As anyone who has been unfortunate enough to be in one of my writing classes can attest, I am a strong advocate of the idea that ’story’ is crucial to the eventual success of your communication. It’s just that we business communicators don’t have the luxury of 400+ pages to tell that story.

So what happens when a sci-fi novelist meets both the social web, via blogs, and computer games? Novels, blogs and computer games are three different delivery channels for a story, with three different format requirements and end-user expectations and needs.

Sean Stewart, 40, is the author of eight novels and the winner of the 2000 World Fantasy Award. He was recently interviewed by freelance writer Jim Hanas.

Instructive and illuminating thoughts…

I think that every means of communication carries within itself the potential for a form of art. Once the printing press was built, novels were going to happen. It took the novel a little while to figure out exactly what it was going to be, but once the press was there, something was going to occur. Once motion picture cameras were around, the movies–in some format or another–were going to happen.

[With regard to the computer games I became involved in,] I modestly or immodestly think that we got some things fundamentally right about the way the web and the internet want to tell stories in a way that not everyone had gotten quite when we lucked into it. What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them.

…

The world of the blog clearly exists in patio space, in porch space, in that “I’m going to invite you into a level of intimacy not usually accorded to strangers, and yet you’re still a stranger. I’m going to write a blog, and you and I will communicate with one another, sometimes with startling candor, and yet in this mixed, hybrid place.”

…

Another part of that art form that I think is going to really stay with people is that sense of the collective or collaborative audience–that it exists in what we were talking about as porch space or blog space: A connected group of people who are interested in talking to one another about things and are even willing to be moved by those things. And it will be a little bit interactive, I think. This is where my crystal ball gets murky, because obviously you look at really passive forms of entertainment like TV and say, “Wow, that’s a model that works.”

It is the nature of the web that you get to click on things. I think, at some level, the art forms that evolve to use that platform will need to let people click on things. In some way or another, people want to push a little on something that happens on the web in a way they do not expect to push on their television sets.”

My thoughts about all this?

I’m not sure — I’m at Dubai airport after a mammoth wait to get a flight home (long story, don’t bother…) and haven’t really slept for about two days. In three hours I will be finally winging my way home to Adelaide, so my brain is terribly foggy right now.

But I do believe that what someone who is at the leading edge of ‘telling stories’ in this brave new digital world — with a new audience that is digital-literate in a way that we 30/40/50-somethings will never fully understand — is telling us deserves to be heard.

Got a view? Comments, please… When I have had a good sleep no doubt I’ll be able to add my two cents worth.

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I’ve mentioned before the importance of reading your email out loud before you send it (the link is on my old blog which seems to have gone down as I type this).

Reading your email out loud serves several ends:

1. It enables you to have a final ‘check and balance’ pause
2. It enables you to ‘hear’ any words that may cause the mental tongue to trip, thus causing a barrier to effective reception
3. It gives you a chance to ensure that your sentence length, and sentences, flow naturally and conversationally
4. It gives you a chance to double check that your audience will understand the communication (their reading and comprehension level may be lower than yours, for example)

Now further research from Justin Kruger and his team published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (I know, I know… you all get a copy but I thought I’d get in first) backs up my views.

Says Kruger:

Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can… Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.

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The ever-wonderful Kathy Sierra points off to despair.com and makes my day!

Go to this page and click on the menu items on the left — ‘Beauty’, ‘Compromise’, etc — and marvel at the images presented before you.

Fantastic!

[Update]

Go to this page and see more posters like this:

Sheer genius!

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If we accept that story telling has been the main way of communicating with each other since when Adam and Eve first decided to fill up their time making babies and that our brains are hard-wired to create and receive stories — and I think we should — then we should ask what the main elements that all good stories have are. We need to know this because if our business ’stories’ don’t have these elements our message may not get across to the reader.

Business, and indeed life, is all about conflict — the conflict between different forces (profit, competition, buyer inertia, buyer preferences) and how these conflicts are resolved, ideally to mutual satisfaction.

For example, we may want a prospective customer to buy our product or service, but the customer has a history of buying from one of our competitors. So to meet our need of selling something to them we must meet their needs.

We must not only meet their needs as currently met by our competitors, but we must create a conflict within that customer that informs and educates them as to how we can meet their needs better than our competitors, then drive them to take action and actually purchase from us. And then not just once, but change their purchasing habits away from our competitors and toward us.

And naturally our competitors are going to create conflict in our new customer to get them to switch back.

So conflict and its resolution is a key component of writing — whether for business or for pleasure.

As James Frey* says, the three greatest rules of writing are:

1. Conflict

2. Conflict

3. Conflict.

It’s only by creating a conflict strong enough to make someone pay attention that we can then introduce a resolution that meets both their needs and ours.

We also need characters, people that are either causing the conflict or are being affected by it.

We need a plot — how the conflict came to be, what is happening or not happening while in this state of conflict, what further conflicts are looming up ahead if we don’t resolve this current conflict now.

And we need a resolution — a number of different scenarios or options that lead to various outcomes, and one option that meets all of the needs of the characters.

Remember, this is business writing not novel writing. So whilst we can use the structure of great novel writing to create powerful business writing, in business we are always striving for a solution that resolves the conflict to everyone’s satisfaction.

Because we want everyone to want to do business with each other again. The cost of doing business with someone who already does business with you is far less than the cost of turning someone into a customer.

The same goes for your management — it is far easier for you if you keep your managers and internal customers on your side than if you have to repeatedly convince them how worthwhile it is for them to listen to you and your views.

In business we don’t have the luxury of 400 pages to tell our story. So our business communication must always be

• concise
• clear
• easy to understand
• memorable, and have a
• ‘call to action’ that is specific and measurable.

Plus, and this is my own personal preference, we should always communicate with passion.

Frey, J.N. ‘How To Write A Damn Good Novel’. New York: St Martins Press. 1987.

No, I don’t know if it is the same James Frey

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Obviously a man with a well-stuffed couch, the Copenhagian Connoisseur of Collectable Detritus, Monsieur Jenkins, has once again uncovered a cracker.

Digging between the cushions for some spare change, he has uncovered a stunner of a newspaper article from 1995.

In the article, Carsten Graff waxes lyrical about how effing useless the internet is, the biggest waste and highest demand of time since the discovery of the baby. Proof of the argument that what you write today can come back to bite you in the bum many years from now.

The article reminds me of all those pundits in the 1970s who foresaw the growth of computer power and gleefully gazed into their crystal balls, prognosticating that we would be working 3 days a week, having 4 days a week of leisure, by 1990. And that happened, didn’t it?!

I can’t wait for Monsieur Jenkins to start spring cleaning his filing cabinet — imagine what treasure troves could be unearthed; all those rejected proposals because the demand for new technology (and the communication thereon) wasn’t there and would never likely be there, according to clients far wiser than us mere mortals…

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Today is Australia Day.

Yes, I’m proud!

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Dubai with a blue sky — this was rare while I was here

They seemed to like the material and my presentation style, which is nice. After all, one never knows how one will be taken in a different country and culture.

So, sitting at 4am in the hotel’s 24-hour cafe and sipping on a very frothy cappuccino, it seems appropriate to reflect on my experience of Dubai — especially as I fly back home in 13 and a half hours time.

The mystery illness that has captured my stomach has, courtesy of pharmaceuticals, largely disappeared. Not totally, but certainly it is not debilitating me like it did earlier this week. That was not fun, and kept me confined to my hotel room every evening, so no sight seeing for me.

However, that does not mean I have not got valid impressions of this city in the desert.

It is winter here, which for me is kind of like a mild Spring — temperatures in the mid 20s celcius, a slight breeze, no humidity. Lovely!

I know that I couldn’t cope with summer here, with its 40+ temperatures and raging humidity. Amusingly (for me at least), whilst I have been here heatwaves back in the sunny downtown Adelaide Hills have seen temperatures hit the 40+ mark (no humidity, though) and bushfires ravage a large chunk of the land I love and call my home. My prayers go out to those threatened with or who have suffered loss.

Back to Dubai…

Dubai — constantly hazy, relentlessly building

There is a permanent haze here. I don’t know whether that’s from the epidemic of building going on, or whether it’s a seasonal weather thing. But very little clear sunshine and always buildings are viewed as if through a glass, darkly.

The building work is mind-blowing. Every where you look there are cranes hard at work on construction sites, each site seemingly trying to outdo its neighbour by constructing a building wider, taller and generally ‘fancier’ than its neighbour. It’s like a whole bunch of teenage boys have entered into a ‘my cordwangle’s bigger than yours’ contest. (Only readers of a certain [old] age will recognise the word ‘cordwangle’ — it comes from Kenneth William’s Rambling Syd Rumpo on the seminal radio show ‘Round the Horne.)

The need here to reposition the city and protect itself from the eventual loss of revenue from oil reserves sees it attempting to emulate two cities at once: Las Vegas and Singapore. Las Vegas for its tourist and entertainment value (”a vibrant city in the middle of the desert? Who’d have thunk?”); Singapore for its investment in knowledge capital.

The tourist aspect is well covered by many of the attractions here, the most spectacular (and because of my illness the only one I’ve seen) being the snow ski slope. Here’s a pdf of some photos of the ski slope taken when it was first built, before it was opened to the public. It is surreal to stand and watch people ski down a snow slope in the middle of the desert.

I’m not quite sure why, but whereas terrorist activity has occurred in every other country around it, the Emirates seems to have escaped any threat to it. Of course, folks here have their own different views and I’m certainly not going to speculate. But it certainly, at least to this Johnny Foreigner, seems a safe place — even the drivers aren’t barking mad; apparently drivers in other Middle Eastern cities are not so polite, careful or ‘aware’ as they are here.

Naturally, in any city wthat serves as a ‘hub’ for local and international trade, there is a dark underbelly. Despite being a muslim country there are certainly aspects that you would expect to find in any major western city. Just this morning, as I came down in the lift to the cafe where I now type, I was joined by a very attractive Russian woman who spoke very little English. I was going down to the cafe to work; she was just leaving her work and heading home.

Alcohol, too, is quietly tolerated. I have been told of local muslims who befriend westerners so as to get access to alcohol. Knowing the sources, I don’t doubt the veracity of their claims.

The price of alcohol is staggering — the ‘house wine’ here at the hotel is a cheap Aussie red for which I would pay no more than $8 a bottle at home; it’s $50 a bottle here. At least I now know to bring some wine in with me next time I visit, and keep it in the room mini fridge.

As for the client that brought me this opportunity, IIR, what can I say? Everyone I met was exceedingly courteous, friendly, helpful and bent over backwards to help me out. The company is an extremely large one, with offices in London, here and Sydney (that I know of, possibly even more). The whole show is very professionally run and I will hopefully get to forge a long-lasting relationship with them.

Everyone of the IIR staff I met were expat British, which reminds me of another bizarre thing about here. It’s an expat city. There are, apparently, more expats here than indiginous inhabitants. Listening to the breakfast radio in the hotel reminded me constantly of that wonderful scene in ‘Love, Actually‘ where Bill Nighy is being interviewed by the chappy at ‘Radio Watford’. I even heard the theme tune from ‘Please Sir‘! (More details about Please Sir). It’s like being back in England all over again, there are so many British accents here.

Dubai is being advertised heavily in Australia at the moment — all the magazines are running full page ads boasting about Dubai Airport’s Duty Free and how huge it is. They are right — it IS huge! The prices are slightly cheaper than I’d pay for gear in Australia, but for many of the items one can purchase it’s just not worth it. Anything electrical comes with a UAE plug, which is the same as the British plug. Therefore I would need to buy adaptors to convert them to Australian plugs. Most often it is not as simple as snipping off the UAE/British plug and wiring up an Aussie plug — the plug is part of the voltage converter. In the end it’s easier to pay a bit more and buy it in Oz, methinks.

Doha, Qatar

I’m tempted to pick up a new fountain pen on my way out, but as the payment from IIR hasn’t hit the credit card yet I don’t want to risk the dreaded and exceedingly embarassing ‘credit card bounce’. I’ve already racked up about $2,000 in expenses since leaving Australia a couple of weeks ago and Mrs BetterComms, the keeper of the finances, is not best pleased.

All in all, despite the stomach bug, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time here — both in Dubai and Doha, Qatar. It will be fascinating to return later in the year (if given the opportunity) and see how both have developed. Doha is preparing for the 15th Asian Games in December of 06, so as with Dubai there is construction work everywhere. The client in Doha is, I believe, ready to move into podcasting and it will be fascinating to be a part of that, if given the opportunity.

And with that I sign off, pack up the notebook and head off to breakfast in my room, thereafter to pack and to check out. Then to the airport and that enticing 23+ hour flight home.

Adieu

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I know he said he was taking some time off to rethink his online strategy.

I know he had a burst of posting activity a couple of weeks ago.

But does anyone else miss his style, his wisdom, his panache and his humour?

Where are you, Mr Jenkins?

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