Authors of Told Use Make Believe
To Capture the Heart of a Story

Told
Simon Aboud
and Paul Wilson
Buy this Book
at Amazon.com

The power of story is indisputable. Story permeates every aspect of life, public and private, cultural and personal. A well told story can change lives and influence the course of destiny.

In TOLD, authors Simon Aboud and Paul Wilson offer a primer on the art of the storytelling as a tool for success in business and marketing. Aboud and Wilson are partners in Make Believe, an agency that promotes brand storytelling and works with clients including BBC, Grolsch, Microsoft and Novartis.

Five years ago Aboud left his job as a creative director at McCann-Erickson in London and was directing commercials full-time to give him time to write screenplays, when he met Wilson.

“When I was a creative in an advertising agency we use to get handed a presentation that was full of pyramids and diagrams that talked about brand positioning, brand essence. We then created stories to bring these to life, to emotionally engage the consumer. Make Believe just takes the storytelling right to the heart of the brand and organization. We use the timeless principles of storytelling to author a story for the brand that will engage (people) inside and outside the business and that connects emotionally,” said Aboud. Aboud elaborates in a section of the book called Three Views of Story: “We’re suggesting applying storytelling principals to wider thinking so you take storytelling into the heart of an organization and use it to articulate whatever you need to communicate through any media – online, TV, cinema, print, new products, We’re saying story is the foundation of all communication.

“We use a term at Make Believe, ‘people don't remember great strategy but they remember great story’. When I was an ad agency creative director, we were handed strategy and asked to turn it into story. Why? Because consumers will buy an emotional story much more than a rational product description. At Make Believe we just bring the storytelling part right to the front of the process so that it informs all the thinking, all the creativity. We put story at the heart of the brand,” said Aboud.

What does brand storytelling look like?

Aboud said President Obama created a brand of sorts with his story of change.

“He brought hundreds of millions along on the ride. A non-storytelling approach would be Gordon Brown's attempt to get re-elected over here. He doesn't have a story. He could have taken the opportunity to create a new story for Britain and own it, but he hasn't so far. He is lost in the tittle tattle of the rational and every day,” said Aboud.

He believes TOLD fills in a unique niche in books about story.

“We found so many of the storytelling books quite scientific and at worst impenetrable. I pitched TOLD to the publisher as teaching storytelling through storytelling. We wrote the book that I couldn’t find in the bookshop. It’s also to take storytelling to a wider community in a way that they will hopefully engage with the advertising community and the film community,” said Aboud.

The result is a thought provoking text that presents the many facets of storytelling in the context of modern culture.

In TOLD, Aboud and Wilson offer twenty principals of storytelling including antagonism, role, premise, dilemma, subplot, point of view, and genre. Then they offer stories that illustrate the various principles in action. The stories cover a range of forms including poems, screenplays, photo-driven narratives, diary entries and photographs.

Aboud described the origins of the stories, “Love In the City started when I was discussing the lack of narrative in fashion photography with someone at Harpers in UK and then I came up with a mix of poetry and photography as a fashion spread, a format that gives us character, location and narrative to an otherwise story-free format. I shot it in LA at the end of 2008. We were trying to find different ways of mixing visual and written technique to create different elements of story structure, anything from screenplay to the advertising layout in “The Shirt” to a diary in “Olympic Dreams”. By mixing it up we can show how pervasive storytelling is and how it is, unconsciously, at the heart of most things.”

Aboud said that changes in media and culture have given us the ability to tell different parts of the story in different media at different times - transmedia storytelling. “It’s really about the ability to manage your story wherever it’s told. You need a solid story at the center to do that, that’s where we come in. We are storytellers and storysellers,” said Aboud.

He and Wilson spent a year developing the book and used their day to day experiences in brand storytelling to inform the content. Aboud said the challenge was trying to make sure that they covered all the principles.

“It’s tough to create a compelling story around a principle, but the book needed to balance,” he noted. “Storytelling has been the most powerful form of communication for thousands of years. We are just trying to show people that when you understand the principles of how it works then it can unlock a lot of creativity,” said Aboud.

They worked with editor Julia Booth-Clibborn at Abrams Books.

“The process was pretty brutal. I think I started with about 60 story ideas to get to the 30 that we used. We changed the layout as more stories took shape to balance the book, that is we needed to create stories that covered off all the principles of story telling but sometimes a story would shine up pretty well and we'd decide to drop another to make room for it, so it was a constant juggling act. I also wanted to create a balance of story forms from screenplay to poem to short story to photograph so we were always changing as we went. It was an intense, but very organic process. The art director was my cousin Alan Aboud and he also fed in his thoughts from a design point of view. I think each story probably went through about three edits in total,” said Aboud.

Ellen Birkett Morris is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in national print and online publications including The New York Times. She also writes for a number of literary, regional, trade, and business publications, and she has contributed to six published nonfiction books in the trade press. Ellen is a regular contributor to Authorlink, assigned to interview various New York Times bestselling authors and first-time novelists.