Here’s a thing I posted to Facebook four years ago:
In a thread about Jennifer Kahn’s NYT article on CFAR, someone observed that there are an awful lot of articles that amount to “techie birdwatching”, which are sort of like “check out what this crowd of weird people does, aren’t they weird?” Nearly every article I’ve seen on rationalist-related organizations and events has been like that, and I’ve noticed it’s upset some of my fellow birds. It’s mean in real life to treat somebody like a circus freak, and that’s how it can feel to be a secondary character in one of these stories.
I responded with (approximately) the following.
About the birdwatching: I think this comes straight from the story structure. (Application of Orson Scott Card’s MICE model follows.) If you plan to use narrative structure to give your nonfiction article greater emotional impact, you’ve sort of got four basic options:
You can start with a puzzle that you’ll work with the reader to solve over the course of the story. This could have been “Trustworthy person X claims to have done impressive thing Y using CFAR techniques. How did that happen? I went to a CFAR workshop, and as you may have guessed from the clues I spent most of this article dropping, it turns out the solution to the puzzle is Y.”
You can follow a specific person, opening with a dilemma that threatens their self-narrative and role in their community, showing their struggle to re-define themselves, and closing with their adoption of a new self-narrative/role. This could have been, “Tod signed up for a CFAR workshop when he could no longer put up with [thing]. This story is about his struggle to learn and apply the techniques taught at the CFAR workshop he attended, and the person he became as a result.”
You can open with a dark force throwing the world into chaos, follow some people who struggle to re-establish order, and close when they’ve succeeded. This could have been, “Things were fine and dandy at the CFAR worshop until [disaster]. We used a bunch of rationality techniques (which they taught us over the course of the workshop) to deal with [disaster], and in the end things were good again and we had a big party.”
You can open with an outsider journeying to a strange new land, show them experiencing a bunch of new and interesting things, and close with them returning home a slightly different person than they were when they set out. This one looks like, “I heard about this interesting thing called CFAR, so I attended a workshop to find out what it was all about. While there, I experienced a bunch of things through the eyes of an outsider on an alien world. Then I went home, and found those experiences stayed with me in a narratively satisfying way.”
With the possibilities laid out like that, I think it’s pretty easy to see why most reporters are going to augment their straight-facts reporting with 4-type story structure. It’s just way easier, unless they happen to be reporting on an organization where they’re already an insider. So when a reporter uses 4-type story structure with a Bay Area thing as the setting, the weird and interesting things the main character sees through the eyes of an outsider will be the sort of geeky and bohemian people and behaviors that exist in the Bay. If they didn’t approach it like that, then unless they used some other story structure, the narrative would lose almost all of its emotional resonance.
They’re not necessarily depicting us as bizarre aliens because they find us incomprehensible and like to make fun of us, or anything like that. They’re likely doing it because they know how to tell a good story.
So I think if you want coverage for CFAR (or another unusual organization) that doesn’t focus on how it’s full of weird geeks and cultish behaviors, I think you have to pitch a journalist a story idea from one of the other three categories of structure, and somehow make it easier and/or more compelling for them to stick to that structure instead of falling back on “I’m an outsider going to a new place to see strange things.”
Here’s a thing I posted to Facebook four years ago:
In a thread about Jennifer Kahn’s NYT article on CFAR, someone observed that there are an awful lot of articles that amount to “techie birdwatching”, which are sort of like “check out what this crowd of weird people does, aren’t they weird?” Nearly every article I’ve seen on rationalist-related organizations and events has been like that, and I’ve noticed it’s upset some of my fellow birds. It’s mean in real life to treat somebody like a circus freak, and that’s how it can feel to be a secondary character in one of these stories.
I responded with (approximately) the following.
About the birdwatching: I think this comes straight from the story structure. (Application of Orson Scott Card’s MICE model follows.) If you plan to use narrative structure to give your nonfiction article greater emotional impact, you’ve sort of got four basic options:
You can start with a puzzle that you’ll work with the reader to solve over the course of the story. This could have been “Trustworthy person X claims to have done impressive thing Y using CFAR techniques. How did that happen? I went to a CFAR workshop, and as you may have guessed from the clues I spent most of this article dropping, it turns out the solution to the puzzle is Y.”
You can follow a specific person, opening with a dilemma that threatens their self-narrative and role in their community, showing their struggle to re-define themselves, and closing with their adoption of a new self-narrative/role. This could have been, “Tod signed up for a CFAR workshop when he could no longer put up with [thing]. This story is about his struggle to learn and apply the techniques taught at the CFAR workshop he attended, and the person he became as a result.”
You can open with a dark force throwing the world into chaos, follow some people who struggle to re-establish order, and close when they’ve succeeded. This could have been, “Things were fine and dandy at the CFAR worshop until [disaster]. We used a bunch of rationality techniques (which they taught us over the course of the workshop) to deal with [disaster], and in the end things were good again and we had a big party.”
You can open with an outsider journeying to a strange new land, show them experiencing a bunch of new and interesting things, and close with them returning home a slightly different person than they were when they set out. This one looks like, “I heard about this interesting thing called CFAR, so I attended a workshop to find out what it was all about. While there, I experienced a bunch of things through the eyes of an outsider on an alien world. Then I went home, and found those experiences stayed with me in a narratively satisfying way.”
With the possibilities laid out like that, I think it’s pretty easy to see why most reporters are going to augment their straight-facts reporting with 4-type story structure. It’s just way easier, unless they happen to be reporting on an organization where they’re already an insider. So when a reporter uses 4-type story structure with a Bay Area thing as the setting, the weird and interesting things the main character sees through the eyes of an outsider will be the sort of geeky and bohemian people and behaviors that exist in the Bay. If they didn’t approach it like that, then unless they used some other story structure, the narrative would lose almost all of its emotional resonance.
They’re not necessarily depicting us as bizarre aliens because they find us incomprehensible and like to make fun of us, or anything like that. They’re likely doing it because they know how to tell a good story.
So I think if you want coverage for CFAR (or another unusual organization) that doesn’t focus on how it’s full of weird geeks and cultish behaviors, I think you have to pitch a journalist a story idea from one of the other three categories of structure, and somehow make it easier and/or more compelling for them to stick to that structure instead of falling back on “I’m an outsider going to a new place to see strange things.”