“I am feeling more and more like a melancholy ghost,” he said to nobody. The dust looked at him apathetically. “Of course,” he thought, drawing in a deep, dusty breath.
We humans are moved by stories. That’s why gossip is sometimes hard to resist. He did what? She thought… what the hell WAS she thinking? Fucking humans… can you believe? And if it is hard enough to believe, but still possible to understand as unmistakably true… or even mistakably true, damn, you got the kernel of a good story there, son.
A lawyer successfully making her case tells a story the jury believes is more true than the other story. A huckster selling you a rock you can keep for a pet, triggers that childish belief in magic, begins the story in your head — what if a rock actually needs love and care as much as we do? Some ingenious fucker sold millions of rocks to Americans as pets by planting that story. Hey, nobody said we’re a nation of geniuses, but we got good hearts.
I have a story to tell, but not here. My story must go into a slideshow I have to get back to work on. It’s the story of young children that society is in the inexorable process of preparing for lives of tragic outcomes, getting a chance to flourish, create and shine. It’s a funny story, and an unlikely one, and tricky as hell to tell with the right tone. I need people to buy the idea, and give me money to fund it.
I note in passing, in outgassing, (and since I’ve already noted it and only have to cut and paste it) the difference between the story I need to tell and the stories we are happy to slurp down during our leisure.
The difference between giving attention to a sales pitch and a TV series is that the TV series, if it’s good, hooks you on a story that pulls you in. A good sales pitch must do the same, but I can’t remember the last time one did that for me.
I recently saw 16 episodes of an engaging TV series called Rectify. An innocent guy spends 20 years on death row for the murder of his high school girlfriend before his determined little sister gets him out on a DNA mismatch. We see him in solitary, flashes of his nightmare life there, his one friend in life– the condemned guy in the cell next door, a repentant and sweet guy who shot into a car as a gang initiation and killed a 3 year-old girl….they become best friends talking through the grate, as the psychopath in the other cell tries to break the sensitive protagonist’s spirit. As I set out the bones of it I’m already feeling it’s a compelling story.
And it gets much more so when he gets out, and is a mess, and the small Georgia town is divided between those who embrace him as an innocent, blessedly exonerated man and those who don’t believe in the technicality of DNA and see him as a confessed and duly convicted rapist and murderer (we know he isn’t either of those, and so our horror at injustice is engaged) and, in any case, a weird and clearly disturbed guy they want to beat the crap out of, as several in masks finally do when he goes to visit the grave of his murdered girlfriend.
After the brutal, possibly deadly beating in the cemetery, the brother of the murdered girl removes his mask and makes sure the protagonist sees his face through bloody eyes before he passes out. Then the brother pisses on his broken body. When the protagonist finally gets out of the coma, and the hospital, he declines to press charges when the corrupt but conscience stricken sheriff runs down and arrests the ringleader. “It wasn’t him,” he says, looking stoically at a photo the sheriff, who knows it was, holds out to him. The sheriff leaves in disgust. Everyone in town is confused, and it is another proof that there’s something seriously wrong with the guy. Some of us can’t help watching this kind of story.
A sales pitch, on the other hand, tells a calculated story that cheerfully invites the potential buyer to envision the wonderful things the product will deliver to them. How will this product make my shit life feel marginally better? Unlike with a story containing enough human complexity to hook us with its narrative mysteries, and we are ready and happy to be hooked, if the hook is there, we are on guard against a sales pitch, which must also disarm us.
A totally different exercise in story-telling and the reason watching five hours of an enthralling drama, if you have the time, is never a chore, and watching a sales pitch of any duration is something you are programmed to mute and go take a mental piss during. There is great art involved in crafting a winning sales pitch, as in telling an engaging story of any kind, and there are similarities in both kinds of storytelling, but differences too. If you get paid to make commercial pitches, well, at least you get paid. If you do them on spec, well, hopefully you enjoy a good challenge and love the work itself, eh pardner?
Heh. I’m sorry, what were you saying, Dusty, old boy?
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