Best Practice Storytelling: Tropes

It was a dark and stormy night.

Maybe the most infamous line in literature.  So infamous that an award for the worst fiction is named after its author.

My high school creative writing teacher taught us never to start a piece of writing with the weather.  It is an excellent rule, borne (I am sure) of reading 100 papers that started “It was a hot day when Jenny left her house.”

We got a lot of related (and equally sound) advice about cliches.  Mostly metaphors (think eggs frying on sidewalks), cliches are language the reader is so used to they just bounce over it.  You’re not advancing your story in their mind and (especially as you are learning to write) you should challenge yourself to find something original.

Wait?  Something original?  That’s what we are really talking about.  We are taught in school to be original.  Of course, originality is valued.  It gets attention.

In the communications world, we have re-branded ourselves as “storytellers.”  And the best storytellers also have the un-original in their toolbox.

What I am talking about is a trope—an often-used rhetorical device that, used correctly, creates a more impactful reading experience.  Once you are aware of this technique, you see it everywhere, including from elite storytellers.  What is Higgins, the bumbling and anxious functionary in Ted Lasso, but a trope?  And Olga, the wise matriarch from In The Heights?  Total trope.

In 2018, we went up to the Detroit Institute of the Arts and saw an exhibit on the art behind Star Wars.  It was just fantastic.  We tend to forget that these films were made by hundreds of creative people—artisans, really.  You could see their workspaces, with pictures tacked to the wall for inspiration. 

You also learned the story behind every little detail.  An example was an exhibit on the Sith costumes in Phantom Menace…in which they clothed the bad guys in black.  How original, right?  Maybe we should try something different.  Maybe the bad guy should be in teal.

But of course not.  A trope is a device—which connotes usefulness—and a bad guy in black is useful because the audience realizes he is bad without even thinking about or realizing they are thinking about it.

Now, is that obvious and cliché or is that great storytelling?  Remember, the audience wants to be drawn into the story and costuming Darth Maul in black is a central line into their brain.

In its way, all of this becomes a form of vocabulary.  Some time ago I heard a radio program about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, one of the most influential speeches of our time.  As perfect as the speech was, the fact is that much of it was extemporaneous and King relied on what amounts to a “vocabulary” of metaphors from the Baptist Church tradition.

All of these would have been readily and instantly familiar to the people he was speaking to.  Sam Leith has written that allusions are embedded in every part of the speech.  Does this make the speech “plagiarized” or “stolen?”  The answer is no.  It makes the speech powerful.

OK, we get it.  Great storytellers are intentional about using tropes to tell stories and we could do that in any type of writing.

Moving now into the practical realm, who else uses tropes?  Bad actors, that’s who.

Renee DiResta, writing recently in Wired, noted this:

Disinformation purveyors use these same [historic] tropes to make their arguments more understandable or relatable and, ultimately, to manipulate us.

She goes on to cite the work of Anna Kata of McMaster University (in Hamilton, Ontario) who has demonstrated that the history of vaccine opposition relies on a series of recurring tropes.  In fact, vaccine tropes weave nicely into broader conspiracy tropes.

And why are these tropes so timeless?  Because, DiResta writes, they rely on the most primal human fears:  the unnatural; malevolent wielders of power; paradoxically, nature; science we don’t understand.

She goes on to suggest that if we are aware of these tropes, we can “pre-bunk” them.  In other words, we can “innoculate” ourselves against these ideas.  (See what she did there?)

This brings us to our banal lives and the banal challenges we face in communicating.

It should be clear by now that there are tropes everywhere.  If there’s a narrative, there’s a trope.

What are the tropes in your organization?  Or your community?  If you are having trouble recognizing them, try this:  What are those annoying stories that won’t go away.

I have taken the liberty of assuming the tropes are negative.  It is possible that there are positive tropes rattling around.  “Overcoming the existential threat.”  “Winning the big contract.”  “Resilience in the face of crisis.”  “The power of common cause.”

If those exist, they should be drawn upon.  To digress briefly, though, positive tropes are closely related to their toxic cousin, nostalgia.  The idea that life was better “before the merger,” “before the new CEO” or “before the plant closed” is a noxious weed in our garden (trope).  Pre-bunking nostalgia means making the case that things weren’t that great before either, which is a big lift (did it again).  You have to be careful invoking the past and the key is to be as action-focused and personal as possible.  The antidote to powerful forces outside our control is the action we take in our sphere of control.  As in, life was better when we did this.

Way more likely is that you are facing malignant tropes.  The annoying stories that won’t go away.   There could be a million of them but they tend to fall into categories.  Let’s take one as an example.

“The past is repeating itself.”

You know the idea.  We just lost a big customer.  It’s just like when it happened 10 years ago and when it happened that time 100 people got laid off.

As a communicator, research is suggesting we need to “pre-bunk” this trope.

The biggest obstacle to “pre-bunking” is that we will need to explicitly acknowledge the former layoffs, something leadership is typically loathe to do, hoping that people will not connect the two events on their own.

Instead, we need to follow the pre-bunking advice in DiResta’s article.  Something like this, from the beginning.

Losing Acme is difficult to hear.  Those of you who have been here a while will remember when we lost Cladis.  That was a difficult time for our company, but here is why this time will be different.  We learned from Cladis.  We diversified our business.  Acme was only 12% of our business, whereas Cladis was 35%.  We also implemented lean operations, which will make us more resilient to events like losing Acme.  Lastly, the hard work we did to restructure our debt means we are in a less precarious position than we were before.  Losing Acme will impact us but we are in a different place than we were before.

We meet our audiences where they are.  We communicate in their world.  Maybe it was a dark and stormy night.