How to improve your business storytelling, part 1: steal from literature
There is literature in this car. Also, a cupholder full of small change.
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
Know where to look
Literature is useful to steal from only if you know where to look. Ideally, you should have a library in mind—a catalog of different approaches that resemble, in some way, the different stories you need to tell. There’s a good chance that no matter what kind of story you’re trying to tell, a great writer has come before you and put down something similar, and has done so in a compelling manner.
In business contexts, you can make easy excuses against novels (too long), poetry (too dense), and short stories (the best ones achieve a sense of compression that is hard to duplicate).
You need to be a smart thief. As T.S. Eliot says, the key is to make whatever you’ve taken into something better, or at least different. Don’t be a stupid plagiarist.
When life gives you lemons, cut one in half and use it as a bookmark.
You’re looking for work that covers the same or similar ground as the story you’re working on, written in fresh contemporary language. The longer you go back in time, the trickier it gets, although one intelligent way to steal is by adapting language from stories that sound dated to our contemporary ears. Such stories are potential goldmines—old-timey language in stories that are structurally or conceptually excellent—and using them can broaden your potential targets considerably. If you want to tell a story about pandemics, and you turn to Bocaccio’s Decameron or Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year or Christina Rossetti’s sonnet “The Plague,” you may not be wasting your time—and even if you are, you’ll probably enjoy wasting it.
Shakespeare is wonderful, but if you make a habit of speaking up in meetings with a soliloquy in the style of Macbeth, you are likely to be remembered for all the wrong reasons. (The next time you’ve got to rally a team around an impending deadline, try beginning a story with, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”)
Dip into books based on brief scenes. Try novels written in short, punchy sections, like Renata Adler’s Speedboat or Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever.
Once you’re there, know what to look for
Take things in small chunks. Steal phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. Anything longer will be hard to keep in your head all at once—and most business stories are simply not that long to begin with. If you’re looking at the Decameron, for instance, which of its 700+ pages should you turn to? You probably don’t have enough time to read the whole thing, and you can get most of what you need from the prologue and introduction.
“To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.”
It can sometimes help to flip around in a good book, but it’s often best to begin at the beginning, where many writers spend the most time getting things perfect. Don DeLillo took “a ridiculously long time” to compose the first sentence of his masterpiece Underworld. In fact, the first sentence of the book was the very last sentence of the book that he wrote. Christie’s auctioned his book, with annotations, for $57,000.
First pages from the Underworld auction. (Click to enlarge)
If you’re trying to tell a personal story, memoirs are a good place to start. They are often told in the first person, use an intimate tone, reveal juicy real-life details, and their points of view are generally very close to the narrator—because the narrator is the author. Literary memoirs and business memoirs use many of the same tricks.
Test yourself by reading the 15 samples below. Can you tell which are literary memoirs, which are memoirs of businesspeople—and which are neither? Which do you like best? Which stories would you keep reading, and why? (Scroll to the end of this article for the sources.)
“It took centuries to develop the Greek drama. It borrowed from preceding ages; it lent to the ages that came after. Men observe and combine, that is all.”
1. Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.
2. I realized early on that I was different. From the day that I was born I was told that I might not feel different, but that I would soon discover that my life wouldn’t be like others’. I didn’t think so much about it then, but when me and my parents were separated I realized that I was made for more than just sitting around counting the hours; that I would never be satisfied with the status quo. I was simply not like everybody else.
3. My name is Johnny Hake. I’m thirty-six years old, stand five feet eleven in my socks, weigh one hundred and forty-two pounds stripped, and am, so to speak, naked at the moment and talking into the dark.
4. When I was seven, our family sold our house in the French-speaking town of Lisbon, Maine, and auctioned off all our possessions. The six of us piled into the Chrysler and drove to California. The day after we arrived in Burbank, I was enrolled in public school. Being the smallest boy in class, and unable to speak English, I did the logical thing. On the third day of school, I ran away.
5. My father died, then my grandmother; my mother was left, but we did not get on. I was probably disagreeable with anyone who felt entitled to give me instructions and advice. We seldom lived under the same roof, which was just as well. She had found me civil and amusing until I was ten, at which time I was said to have become pert and obstinate. She was impulsive, generous, in some ways better than most other people, but without any feeling for cause and effect; this made her at the least unpredictable and at the most a serious element of danger.
6. Scottsville, Kentucky, was a great place for a kid to grow up, but it was a terrible place for a wholesale business. Nashville, 60 miles to the south, or Louisville, 120 miles to the north, would have been much better. Fewer than 2,000 people lived in Scottsville in 1939, and the roads leading in and out were winding and rutted. To my father and my grandfather, though, Scottsville was the center of the universe. Besides, they had just bought a big brick building on East Main Street—they had gotten it for half price, and a Turner will buy anything for half price—and so Scottsville it was.
7. My father was a fox farmer. That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders. These companies supplied us with heroic calendars to hang, one on each side of the kitchen door. Against a background of cold blue sky and black pine forests and treacherous northern rivers, plumed adventures planted the flags of England and or of France; magnificent savages bent their backs to the portage.
8. In the fifties I learned to drive a car. I was frequently in love. I had more friends than now.
9. Over the course of the past twenty-one years I’ve opened and operated five white-tablecloth restaurants; an urban barbecue joint; a feel-good jazz club; a neo-roadside stand selling frozen custard, burgers, and hot dogs; three modern museum cafés; and an off-premises, restaurant-quality catering company. So far, I haven’t had the experience of closing any of them, and I pray I never will.
10. I am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small. I have worked diligently, and I do not mind saying that in the conscientious embrace of the ledger I have done well for myself over the years, yet not I must also say that due to a flaw in my character I have allowed one small trespass against my honor.
11. Nicola Iacocca, my father, arrived in this country in 1902 at the age of twelve—poor, alone, and scared. He used to say the only thing he was sure of when he got here was that the world was round. And that was only because another Italian boy named Christopher Columbus had preceded him by 410 years, almost to the day.
12. My father stopped living with us when I was three or four. Most of his adult life was spent as a patient in various expensive rest homes for dipsomaniacs and victims of nervous collapse. He was neither, although he drank too much, but rather the kind of neurotic who finds it difficult to live for any length of time in the outside world. The brain tumor discovered and removed toward the end of his life could have caused his illness, but I suspect this easy out. To most people he seemed normal, especially when he was inside.
13. I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes. Then slipped quietly out the back door.
14. I woke up shaking, alone in my room. I was clammy cold with sweat; under me the sheet and the mattress were soaked. The sheet was gray and twisted like a rope. I breathed like I had been running.
15. My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs. All I can do is move from chair to chair with my cigarette. I wear shades. I can’t read a magazine. Some days I take my binoculars and look out in the air. They laid me off. I can’t find work. My wife’s got a job and she takes flying lessons. When she comes over the house in her airplane, I’m afraid she’ll screw up and crash.
Sources
1. Thomas Lynch (funeral-home director and National Book Award finalist), “The Undertaking”
2. From a Swedish advertisement by McDonald’s. The narrator is a pickle.
3. John Cheever, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”
4. Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia), “Lessons from the Edge” from Some Stories
5. Mavis Gallant, “In Youth Is Pleasure”
6. Cal Turner Jr. (former CEO of Dollar General), Chapter 1 of My Father’s Business
7. Alice Munro, “Boys and Girls”
8. Leonard Michaels, “In the Fifties”
9. Danny Meyer (Founder & CEO, Union Square Hospitality Group) from the introduction of Setting the Table
10. Ethan Canin, “Accountant”
11. Lee Iacocca (former executive at Ford and Chrysler) “The Family” from Iacocca: An Autobiography
12. Frank Conroy, Stop-Time
13. Phil Knight (co-founder and former CEO of Nike), “Dawn” from Shoe Dog
14. James Baldwin, “Previous Condition”
15. Barry Hannah, “Love Too Long”