Make Your Work Interesting to Others with Story

The Art and Science of Relating: Make Your Work Interesting to Others with Story, with Alan Alda, Actor & Author, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

Humanize your message

I met a nanoscientist at Cornell University. He had discovered–with his graduate student–how to make the world’s thinnest glass. It was only one atom thick. The top of it was the same atom as the bottom of it. And he called it two-dimensional glass. It was an amazing thing, nobody had ever found a way to make glass this thin before. And it was picked up by one scientific journal. And it seemed like a more interesting subject than one that would just get that much attention. A couple of months later he was taking our workshop, we were up at Cornell. And in the course of talking about his discovery, we realized that he had discovered how to make the world’s thinnest glass by accident. It wasn’t something he was trying to do – an accident happened. And I said, you know, this is fascinating. People like us, on the outside in the public, it’s an interesting story to us to know that something so groundbreaking that helped you understand the structure of glass and might have new uses for glass, that you discovered such a thing by accident. What an interesting story that is. And the next time he gave an interview, he started off with the story of how it had been an accident that he discovered this. It became a story that was interesting to other people who don’t know the technical details with that familiarity. And this story about discovering the glass was picked up by websites and newspapers all over America, all over Great Britain. And venture capitalists started calling him asking him if they could commercialize this process. Just starting with a human story that people on the outside of your work are interested in, because we’re all human and we all think in stories.

Highlight your obstacles

The glass of water exercise is something that I figured out on the way to giving a talk. I wanted to give a talk to writers about what’s the essential ingredient of a dramatic story. And I’m in the car with my wife and I said, I don’t know how to start this thing. She says, well why don’t you start with an image? I said an image, ok. So an image of a story, a dramatic story, I decided in that moment was carrying a glass of water across the stage filled to the brim. So when I got there I said, is there somebody relatively brave in the audience? Come on up. Carry this empty glass across the stage. And it’s a little awkward, the audience titters a little bit. But nothing much is happening. She puts the glass down on the table over there. Then I take a pitcher and fill it all the way to the brim. There’s hardly a molecule of water left before it starts to spill. And she’s holding the glass. And I say, ok, now carry the glass carefully across the stage and put it on the table over there, but don’t spill a drop or your entire village will die. Now she’s got an obstacle she has to overcome. And she carries it so carefully that the audience is riveted to the glass. And if a bead of water goes down the side of the glass, you can hear them gasp. Now everybody knows there’s no village, nobody’s going to die. But just the imaginary situation that she has this important obstacle makes this an engaging sight. The attempt to get past the obstacle to get where you’re going, to achieve what you’re trying to achieve, makes it an interesting story. The story is not I wanted to get to Toledo and I went and I got there. That’s ok, it’s not much of a story. The story is I was headed toward Toledo and the airplanes were shut down. The cars were shut down. The railroads were shut down. How was I going to get to Toledo? That’s an interesting story and I want to listen to that. And if in the course of that it turns out you discovered a new way to get to Toledo, I want to hear it.