We should adopt a pitbull, maybe?
What we can learn about narrative tension from the Dems, an education fellowship, and an org that builds playgrounds
On the rare weekend morning when I wake up before my son, I spend my precious minutes of alone time scrolling through The Dodo’s Instagram and indulging in a bout of cooing, oohing, aahing, and crying. Humans rescuing pelicans tangled in fishing wire! An endless parade of abused and frightened pitbulls transforming into goofy cuddlebugs in loving foster homes! A dog bringing a blind chicken her favorite toys! It’s phenomenal content.
For the rest of the morning, the world is a flawed but hopeful place. My eyes feel opened anew not only to the animal rights issues that usually dwell on the backburner of my brain, but also to the everyday humans who are making a real difference in the lives of our earthly brethren. When my son gleefully hurls his yogurt at our free-range pet rabbit, I wipe down the rabbit with a new tenderness and wonder what his life was like before we adopted him from the shelter. When the rabbit bites my husband in transitive revenge—cunningly intuiting that biting the baby won’t fly—I wonder out loud whether his actions are the result of PTSD rather than a fundamentally mean temperament, and suggest that maybe we should adopt a pitbull next?
The Dodo has me hooked because it’s mastered the art of narrative tension.
Narrative tension is the feeling of anticipation or suspense that an audience experiences while reading or watching a story. It’s created by the conflict—presented by a threat or obstacle that characters must overcome—and by the stakes—basically, what happens if they don’t overcome it. Master storytellers vary the level of tension throughout a story to engage and captivate their audience. They understand that dwelling too long on nail-biting or heart-rendering conflict—the widespread abuse and neglect of pitbulls, say—will desensitize and ultimately detach their audience. They also understand that a montage of happy endings—thriving rehabilitated pups—eliminates any sense of anticipation or suspense, and so will never hook an audience in the first place.
Social sector work is inherently about conflicts and the happier outcomes for which we strive. Yet, many orgs engage in one of two patterns of storytelling:
They paint the current-state nightmare without ever offering a glimpse of the future-state dream. We can partly blame grant-writing for this habit, since grantmakers often ask for data establishing need without asking for equally concrete evidence of impact. There is little narration of the road forward or reasons for hope, so audiences must simply take an org’s word for it that they can solve the problem in some way.
They exclusively engage in celebratory storytelling, e.g. impact stories and profiles of success. There’s little narration of the problem, so audiences have no sense of what is at stake. Also, they won’t feel a need to get involved; why bother, when the story already offers them a sense of closure?
As storytellers, the social sector needs to learn how to move fluidly between conflict and impact, nightmare and dream, awareness and hope… in other words, we need to learn how to vary our narrative tension. Otherwise, we will disengage the audiences whose attention and support we need.
for example…
Last year, Democratic party emails became a running joke, with lampoons like this McSweeney’s article “If I Emailed My Parents Like Democrats Email Me.” I began routinely deleting their emails from my inbox, then unsubscribed altogether. This op-ed from the New York Times sums up the reasons for my disengagement: “Voters inevitably must wonder, why keep trying?… Democrats receiving apocalyptic messages can feel more battered than activated, leading to demoralization and despair.” Humanitarian crisis organizations often follow this pattern of emotionally exhaustive storytelling.
On the flipside, Education Pioneers’ Instagram tells a story of continuous celebration. The organization, whose mission is to build talent pipelines to “transform” the education sector, focuses the bulk of its content on profiling fellows who have helped nonprofits develop strategic plans, create data dashboards, and connect families to broadband. Absent from the story is any sense of what is at stake or why their audience should care. (Also, check out my post on how words like “transform” are often red flags for poor storytelling). Tellingly, Education Pioneers’ Instagram only has 1,600 followers, despite an alumni base of over 4,500 members.
In other words, neither organization has a grasp on narrative tension...
…unlike KABOOM!, a nonprofit that builds playgrounds in communities where access has historically been denied. Their Instagram exemplifies narrative tension. One post, accompanied by a photo of a boy sitting sadly on a picnic table on a cloudy day, contextualizes the Central Park birdwatching incident within the history of racialized segregation and disinvestment in public spaces. A subsequent post, accompanied by a photo of excited children brainstorming in a bright library, announces that they are designing their dream playground in Uvalde. KABOOM! continuously shifts between reminding its audience of what is at stake and offering glimpses of a better reality, should we act.
long story short…
In novels and movies, narrative tension sustains audience attention by keeping the plot moving. In the social sector, our storytelling often loses our audience because we stop the plot by suspending it in the problem or fast-forwarding to closure.
This doesn’t mean that we should never just state the problem or just celebrate a win. After all, there is only so much you can say in 280 characters on Twitter, 2,200 on Instagram, or 3,000 on LinkedIn. But rather than thinking of storytelling in individual, discrete pieces—one post, one blog, one newsletter—we need to think about how we storytell across a body of work.
While on occasion a fantastic, one-off social media post might win a deluge of flash-in-the-pan attention, we cultivate a loyal and engaged audience through the consistent ebb and flow of narrative tension through our storytelling over time. If we celebrate a win one day, how might we pull our audience back to the problem at hand the next?
(Pictured below: the rabbit, who usually gets an extra portion of leafy greens and other such delicacies after I read The Dodo.)
