other. Introductions are made, problems solved, experiences shared.
I hang out there a bit, picking up the goss, leaning over the fence to chat. It’s fun.
Steve Rawling, author of Storyteller Tactics, weighed in recently on behalf of a member who was having difficulty with the Abstractions card.
Steve, if you follow that link above, says,
…nobody ever explained why some stories worked and others didn’t. They just had a gut feeling. Twenty years later, after researching, pitching and telling thousands of stories, I had a gut feeling too.
When I left the BBC, I thought “People need to tell better stories about their work. I can teach them how to do it.”
But the problem is — you can’t teach a gut feeling.
— Steve Rawling, New Thinking Tools
By reading and teaching and explaining the craft of storytelling for decades, Steve has put his gut feeling into a deck of cards. There are rules for why some stories work and some don’t, and these can be taught.
Playing the Abstractions card
The discussion on the Slack channel concerned exactly how to use the Abstractions card in the Storyteller Tactics deck.
It is a bit of an odd man out. Unlike most of the other cards that explain exactly how to use a specific plot mechanism or neat trick to make a story stick or a useful character to guide the audience down the right garden path, this one seems a bit more nebulous.
Here’s why: it concerns what David Ogilvy — the advertising genius who came up with that famous line about the Rolls-Royce clock — said about people:
‘People don’t know what they feel, they don’t say what they know, and they don’t do what they say’. — David Ogilvy
David could tell a great story and became rich coming up with them. His autobiographical books Blood, Brains, and Beer, and Confessions of an Advertising Man are thrilling reads. You want to get your creative juices flowing and go out and sell something, read Ogilvy.
Steve sent me a link that explains the Abstractions card — or goes a long way in that direction, anyway; I think it’s really something we have to feel rather than know — and it’s about stories that we tell ourselves that we never ever put into words.
Like asking a scientist to explain consciousness — TL:DR, they can’t — if we ask someone why they have a shelf full of books on important subjects that they never ever read, they tell us a story beginning with “One day I’m going to…”
They feel they need to learn German grammar or understand what Plotinus meant in his Three Primary Hypostases or to bathe in Shakespearian sonnets or unravel the mysteries and contradictions of Sherlock Holmes.
It’s a rare person who does this. I study German every day — have done since before the pandemic, thank you Duolingo — and I’m still in the dark about how the pronouns work. One day…
The most powerful card in the deck
I believe that if you understand the Abstractions card you can touch the soul.
Maybe we as storytellers cannot put our fingers on exactly what passes through the grey gunk of mind — and I’m indebted to Steve for that phrase — but we can find words or images to lead them to a point of feeling, of emotion, of some shared experience of spirit.
It might be beauty, or horror, or love. Or some abstract notion of a “mute inglorious Milton” as Thomas Gray put it. With a little thought we know what he means and that precise emotion beats in our own breast.
People are complex in ways that scientists cannot explain. But also simple in that we are people and we know within ourselves things that we cannot explain.
Just as a painter can express harmony or excitement or joy with some swirls of colour, we as storytellers can do these things with words or images or actions. A great storyteller can lower their voice, pause, and look around. And we know, just beyond the firelight, the great man-eating lion is about to pounce. The audience feels that delicious terror.
This one card cannot teach us exactly how to touch the soul of our reader. But if we think about it and we look within ourselves, we can find that knowledge because it is a part of what makes us — all of us — human.
This is just one card out of the 54 working cards that make up the Storyteller Tactics deck. These cards are the distilled essence of the gut feeling of what makes a good story. Read them, think about them, put the ideas into practice and watch the effect.
Pip Decks is so confident in their product that they offer a money back guarantee if, after a year, you have not gained ten times the return on investment. and you can keep the cards.
Use my discount code BRITNIPEPPER to get 15% off. I get a few dollars in return. The bold links above are affiliates, same deal. Or just go to the website, no strings attached, look around, discover the system for yourself.
My review series is free. I explore the cards, the systems, the tactics, link to independent reviews, and even show you how to get every word, every diagram, every dot point on every card for free, without paying a cent, with the blessing of the firm.
I believe in these cards. They are the wisdom of storytellers, passed on from ages past. The tactics work. They are a secret guide in the palm of your hand and, though they are expensive, they come with a money-back guarantee.
Britni
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