The Story

29/05/2024

Will listening to these songs turn you into a best-selling author? Unlikely! Will it reveal insights into these authors' inner lives? Maybe! Will it give you something to tap your feet to? Provided you enjoy classical, Motown, a genre we're generously calling ‘Gen X alt-country’, and—ah—Lou Bega's 1999 hit 'Mambo No. 5', then yes. Yes it will.

The songs Stephen King, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler and more played to get the words flowing.

16/05/2024

Conservatives have long dominated the political battlefield with simple slogans (and simpler thinking). PR legend David Fenton, whose campaigns helped reverse the nuclear arms race and end apartheid in South Africa, says it's time the left did the same.

In our latest dispatch from the wild world of progressive comms, we ask the so-called 'Robin Hood of public relations' how activists can fight fire with fire to shift the climate change debate.

Conservatives have long dominated the political discourse. PR legend David Fenton says its time for the left to fight back.

01/09/2023

In ‘The Heat Will Kill You First’, Rolling Stone editor Jeff Goodell turns an invisible, nebulous subject into a page-turning thriller.

It’s a masterclass in crafting fear and suspense out of unlikely materials. We sat down to find out how he does it, whether he thinks writing can actually save the planet, and why he quit professional motorcycle racing to tackle a far more dangerous pursuit.

In 'The Heat Will Kill You First', the best-selling author turns an invisible, nebulous subject into a page-turning thriller. Here's how.

15/08/2023

Do you wake up before sunrise, bang out couple dozen pages then complete a quarter marathon like Murakami? Or is a day of tortured, Didion-esque reflection and a handful of sentences more your style?

Of course, these aren’t the only options: Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S Thompson, Ursula Le Guinn, Susan Sontag—they all had their own writing routines (some healthier than others).

Find the one that’s right for you (or simply gawk at the odd hours they kept) in the article below.

“After 8:00 p.m. I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this.”

16/05/2023

They were the beloved upstarts of the millennial era. Now publications like BuzzFeed and Vice are the ones being disrupted. Where did the dream of the 2010s go wrong?

They were the beloved upstarts of the millennial era. Now the BuzzFeed, Gawker and Vice set are being disrupted. Where did the dream of the 2010s go wrong?

01/05/2023

Nathan Anderson exposes corporate fraud (and makes millions in the process). Can activist short sellers like him replace the journalists who ordinarily do this work? Paddy Manning investigates.

The activist investor behind Hindenburg Research is doing the work once reserved for investigative reporters. Is this the new face of journalism?

06/04/2023

Dreams, italics, the word “lugubrious”—here’s everything America’s newspaper of record wants writers to stop, ahem, writing.

Dreams, italics, the word “lugubrious”—here’s everything The Washington Post wants writers to stop writing.

03/04/2023

For decades, newsrooms have followed an unbeatable ratings strategy: ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. But while negative stories tend to attract bigger audiences, they can also lead those same audiences towards what psychologists call ‘learned helplessness’—a state of fatalistic apathy where people start to believe the world is beyond saving.

As the director of one of Denmark’s biggest newsrooms, Ulrik Haagerup helped produce this kind of ‘doom-and-gloom’ reporting for ten years. Then one night, he found himself wondering if another form of journalism might be possible—one that gave audiences the tools to solve the world’s problems instead of throwing up their hands and changing the channel.

Together with a team of like-minded reporters and academics, he spent the next few years ironing out the details of what is now known as ‘constructive journalism’. Could it be the solution to our media woes?

Constructive journalism—also known as solutions journalism—is a more helpful way to report the news. Here's how it works.

01/03/2023

In hospitals across the world, doctors are putting down their scalpels and picking up novels to better understand—and better heal—the sick. The reason why? A woman named Rita Charon, and the burgeoning field of healthcare she founded called ‘narrative medicine’.

The idea behind narrative medicine, Charon says, is that patients tell stories about what’s wrong with them. And just like a novel, these stories are filled with plot, character and metaphor. To make sense of these stories—and to translate them into effective clinical care—Charon and her disciples are instructing doctors to read.

“We teach very complicated novels, hard fiction, heavy-duty Sebald, poetry,” Charon says. “We show them the complexities, how a sentence can mean 10 different things.”

If this all sounds like a load of liberal arts hoo-ha, you may be surprised to learn what the science says about narrative medicine, and why more and more doctors are starting to practise it.

More doctors are putting down their scalpels and picking up books to better understand the sick. But what is narrative medicine, and does it work?

09/02/2023

11/01/2023

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from 2022. In this piece from September, writer Patrick Pittman examined an idea that novelist Kurt Vonnegut came up with as a student in the 1940s, which he thought might say a lot about us as a species. It went something like this:

Every story ever told—from the earliest morality tales to Shakespeare right up to the latest episodes of 'House of the Dragon'—follows one of just seven basic 'story shapes’. Not yet one of the most successful authors of the 20th century, Vonnegut came up with the idea when he started charting the plot points of his favourite novels on paper, marking the good and bad things that happened to the books' protagonists over time.

Vonnegut took his idea to the anthropology department at Chicago University, hoping it might form the basis of a master’s thesis. Unfortunately for Vonnegut, the anthropologists rejected his idea, leading the would-be academic to pursue a career in creative writing. (A sliding-doors moment for which we can all be thankful.)

But Vonnegut never abandoned his idea of story shapes, and some 80 years later they continue to dazzle fiction writers. We couldn’t help but wonder whether current-day anthropologists might have softened their stance against Vonnegut’s theory. So we sent Pittman to investigate.

Read the full story—and check out Vonnegut’s nifty diagrams—at the link below.

Vonnegut believed every story could be described by one of just eight line graphs—and that their shapes might be of interest to anthropologists.

09/01/2023

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from 2022. In this piece, writer Fleur Macdonald explains what she learned from inhaling nearly 10,000 action-packed pages of Lee Child’s prose during lockdown.

From the role of pacing (“Where the reader expects pace, Child holds back”) to the importance of finding the bigger picture (“There is a before and an after in a Reacher story, just as there is a before and after in modern America”), Macdonald outlines a masterclass in storytelling for fiction and non-fiction writers alike.

As Macdonald writes, “ I can’t quite remember why I embarked on Reacher. I studied literature, I know I need to finish War and Peace, and I haven’t even been in an airport for a while. But last November, about three weeks into the U.K.’s sad wet second national lockdown, I downloaded the first in the series on Kindle. Perhaps the Amazon algorithm saw into my soul, or more likely I finally acted on the advice of a friend who listens to the audio versions while he illustrates children’s books, wiping the watercolour across his delicate lines as Reacher beats his enemies to a pulp. The beginning set the tone: ‘I was arrested in Eno’s diner.’ For the next two hours, I didn’t look up.”

Read the full article—and contemplate Macdonald’s 7 storytelling tips—at the link below.

A writer sought distraction in the 26 paperback books of Lee Child. She came for the punch-ups. But she left with a masterclass in storytelling.

04/01/2023

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from 2022. In this piece from April, Story editor Chris Harrigan asked what lessons storytellers could learn from bazillionaire Jeff Bezos, who once listed a dozen storytelling elements every Amazon TV show had to include.

As we wrote, “Amazon Studios executives were required to send Bezos spreadsheets explaining how their TV projects addressed each of his 12 storytelling must-haves. Should one element be missing, the studio exec had to explain why.”

Bezos’s rules would have made for some pretty bizarre television: “Insisting on a heroic protagonist (rule 1) would mean shows like ‘The Sopranos’, ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Mad Men’ would never have been made. Diverse worldbuilding (rule 5) would have caused problems, too; ‘The Sopranos’ rarely left New Jersey, and it took five seasons for Walter White to leave the sepia-coloured deserts of New Mexico. And while Bezos is right that superpowers (rule 3) and civilisational high stakes (rule 7) were a big part of ‘Game of Thrones’’ success, insisting on their presence in every show makes you wonder if the fantasy epic was the only show he’d ever seen.”

“We could go on—yes, your TV show should probably have positive and negative emotions (rules 10 and 11), and if Man in the High Castle didn’t, then I’d very much like to know how its screenwriters managed to fill the time—though at this point it’s starting to feel like beating a dead horse. As Stone later clarified, Amazon Studies eventually abandoned Bezos’s 12 rules, presumably around the time Bezos also stepped down as Amazon CEO.”

Read about Bezos’s list—and what it says about the fallacy of storytelling rules—at the link below.

Jeff Bezos once listed a dozen storytelling elements every Amazon TV show had to include. But would they make for good TV?

02/01/2023

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from 2022. In this piece from June, writer Eliza Levinson asked whether ‘cli-fi’ was just morbid entertainment, or if the nascent literary genre could actually help us stop the looming climate crisis.

As Levinson writes, “even the most effective cli-fi struggles against the same problem facing the climate movement: paralysis. Existential fear, however legitimate, can cause people to despair. How much can a single person do? Why aren’t the more powerful doing more? What does it take to make a change? Could such change even be possible? And then, a distressing alchemy: despair transforms into a more comfortable apathy. Why do anything when nothing seems possible?”

Read the full article—and check out Wenjing Yang's award-winning illustration—at the link below.

The climate crisis has sparked its own literary genre. Is it just morbid entertainment, or could ‘cli-fi’ actually help us avert disaster?

28/12/2022

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from 2022. In this piece, published 126 days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, writer Andrew Mueller asked whether Zelensky may have learned anything about international politics from his previous job as a comedian. As Mueller writes:

“On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine—or, more accurately, invaded even more of Ukraine than it had in 2014. Among the many miscalculations made by Vladimir Putin, one concerning the mettle of his Ukrainian counterpart stands out. Putin might well have picked Zelensky for a dilettantish poseur likely to bolt for the first available helicopter. But when the United States apparently made such an offer, Zelensky responded with what will surely one day form the chorus of a patriotic accordion ballad of not fewer than 27 verses: “I need ammunition, not a ride”. It was an early indication that, in these peculiar circumstances, Zelensky’s peculiar background might become a peculiar advantage: his statement of defiance had the quality of the instant zinger with which an experienced showman might silence a heckler.”

Before he was president, Volodymyr Zelensky was a comedian. Now, he is transferring the skills he learned on the comedy circuit to the international stage.

26/12/2022

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from 2022. In this piece from April, writer Mel Campbell asks what the long, myth-laden history of cartography—specifically, our habit of mapping islands that don't exist—says about the human need to make sense of an uncertain world.

As Campbell writes, “In many ways, the earliest maps were stories. Aboriginal songlines in Australia are paths across Country recorded as song cycles: a navigator can cross vast distances by repeating the adventures of creator-beings, which attribute cultural meanings to key landmarks. The epic poet Homer, whose Odyssey invented some of literature’s most famous islands, is credited as the founding father of Western geography.

“And ever since 360 BCE, when Plato mentioned the submerged city of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critius, generations of philosophical seekers have struggled to identify its real-life location. To Plato, the doomed Atlantis was simply an allegorical contrast to his perfect Republic; but that didn’t stop amateur historians claiming it was everywhere from Malta to Morocco.

“You might think it’s obvious that Plato made up Atlantis, that it was just a story. But historically, people resisted such unambiguous distinctions between truth and fiction. A place could be both—and that was what made it powerful.”

Read the full article at the link below.

Why did Hy-Brasil, a "phantom island" that never existed, appear on naval maps for seven centuries? Writer Mel Campbell investigates.

20/12/2022

Give it the right prompts and a couple of seconds and ChatGPT—the artificial intelligence chatbot that’s taken the internet by storm—will write you a poem, an essay, or a Cormac McCarthy novel about a frog on a bicycle.

The chatbot offers a fascinating (and sometimes frightening) glimpse at A.I.’s astonishing progress—and poses some serious questions about creativity. Namely, could artificial intelligence spell the end of human storytelling as we know it?

Writer and living human being James Hennessy reports.

ChatGPT can write you a poem, an essay, or a Cormac McCarthy novel about a frog on a bicycle. Is this the end of human storytelling as we know it?

08/12/2022

Can you post about being laid off without seeming like an unhinged automaton? Or does LinkedIn's obsession with positive storytelling mean there's no place for human emotion? Comedian Patrick Marlborough investigates the strange, relentlessly happy phenomenon of being fired in the age of digital networking, and offers a few tips for the recently unemployed.

Can you post about being laid off without seeming like an unhinged automaton? Comedian Patrick Marlborough ponders getting fired in the age of LinkedIn.

05/12/2022

Well, ain’t this nice? The artwork for our climate fiction article has been juried into Illustrators 65—an exhibit, book and award ceremony hosted by the Society of Illustrators in New York City! Big props to the very talented Wenjing Yang for bringing this story to life.

Head here to revisit our story on how climate change is influencing sci-fi (and how sci-fi is trying to influence climate change): https://bit.ly/3OY4N3d

29/11/2022

Want to bring down a head of state? Expose a match-fixing scandal? Prove that a certain short-term accomodation app is bad for the housing market? No problem! You'll just need to acquaint yourself with a little, often misunderstood and frequently feared thing: data.

As Jack Kerr explains over at The Story, journalists used to spend their whole careers chasing these kinds of leads. But with an internet connection, some off-the-shelf software and a working knowledge of Excel, you too could break the next Watergate—all from the comfort of home.

To find out how (or just marvel at those who do it for a living), click here: http://bit.ly/3urAPeB

23/11/2022

“In the age of big data, many of the world’s secrets are hiding in plain sight. You just need to know where to look.”

Reporters might prefer words to numbers. But as award-winning data journalist Jack Kerr explains, sometimes a simple spreadsheet and a graph are all you need to make headlines.

In an article up today on The Story, Kerr outlines how a new form of journalism is speaking truth to power—and how anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can get involved.

Big data is changing the way journalists break news. An award-winning data journalist explains how it's done—and how you could do it yourself.

17/11/2022

When the world shut down, Fleur Macdonald sought distraction in the 26 paperback books of Lee Child. She came for the punch-ups, but she ended up with something altogether more remarkable: a masterclass in fiction writing.

Here’s everything she learned from inhaling nearly 10,000 action-packed pages in far too short a time, from the role of pacing (“Where the reader expects pace, Child holds back”) to the importance of finding the bigger picture (“There is a before and an after in a Reacher story, just as there is a before and after in modern America”).

A writer sought distraction in the 26 paperback books of Lee Child. She came for the punch-ups. But she left with a masterclass in storytelling.

09/11/2022

In the wake of the devastating Black Summer bushfires, Claire O’Rourke was overcome with a crisis of confidence in our ability to avert a climate disaster. Thankfully, not long after she was overcome by something far stronger: the need to act.

Recognising that millions of other Australians also felt overwhelmed by the scale of the climate crisis, she began writing ‘Together We Can’, a book that threads together the hopeful stories she kept encountering of people taking action to preserve a healthy and habitable planet for future generations.

As an exercise in storytelling, ‘Together We Can’ tackles the most critical communications challenge of our times: how to discuss climate change—a complex, overwhelming and frequently terrifying problem—in a way that inspires people to become part of the solution rather than scaring them into inaction.

On the latest episode of StoryCraft, our sister podcast about all things storytelling, O’Rourke speaks with host Ben Hart about the rise of ‘constructive journalism’, a new communications framework that empowers audiences to come up with solutions rather than stew over seemingly intractable problems. Backed up by a belief that anyone can create the conditions for positive systems change, O’Rourke outlines the pathways for all of us to become better climate communicators.

Listen over at https://bit.ly/3zUKWvt, or wherever you get your podcasts.

02/11/2022

It’s November, which for a certain particularly masochistic subsection of the storytelling population means it’s also , or National Novel-Writing Month.

The goal is as simple as it is daunting: write a 50,000-word manuscript in—you guessed it—a single month. And judging by the number of tagged posts on social media, plenty of would-be authors are currently three days into what will likely be one of the most frenzied months of their lives.

If the idea of writing a book in four weeks has you breaking out in hives, it may help to take some advice from Matt Rogers. One of the most successful writers in Australia (Rogers nets about $40,000 in sales each month), he knows a thing or two about writing. And he knows even more about writing *fast*—the 24-year-old spends just two hours a day typing, yet manages to publish a new novel every three months.

How does he do it? Find out in this feature from our archives.

To write his 28 action-adventure novels, Matt Rogers engaged in some strange practices: namely, transcribing his favourite books, word by painstaking word.

18/10/2022

We don't mean to alarm you, but advertisers really want to insert commercials into your dreams. And according to this group of scientists, they're pretty close to having the tech to do it.

Advertisers want to insert commercials into your dreams. And according to this group of scientists, they're pretty close to having the tech to do it.

11/10/2022

At a children’s centre in Melbourne’s west, educators are getting kids ready for the future by teaching storytelling as a core life skill.

The idea, as founder Jess Tran explained it to us, is that by learning how to tell stories (by grappling with narrative arcs and inciting incidents and all the other highfalutin literary devices usually reserved for TV writers’ rooms), children won’t just learn how to spin a yarn—they’ll learn how to be better scientists, better engineers, better lawyers, better whatever it is they want to be.

We sat down with the good folk at 100 Story Building to find out why they do what they do, why it works, and why storytelling should be up there with the three Rs.

At a children’s centre in Melbourne’s west, educators are getting kids ready for the future by teaching storytelling as a core life skill.

04/10/2022

In the 1940s, Kurt Vonnegut spent his spare time charting the plot points of his favourite books on graph paper. Eventually he came to a startling conclusion: every story ever told—from the oldest fairy tales to Shakespeare right up to works of 20th-century modernism—followed one of just eight different story shapes.

Intrigued by what these shapes might say about us as a species, Vonnegut took his graphs and applied for a master’s in anthropology. “The fundamental idea,” he later wrote of his proposal, “is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”

Unfortunately for Vonnegut, the anthropologists disagreed; his professors rejected his thesis proposal, leading the would-be academic to pursue a career in creative writing. (A sliding-doors moment for which we can all be thankful.)

But Vonnegut never abandoned his idea of story shapes, and some 80 years later they continue to dazzle fiction writers. We couldn’t help but wonder whether current-day anthropologists might have softened their stance against Vonnegut’s theory. So we sent writer to investigate.

Vonnegut believed every story could be described by one of just eight line graphs—and that their shapes might be of interest to anthropologists.

27/09/2022

“I realised I wasn't alone. To know that there are almost five million Australians feeling similar to yourself—it made me understand that people have an enormous appetite to be part of this solution.”

Leading climate communicator Claire O’Rourke is convinced that telling stories of togetherness is the way to get us out of the climate mess we’re in. She should know—as the author of ‘Together We Can’, she’s literally written the book on the subject.

We sat down with Claire to talk about the power of storytelling, the uses (and misuses) of hope, and why feeling overwhelmed can sometimes be a good thing.

Climate change activist and communicator Claire O’Rourke is convinced telling stories of togetherness is the way to get us out of the mess we’re in.

21/09/2022

“The media did not simply deliver the news of the Queen’s death—they told us how we should feel about it.”

Australians have responded to the Queen’s passing in many ways. Some have felt grief, some a sense of history taking place in real-time. But many have had more complex feelings, reflecting the diversity of lived experiences in this country.

You might have expected the media to have reflected these different perspectives in its wall-to-wall coverage leading up to the funeral. But as Jill Stark writes, the press has been strangely united in its coverage. Which leads us to wonder—why?

Australians responded to the Queen’s passing in various ways—not all of them glowing. Why aren't these views expressed in our media?

08/09/2022

While reporters were busy asking trivia questions during the 2022 federal election, others sat on news that would have sent shock waves through the political system. Has Australian political journalism lost its way? Ben Eltham investigates in The Story.

While reporters were busy asking trivia questions, others sat on news that would have sent shock waves through the political system. Will the press learn from its mistakes? Ben Eltham investigates.