Watch industry influencer Emmy Laybourne present her 2017 IZEAFest session: Secret Weapon of Storytellers
Telling a good story is essential to creating compelling content–but how do you know when a story is working? Award-winning novelist Emmy Laybourne presents a simple diagnostic tool to measure the success of any story. Using funny clips from YouTube, she illustrates the most common storytelling problems and discusses how to recognize them in any medium, from blog posts to Snapchat to marketing presentations!
Emmy Laybourne is a novelist, public speaker, screenwriter and former character actress. She is the author of the MONUMENT 14 trilogy (“Frighteningly real… riveting” – NYT Book Review, Editor’s Choice) and the novel SWEET (“A gripping action-adventure survival story” – VOYA, rated Perfect Ten). Before her life as a novelist, Emmy performed original comedy on Comedy Central, MTV and VH1; and acted in the movies “Superstar,” “The In-Laws” and “Nancy Drew,” among others. Emmy lives outside New York City with her husband, two kids and a flock of 6 nifty chickens.
– Wow. I was kind of hoping for a hair microphone, but they’ve given me a lapel mic. But it’s still cool. I am a young adult novelist with a fascination for story structure, and I’ve come here today to give you a simple tool that you can use to create content, and to identify when a piece of content is working or not. But first, let’s watch this funny clip from YouTube.
(shouting)
I’m sorry to spring that on you. This works, right? It’s compelling, it’s funny, and it’s surprising. And by the time I’m done with this short presentation today, I’m going to show you exactly why that clip works. But first, here’s another clip from YouTube.
(cheerful music)
That’s sweet, right? Now, how many of you recognize that theme song? Show of hands. Oh, a couple, only a couple. How many of you recognize the little girl in that video? It’s me. Emmy Laybourne, that was me. I know, I was super cute, wasn’t I?
The year is more like 1981, I’m around 10 years old, and I am in that video for Pinwheel because my mom, Geri Laybourne, created Nickelodeon. I know, thank you, thank you! Thank you very much. She created it, of course, along with a bunch of other wildly creative, inventive people, one of whom was my dad, Kit Laybourne, looking in that photo sort of like a happy Gordon Gecko.
My dad was an animator and a television producer, and because he and my mom and all these other wonderful creative people had all of these crazy ideas, but not a lot of money, we developed and made a lot of the early programming for Nickelodeon in our own house. So that was me on that video for Pinwheel. I kissed frogs and threw them out of a window for a sketch on Turkey TV when I was about 13, and we tested all of the stunts for Double Dare in our basement. Whoops. I messed up my slides, there we go. Double Dare, right there, in my basement. It was awesome, it was incredible. And, of course, it turned my brother and I into storytellers.
And all of you out here, whether you’re a blogger, or a Tweeter, a YouTuber, or a Snapchatter, you guys are storytellers as well, but because you didn’t get to sit around the, excuse me, the dining room table with me and my family, you didn’t get the advantage of that.
So let me tell you a little bit about what I learned. Let me talk to you about the shape of story. You know who had a lot to say about the shape of story? My friend Aristotle. From his Poetics: “Now, according to our definition, “tragedy is an imitation of an action “that is complete and whole. “A whole is that which has a beginning, “a middle, and an end.” Aristotle is saying that, for a story to be complete, it needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We see, also, that any story is an imitation of an action occurring in the real world.
So Aristotle nailed it for all civilization to come, but if you’re not in to Aristotle, maybe you’ll take it from my friend David Mamet, the famous playwright and screenwriter. Of beginning, middle, end, David Mamet says: “This is the structure that mirrors human perception.” He goes on to say: “It’s not just something “made of old cloth. “This is the way we perceive a story, “with a beginning, a middle, and an end. “So when one wants to best utilize the theater, “one would try to structure a play “in a way that is congruent “with the way the mind perceives it.”
I know that’s a long quote, but what he’s saying is beginning, middle, end is how our minds work. So if you wanna structure something in a way that an audience can really absorb it, then you should follow that form. Now, if Aristotle and Mamet don’t do it for you, perhaps you’ll be impressed with this example of structure from the big book, the Bible. I’ll paraphrase from Genesis here: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”
He creates the light, the earth, and the waters, grass and plants, the sun, the moon, and the stars, and then every living creature, man and woman. On the seventh day, he rests. Beginning, middle, end. And this very clean and clear structure is found through our everyday lives. We wake up, we go to work, we go to sleep, right? We have a secret, we share it, we heal. We have a dream, we work hard to achieve it, and we enjoy it. Right, you better enjoy it after you worked that hard to achieve it. We’re born, we live, and we die, the beginning, middle, end. It works. We know this structure.
This simple pattern is everywhere, because story is a fractal. What is a fractal? I’m going to read it to you from the screen. “A fractal is a never-ending pattern. “Fractals are infinitely complex patterns “that are self-similar across different scales.” Fractals can be found in math, and in nature, and in story. Here’s an example of a fractal from nature. See, the shape of that whole thing, that whole frond, is echoed in the shape of this little frondlette, which is echoed in the shape of the little doohickey thing that sticks out. And if we can go further in, you would see that it’s echoed in the shape of one of those little leaf ridges, right? Story is a fractal.
Here’s the shape of story. It’s just a little mountain, right? Rise in tension, and then it comes down. That’s the general story structure shape. But here’s the shape of three act story structure. Beginning, middle, end. See that? See the fractal working here? And then if you drew a line connecting from the beginning point of the first arrow, all the way up to the top of that last arrow, you’d see the whole thing has the same shape. And if we went in, we would see that it’s a little razor. It’s like a jigsaw, going up, up, up, up, up. Each scene has the same shape, each beat has the same shape. I think this is incredibly cool.
This is the tool I want to give you. It’s using beginning, middle, end as a diagnostic tool. Now, when I’m watching content, I’m looking to see, does it work? Does it hit all of these marks? I use it when content is working, but more importantly, I use it when something is not working. So when I see a movie, or read a book, or see content on YouTube that doesn’t work, I apply this to it, and I look to see where has it missed the mark? Let’s practice doing that together, all right?
Here is a clip from YouTube that has a really great beginning. Let’s go from there.
– Ken, in one of your emails, you said your wife questioned whether the video that I had published was real, or whether the thing had been faked. Yesterday we had the house pressure washed, and I had to move all the feeders off the deck, so I put them up on this temporary rack in the backyard, and I’m just making a second video for you and your wife. You can judge for yourself. I’m just gonna stand here quietly for a minute.
(chirping)
I’m afraid of getting hit here, so we’re gonna kill this now. Hope you enjoyed.
– I love this guy. I love serious people, and he’s super serious about this video that he has made to show his neighbor that he has a lot of hummingbirds around his house. That is what this is about. He’s like, it’s a little hard to hear the audio, but he’s basically saying, “Ken, “I know you didn’t believe me about that other video, “so here, I’m having the house pressure washed.
“Here are all the hummingbird feeders. “Check it out.”
And then the hummingbirds, there are seriously a lot of hummingbirds at this guy’s house. I mean, there are a multitude of hummingbirds. But just as it gets interesting, just as we come in to finding out what the answer to the question of this little movie is: what will happen with these hummingbirds? He cuts it. He gets scared that something’s gonna happen. What could happen? I don’t know, it would be great. wanna see a hummingbird crash into his ear, or I wanna see him crush one by mistake, or get pierced by thousands of hummingbird beaks and spew blood like a sprinkler. I don’t know, I don’t know what could happen. We never find out. That video was all beginning.
Next up we have a video that has no beginning and no end, it’s all middle. And pay attention to how you feel when you watch this.
(laughing)
I know, it’s so cute. Thank you for that “aw.” it’s very sweet, but we don’t know how it began, so we have a little bit of, our mind are trying to figure out what was the beginning. We don’t know. And then we’re watching this baby laugh, and that goes on a lot longer. I cut it down for this presentation. And then there’s no end. You know, you get this kind of churning in your gut like what’s gonna happen? She’s gonna fall over. Oh, she’s gonna throw up. You know, something’s gonna happen. But no, it just cuts out. So that’s an example of a video with no beginning and no end. It’s all middle.
Next up we have, oh, I love this clip. It is a rock-solid beginning, a totally compelling middle, and again, it misses its end.
– No pushing.
– [Man With Camera] Okay, you guys ready?
– [Kids] Yeah.
– [Man With Camera] Hold on. On your marks.
– Dad, it’s gonna bash right into the camera!
– [Father] Get set.
– Dad, I’m gonna bash right into your camera!
– [Father] You’ll be okay.
(crying)
Chris, you gotta scoot over.
(crying)
I promise you won’t, Forest. If you do, we’ll have a restart. Okay, here we go, onyour mark, get set, go.
(screaming)
(laughing)
(screaming)
– [Kid] Tyler’s got his under the car.
– [Father] Oh no, whose is that one?
– [Kid] That one’s mine.
(screaming)
– Hurry, Forest, yours is winning, go get it.
– Oh, the agony.
This is a magnificent example of a real story playing out in a YouTube clip. Act one, a tape race. Okay, I’ve never seen a tape race before. I’m thrilled, I’m riveted. Act two, the race begins, and the child who was crying, oh, he was a prophet. His tape roll rolls directly into the camera. Like, if you had a budget of a million dollars for CGI, you could not make it roll more directly into the camera. Act three, so, act two is the race, right? And then act two is over. Now it’s into act three. What happens next? We never find out, ugh.
All right, my gift to you now, three perfect clips with a beginning, middle, and end. Watch it.
(laughing)
That’s it. Beginning, middle, pop, it’s the story of a hairdo.
– Will you marry me?
– [Kid Off Camera] Talk loud.
– Will you marry me?
– Yes. No, don’t.
– No, and then we kiss.
– Fine, on the cheek.
– No, on the lips.
– No!
(laughing)
(laughing)
– [Woman] That’s too great.
– [Kid] We did not tell them to do that!
– [Woman] Yeah, right.
– Again, the cinematography is just excellent. Beginning, older cousins are trying to get their younger cousins to kiss. Middle of the story, will they or won’t they, will they or won’t they. It’s innocent fun. They kiss, and then the surprise twist at the end, boom, the mom is there. That’s act three of that whole thing. That’s the end. And now we’re back, I wanna show you our frog clip one more time. And now that you’ve used this little tool of mine, see how beautifully this plays out. Beginning. Middle, the frog can actually play the video game. End.
(shouting)
It still hurts the second time you see it, doesn’t it? That’s it, that’s my gift to you guys. Enjoy IZEAFest!
