- Email: [email protected]
Three questions for better academic storytelling
BUSHOR-1328; No. of Pages 3 Business Horizons (2016) xxx, xxx—xxx
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor
EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE
Three questions for better academic storytelling Jeffery S. McMullen Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, 1309 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-1701, U.S.A.
1. Tell me a story: Lessons from Jim Shooter About a month ago, my daughters and I attended our first ComicCon. I could claim that my children dragged me there; however, the truth is that when my younger daughter mentioned the idea to my wife, my ears piqued like our dog’s upon hearing the word squirrel. I loved comics as a teenage boy, and some three decades later rediscovered them after deciding to read a list of the 100 best graphic novels of all time. My exposure to ComicCon was limited entirely to jokes from The Big Bang Theory, and–—for better or worse–—it lived up to such ridicule. There were more than enough comic book vendors, cosplays, and celebrities from sci-fi/fantasy/superhero movies to confirm that my wife’s call (‘‘Let dad go this one alone’’) was the right decision for her. What I did not expect were the Academy-like plenary sessions. By good fortune I happened into a lecture on writing by Jim Shooter, former editor of Marvel during the 1980s when I was at the peak of my fandom. Since becoming an academic, I stand in awe of comic book and screenplay writers who are able to boil a story down to 600 frames–—or, in some cases, one (see Gary Larson’s The Far Side). Some of their stories are incredibly complex, abstract, and insightful, yet also accessible and approachable at the same time. I, on the other hand, often have
E-mail address: [email protected]
30 pages of prose to work with and still struggle to convey the essence of my story. Needless to say, I intently listened to Jim Shooter reference Aristotle and Horace about the essence of story, Mark Twain about the literary offenses of James Fennimore Cooper, and Kurt Vonnegut about what it means to write with style. Though Shooter’s lecture conveyed too many insights to recount them all here, a few demand to be shared because I find myself conveying some variant of these messages in desk rejections of submissions to Business Horizons. Since becoming editor, determining the essence of a manuscript’s story is a daily issue for me. During the review process, I ask myself: Will readers find this piece interesting enough to justify my time spent in helping the author develop it further for publication? I could answer this question in the affirmative more often if academic authors took Jim Shooter’s advice. Therefore, I would like to share some of Shooter’s insights as they relate to three questions authors should ask themselves before submitting.
1.1. Who is your audience? Nothing produces more desk rejections than failure to know your audience. Articles published in Business Horizons have a designated audience: practitioners. BH articles do not target other academics, and this affects both their content and style. Practitioners have interests and concerns dissimilar to those of academics, meaning an article targeting practitioners will cover different ground than an article
0007-6813/$ — see front matter # 2016 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2016.08.007
BUSHOR-1328; No. of Pages 3
2
EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE
targeting academics. A change in audience also has significant ramifications for the article’s style. Writing is communicating, and communication is a two-way street. We all talk differently to different people, even when we are talking about the same subject in both instances. Knowing that your audience consists of practitioners helps you, the writer, gauge which points may require elaboration, which may be self-evident, and which simply need to be omitted. Jim Shooter explained this phenomenon in the context of comic book writing as ‘Kirby pacing.’ Reputedly named for the legendary Jack Kirby, Kirby pacing seeks to cover as much ground as possible from frame to frame without losing the reader. The hope is that the reader’s imagination can fill in the details between frames. If leaps between frames are too great, coherence of the narrative suffers. If too much detail is provided, pacing of the story slows and the narrative bogs down, losing the reader’s interest. Knowing your audience helps writers to determine what the pacing should be–— that is, when accelerating may facilitate reader engagement or when throttling down may benefit reader comprehension. As Shooter pointed out, the conceptual distance traversed between frames of a comic is much farther for action scenes than scenes emphasizing dialogue between characters. Analogously, technical arguments in a practitioner piece may require a slower pace than case illustrations or examples. Knowing your audience should allow you to facilitate the pace of your story without losing reader comprehension.
1.2. Does your story have an end? Jim Shooter pointed out that simple stories consist of an actor, a situation, and an opposing force that disrupts this situation or status quo. He illustrated this notion with the example: Little Miss Muffet Sat on a tuffet, Eating her curds and whey; Along came a spider Who sat down beside her And frightened Miss Muffet away. Here, Miss Muffet is the actor. She is sitting on her tuffet, enjoying her breakfast, and conflict ensues. A spider enters the picture and creates tension for the reader. Is the spider dangerous? What will Miss
Muffet do? Finally, the story concludes by telling the reader what happened. Miss Muffet was frightened away. Too often, academic articles lack story. Many are good at telling the reader–—typically another academic–—what the literature has said, offering extensive detail about its origins, development, and current state. A few efforts go on to name an opposing force, explaining why the literature is incomplete, inadequate, or insufficient, while proposing some solution to this problem. Too few, however, complete the story by explaining how the proposed solution enables readers to do something they could not before. Inability or unwillingness to finish the story is never good in any form of communication, but it simply cannot be tolerated among manuscripts targeting practitioners. While articles aimed at academics should also prescribe advice (i.e., what the field should do differently as a result of their empirical findings and/or theoretical insights), practitioner pieces live or die based on the prescriptive advice they offer. When this prescriptive advice is absent, readers are left with unanswered questions. It is a story without an ending. When a practitioner piece offers prescriptive advice, it tends to be clearer about the problem it is addressing, whose problem it is, and why it is a problem–—all while achieving this in fewer words. Why? Because the author knows what is essential and what is superfluous, and–—if disciplined–—chooses to include only the former. Jim Shooter recommended in his lecture that writers interested in mastering the craft of comics or screenplays analyze their favorite movies until they know why the director included each and every frame. Writers of great practitioner articles and academic papers would likely benefit from a similar practice, analyzing exemplar work paragraph by paragraph and applying that same critical eye to their own writing. Prescriptive advice serves as the filter through which all this research support should be sifted. Descriptive background research is necessary to support your prescriptive advice, but it should play supporting cast. At one extreme, you must ask yourself: ‘‘Are my claims and assertions supported?’’ Equally important is the question: ‘‘Does the detail clarify my point and/or support my conclusion?’’ If not, delete it.
1.3. Does your story have tension? At this point, an aspiring author might say: ‘‘I targeted [entrepreneurs, mid-level managers, CEOs of Fortune 500 firms, or some such practitioner] and offered prescriptive advice. I clearly articulated
BUSHOR-1328; No. of Pages 3
EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE the problem and why it is a problem for my audience, but I still got rejected.’’ Though unlikely, this outcome is possible if a manuscript lacks a story, the essence of which is conflict. Ask yourself: Have I established any tension? Once again, consider Jim Shooter’s reference to Little Miss Muffet. In the original story, the author uses the reader’s experiences and expectations to evoke empathy for the girl. This empathy then triggers imagination to offer an explanation for why she fled: the reader assumes the girl was frightened because spiders bite. Without this assumption–—provided by the reader, not the author–—Little Miss Muffet lacks tension. Yes, the nursery rhyme conveys some anxiety and technically qualifies as a story, but the tension is so weak that it barely holds even the youngest listener’s attention. Although a bigger, more dangerous spider would make for a better tale, there are other, subtler ways of creating tension. For example, what if the writer asked readers to empathize with the spider? Using the same events, an author could transform the nursery rhyme into an allegory about how it feels to be rejected and considered dangerous based merely on appearance. In this scenario, the author could tell the story from the vantage point of a lonely spider who stays up all night spinning the most beautiful web he can to win Little Miss Muffet’s favor, only to have his heart broken as she flees upon his approach. All of a sudden, Little Miss Muffet is no longer a story about danger; it becomes a story about loneliness. And instead of enjoying our sympathy, Little Miss Muffet receives our scorn. Indeed, the solidarity that many readers drew upon moments ago to explain Little Miss Muffet’s reaction to the spider now serves to convict them for unfairly judging the spider’s motives. Such a creative angle or take on familiar events is not the exclusive domain of Pixar or Disney; it is often the hallmark of great writing and a great practitioner piece. Does your article
3 have a hook? Does it offer a unique angle on a familiar problem? My simple anthropomorphization of a spider in a familiar nursery rhyme points out that the reader is more than merely a receiver of the story the author is telling; readers fill in the blanks by drawing from their own experiences and expectations to help authors co-create the story. Often, they empathize with the actors to explain what has transpired and sketch out details about why it has happened. This can either facilitate the story the author wants to tell, or frustrate it. But if authors know their audience well (see Section 1.1.), they can find ways to engage readers’ expectations and transform the meaning of events. Even the worst comedians know this and draw upon these expectations to set up their jokes (e.g., I just flew in from Chicago; boy are my arms tired). What are your readers’ experiences and expectations, and how does your article inform, contradict, or change their meaning to offer new insights for practice? The three questions for academic storytelling cannot be answered without also tackling more detailed issues of problem solving. For example: What is the problem? Whose problem is it? Why is it a problem? What is the solution? Why is it better than the solutions already out there? How will it improve the reader’s life? Consequently, the three questions are elements of every elevator pitch and infomercial–—messages that exist to persuade, influence, or cajole. Given that great practitioner articles request readers to invest their attention and change their minds and/or behavior, they certainly constitute persuasive messages, made only more so through good storytelling. I hope I have shown that by answering the three questions for academic storytelling, you should not only increase your odds of publishing in Business Horizons but also improve the clarity and persuasiveness of your story, regardless of the medium via which you choose to communicate it. Happy storytelling!
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor
EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE
Three questions for better academic storytelling Jeffery S. McMullen Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, 1309 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-1701, U.S.A.
1. Tell me a story: Lessons from Jim Shooter About a month ago, my daughters and I attended our first ComicCon. I could claim that my children dragged me there; however, the truth is that when my younger daughter mentioned the idea to my wife, my ears piqued like our dog’s upon hearing the word squirrel. I loved comics as a teenage boy, and some three decades later rediscovered them after deciding to read a list of the 100 best graphic novels of all time. My exposure to ComicCon was limited entirely to jokes from The Big Bang Theory, and–—for better or worse–—it lived up to such ridicule. There were more than enough comic book vendors, cosplays, and celebrities from sci-fi/fantasy/superhero movies to confirm that my wife’s call (‘‘Let dad go this one alone’’) was the right decision for her. What I did not expect were the Academy-like plenary sessions. By good fortune I happened into a lecture on writing by Jim Shooter, former editor of Marvel during the 1980s when I was at the peak of my fandom. Since becoming an academic, I stand in awe of comic book and screenplay writers who are able to boil a story down to 600 frames–—or, in some cases, one (see Gary Larson’s The Far Side). Some of their stories are incredibly complex, abstract, and insightful, yet also accessible and approachable at the same time. I, on the other hand, often have
E-mail address: [email protected]
30 pages of prose to work with and still struggle to convey the essence of my story. Needless to say, I intently listened to Jim Shooter reference Aristotle and Horace about the essence of story, Mark Twain about the literary offenses of James Fennimore Cooper, and Kurt Vonnegut about what it means to write with style. Though Shooter’s lecture conveyed too many insights to recount them all here, a few demand to be shared because I find myself conveying some variant of these messages in desk rejections of submissions to Business Horizons. Since becoming editor, determining the essence of a manuscript’s story is a daily issue for me. During the review process, I ask myself: Will readers find this piece interesting enough to justify my time spent in helping the author develop it further for publication? I could answer this question in the affirmative more often if academic authors took Jim Shooter’s advice. Therefore, I would like to share some of Shooter’s insights as they relate to three questions authors should ask themselves before submitting.
1.1. Who is your audience? Nothing produces more desk rejections than failure to know your audience. Articles published in Business Horizons have a designated audience: practitioners. BH articles do not target other academics, and this affects both their content and style. Practitioners have interests and concerns dissimilar to those of academics, meaning an article targeting practitioners will cover different ground than an article
0007-6813/$ — see front matter # 2016 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2016.08.007
BUSHOR-1328; No. of Pages 3
2
EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE
targeting academics. A change in audience also has significant ramifications for the article’s style. Writing is communicating, and communication is a two-way street. We all talk differently to different people, even when we are talking about the same subject in both instances. Knowing that your audience consists of practitioners helps you, the writer, gauge which points may require elaboration, which may be self-evident, and which simply need to be omitted. Jim Shooter explained this phenomenon in the context of comic book writing as ‘Kirby pacing.’ Reputedly named for the legendary Jack Kirby, Kirby pacing seeks to cover as much ground as possible from frame to frame without losing the reader. The hope is that the reader’s imagination can fill in the details between frames. If leaps between frames are too great, coherence of the narrative suffers. If too much detail is provided, pacing of the story slows and the narrative bogs down, losing the reader’s interest. Knowing your audience helps writers to determine what the pacing should be–— that is, when accelerating may facilitate reader engagement or when throttling down may benefit reader comprehension. As Shooter pointed out, the conceptual distance traversed between frames of a comic is much farther for action scenes than scenes emphasizing dialogue between characters. Analogously, technical arguments in a practitioner piece may require a slower pace than case illustrations or examples. Knowing your audience should allow you to facilitate the pace of your story without losing reader comprehension.
1.2. Does your story have an end? Jim Shooter pointed out that simple stories consist of an actor, a situation, and an opposing force that disrupts this situation or status quo. He illustrated this notion with the example: Little Miss Muffet Sat on a tuffet, Eating her curds and whey; Along came a spider Who sat down beside her And frightened Miss Muffet away. Here, Miss Muffet is the actor. She is sitting on her tuffet, enjoying her breakfast, and conflict ensues. A spider enters the picture and creates tension for the reader. Is the spider dangerous? What will Miss
Muffet do? Finally, the story concludes by telling the reader what happened. Miss Muffet was frightened away. Too often, academic articles lack story. Many are good at telling the reader–—typically another academic–—what the literature has said, offering extensive detail about its origins, development, and current state. A few efforts go on to name an opposing force, explaining why the literature is incomplete, inadequate, or insufficient, while proposing some solution to this problem. Too few, however, complete the story by explaining how the proposed solution enables readers to do something they could not before. Inability or unwillingness to finish the story is never good in any form of communication, but it simply cannot be tolerated among manuscripts targeting practitioners. While articles aimed at academics should also prescribe advice (i.e., what the field should do differently as a result of their empirical findings and/or theoretical insights), practitioner pieces live or die based on the prescriptive advice they offer. When this prescriptive advice is absent, readers are left with unanswered questions. It is a story without an ending. When a practitioner piece offers prescriptive advice, it tends to be clearer about the problem it is addressing, whose problem it is, and why it is a problem–—all while achieving this in fewer words. Why? Because the author knows what is essential and what is superfluous, and–—if disciplined–—chooses to include only the former. Jim Shooter recommended in his lecture that writers interested in mastering the craft of comics or screenplays analyze their favorite movies until they know why the director included each and every frame. Writers of great practitioner articles and academic papers would likely benefit from a similar practice, analyzing exemplar work paragraph by paragraph and applying that same critical eye to their own writing. Prescriptive advice serves as the filter through which all this research support should be sifted. Descriptive background research is necessary to support your prescriptive advice, but it should play supporting cast. At one extreme, you must ask yourself: ‘‘Are my claims and assertions supported?’’ Equally important is the question: ‘‘Does the detail clarify my point and/or support my conclusion?’’ If not, delete it.
1.3. Does your story have tension? At this point, an aspiring author might say: ‘‘I targeted [entrepreneurs, mid-level managers, CEOs of Fortune 500 firms, or some such practitioner] and offered prescriptive advice. I clearly articulated
BUSHOR-1328; No. of Pages 3
EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE the problem and why it is a problem for my audience, but I still got rejected.’’ Though unlikely, this outcome is possible if a manuscript lacks a story, the essence of which is conflict. Ask yourself: Have I established any tension? Once again, consider Jim Shooter’s reference to Little Miss Muffet. In the original story, the author uses the reader’s experiences and expectations to evoke empathy for the girl. This empathy then triggers imagination to offer an explanation for why she fled: the reader assumes the girl was frightened because spiders bite. Without this assumption–—provided by the reader, not the author–—Little Miss Muffet lacks tension. Yes, the nursery rhyme conveys some anxiety and technically qualifies as a story, but the tension is so weak that it barely holds even the youngest listener’s attention. Although a bigger, more dangerous spider would make for a better tale, there are other, subtler ways of creating tension. For example, what if the writer asked readers to empathize with the spider? Using the same events, an author could transform the nursery rhyme into an allegory about how it feels to be rejected and considered dangerous based merely on appearance. In this scenario, the author could tell the story from the vantage point of a lonely spider who stays up all night spinning the most beautiful web he can to win Little Miss Muffet’s favor, only to have his heart broken as she flees upon his approach. All of a sudden, Little Miss Muffet is no longer a story about danger; it becomes a story about loneliness. And instead of enjoying our sympathy, Little Miss Muffet receives our scorn. Indeed, the solidarity that many readers drew upon moments ago to explain Little Miss Muffet’s reaction to the spider now serves to convict them for unfairly judging the spider’s motives. Such a creative angle or take on familiar events is not the exclusive domain of Pixar or Disney; it is often the hallmark of great writing and a great practitioner piece. Does your article
3 have a hook? Does it offer a unique angle on a familiar problem? My simple anthropomorphization of a spider in a familiar nursery rhyme points out that the reader is more than merely a receiver of the story the author is telling; readers fill in the blanks by drawing from their own experiences and expectations to help authors co-create the story. Often, they empathize with the actors to explain what has transpired and sketch out details about why it has happened. This can either facilitate the story the author wants to tell, or frustrate it. But if authors know their audience well (see Section 1.1.), they can find ways to engage readers’ expectations and transform the meaning of events. Even the worst comedians know this and draw upon these expectations to set up their jokes (e.g., I just flew in from Chicago; boy are my arms tired). What are your readers’ experiences and expectations, and how does your article inform, contradict, or change their meaning to offer new insights for practice? The three questions for academic storytelling cannot be answered without also tackling more detailed issues of problem solving. For example: What is the problem? Whose problem is it? Why is it a problem? What is the solution? Why is it better than the solutions already out there? How will it improve the reader’s life? Consequently, the three questions are elements of every elevator pitch and infomercial–—messages that exist to persuade, influence, or cajole. Given that great practitioner articles request readers to invest their attention and change their minds and/or behavior, they certainly constitute persuasive messages, made only more so through good storytelling. I hope I have shown that by answering the three questions for academic storytelling, you should not only increase your odds of publishing in Business Horizons but also improve the clarity and persuasiveness of your story, regardless of the medium via which you choose to communicate it. Happy storytelling!