How to tell your story to 5 million people

It was Austin. Late May. A Friday evening and the temps were easily still in the high 80s as I sat down on our little deck beneath the Live Oaks. I was returning from a 5-mile run and knew it would be well over an hour before I'd be able to cool down long enough to even take a shower. Yet, sitting out there with my phone I found the one thing to make my blood run cold:

My voice was on the radio. Even worse I was telling personal embarrassing stories about myself. Worst of all, I wasn't the only one listening; some 2+ million people could be listening at the same time, and other 2+ million people would hear me straight through their headphones once they heard the podcast.

My life was now part of This American Life.

Lessons beyond radio

This is the story about the time I was on the popular radio show and podcast. You can listen to it here, Episode 587 Act Two. The summary is that it's about a guy (me) who moves to a new town (Austin) and can't find friends. The producer takes it upon himself to set me up on a blind man-date with another guy (Evan) at a local pub trivia night.

The story isn't what I had in mind. No one told me it was going to make it to air. I didn't realize everything I said on tape was fair game. These are stories for another time.

What's important here is that my experience (a one in a million shot) offers lessons in storytelling that extend far beyond radio. Whether giving a presentation, brainstorming a campaign, or crafting a narrative strategy, This American Life is the gold standard of mass media storytelling. These are their lessons filtered through my experience:

(1) Pitch succinctly
(2) Collaborate selflessly
(3) Compose multiple options
(4) Story first, theme second

There's a reason why the show is so successful, and why dozens of strangers from around the globe reached out to me offering to be my friend after hearing the show. This American Life's template works.

Anyone, though, can tell good stories. What works so well for TAL--and what my biggest lesson from the experience was--is that their brand of stories are collaborative in ways that force the subject (or the storyteller) to move in new directions. The result is that the storyteller must give her story away before it can become her own.

Act 1: Pitch succinctly

Four months before my story aired I wrote an unsolicited email to TAL that I assumed would end up in an unattended Inbox or intern's slush pile. This is that email:

Hi TAL, here's a story idea that I'm both living and would like to further explore:

I recently dragged my family 2,000 miles from San Francisco (land of food, high rent, and many friends) to Austin (land of...well, we don't really know, because we haven't met any friends.) We've now lived here for six months and I'm still faced with the Quixotic task of being a middle-aged married with kids heterosexual man trying to find friends.

I'd like to pitch this ongoing journey as both a first-person narrative and an introduction to the cast of characters I continue to try to saddle up next to: other men I meet at bars, other parents I meet at the playground, people I've meet at MeetUp.com events, etc. I'd love to round this out with talking to some experts (I'm a professor, but not of this nature) about social anxieties, interpersonal relationships, etc.

I think a lot of people could relate to this story of mid-life alienation and isolation. Especially coming from California and moving to Texas (which feels like a foreign country), we feel doubly like outsiders. Although this experience has had some serious emotions attached, I think it can be told in a light, even humorous, way to balance out the universal sadness of it all.

I'd love to chat more about this idea. Thanks so much for your time.

I received a response 2 days later; I'd pitched the right story at the right time.

Here are some reasons why this particular pitch worked well, and what it means for organizations doing something similar:

1. It was succinct. Admittedly it could have been told in even fewer words, but this 3-paragraph missive said everything it needed to and no more.
2. It showed emotion. I didn't just talk about emotions (though I did that, too), I actually showed emotions through a mix of parenthetical asides, vivid examples, and personal voice.
3. It had just enough specifics. The later story became something else entirely, but I gave enough of a footing (e.g. Texas, meeting guys in bars, etc.) to make it solid, while also leaving the door open for future editing/revising.
4. It wasn't just about me. This is the key. Nearly every sentence contained the pronoun "I," but the overall purpose was always to connect with the reader. The final paragraph is all about how this is a story that a lot of people can relate to. I wasn't just showing that I was uninterested in a story solely about me, I was telling readers why this story would succeed.

Act 2: Collaborate selflessly

I had a very vivid sense of what this story would entail: personal reflections, field recordings of me meeting strangers in the wild (or underneath our kids' monkey bars), and experts weighing in on what works, what doesn't, and why everything I was doing was more than likely wrong.

It was a tight, professional arc. Except it's not the arc the final story took at all.

In fact, my story--which I held onto so strongly for weeks--went nowhere for 3 months. Over those three months my TAL producer talked me through the storyline, conducted phone interviews, and promised me that he was brainstorming with his fellow producers. And yet: nothing.

I had all but given up on the story until I received an email pitching a different approach. Within a week I'd be meeting a guy at a bar and trying to be his friend. Within two weeks I'd be recording my segments at an NPR affiliate at the University of Texas. And within a month my story would be immortalized on the airwaves.

How did it happen? I gave up control. My story had to become someone else's story for it to succeed.

The producer had his own very particular idea of what the story should be, and I can only assume other TAL producers had theirs. And then, of course, there was the random guy I'd share some drinks with, the pub trivia hosts who came over to talk to us, and the engineers at KUTX who made the story sound the way it did. All of their voices mixed with mine despite the I-heavy initial email pitch.

There's a lesson here about time. For months I was convinced that my story was the story. It was mine, and it was perfect. But time dulls our innate selfishness. By the time the revision was pitched I had not only given up control, I had come to the realization that if this was going to happen it would require a change of direction and few extra hands on the wheel.

Act 3: Compose multiple options

The key to success for any content manager or marketer is to amass a library of small assets that can be used to add texture, depth, and variety to any large project.

In audio (as in video) this entails recording loads of B-roll. Beyond the hours of interview tape and email exchanges, this story had over an hour of atmosphere recordings that I personally recorded and handed over (in those podcast-crazy days I went everywhere with a digital recorder.) Some of them made it into the final segment. In fact, at one point you can hear me order a "Founders All Day" at the bar, a fact that the Grand Rapids brewer didn't overlook, as I was eventually showered with swag and invited out with local marketers for a night of celebratory pours.

Unfortunately TAL runs a tight black box, and I wasn't part of the final decision making, but I did provide them with so many B-roll segments (the vast majority of which never saw the light of day) that I all but loaded the deck on telling the story in a particular way.

People like the story behind the story

This lesson, in particular, is very important for storytellers in organizations: no planning detail should go unarchived. White board doodles, brainstorm conversations, and prototype notes should all be considered as potential publishable content, fodder for the eventual narrative. People like the story behind the story as much as the actual finished product; so keep everything even if it feels like an immediate failure.

There's a reason why DVD commentaries and documentaries have always been so successful. People enjoy the creative process; it helps them feel like insiders, and take a certain amount of ownership in the eventual finished product.

Act 4: Story first, theme second

I've previously written about what I consider the essential aspects of brand storytelling. TAL regularly checks them all, not just in each individual segment, but in each weekly show.

If you're not familiar, TAL takes on a theme each week. Some of them are broad (e.g. intimacy) and some are very specific (e.g. Harper High School.) Regardless, these themes for the most part come after the stories are in the can. The theme frames the stories more than the stories inform the theme. Before them, then, comes the essential elements of story craft.

One of the reasons my lone man on the prowl pitch didn't ultimately make it to air is because it relied too much on me. Characters came and went, but the conflict and details were always mine. By introducing a secondary character (Evan), audiences saw multiple conflicts, and were invited to see themselves from a number of perspectives. The story, in essence, became more interesting.

I pitched my story around the themes of friendship, loneliness, and middle-aged sadness. But I've heard people describe my eventual TAL story as "the one about the two guys going on a man-date." I have to admit that I wasn't a huge fan of the final product (and, no, Evan and I didn't become friends; in fact we never saw each other again), but I'd be a fool to not see how millions of listeners are drawn in by characters and conflict more than they are by some arbitrary, abstract concept like loneliness.

The corollary for organizations should be clear: the product, strategy, or idea is the theme. But people largely don't buy products, they buy the stories about the products.

Five million strangers can't be wrong

Response to the story has been largely positive. Aside from one guy on Twitter who told his followers (and me) that I was boring and that's why I didn't have friends, people have been kind on social media, Reddit, and random blogs. The story has been aired twice in two years, and big name celebrities have even name-checked it on their personal accounts. Full success.

But what does it all mean, especially if you're a business or organization executive trying to justify reading this?

In a word it's about control. I can still hang my hat on the fact that my story was picked out of a pile of emails to live another day. But ultimately what became the successful story wasn't my story; I was in it, I inspired it, and I had some say in its success, but ultimately other people added their stories to it.

My story became our story. If I'm feeling generous, it became their story.

It's taken me a few years to be OK with that. Had I been too hung up on my personal entrenched view of my story it may have never made it to air, and definitely wouldn't have made it to 10 million ears. But I let the storytelling process work its magic. More specifically I let the professional storytellers at TAL work their magic. The result may not have been my idea of perfect, but it was heard.

It reminds me of my favorite quote about writing:

There are two types of stories: the ones that are inspired, planned out, written, revised, and perfected in every way. And then there are the ones that are published.

Given the choice I'll take the latter approach every time.

Chris Gerben is a digital strategist and content producer. If you'd like to know more, or work together, please follow or reach out.