It’s kind of hard to say which part of a narrative is most important. If you confuse or bore people at the start, you’ve lost them. If you don’t close well, the whole effort can be a waste. And it kind of helps to not make a mess of things in the middle.

But in a world of short attention spans, it is increasingly crucial to have a strong opening. People are making their minds up whether to listen from the start.

Lots of people over the ages have analyzed MLK’s great speech. There’s tons to praise in it, and given the seriousness of the moment and enormity of his audience in front of the Lincoln Monument, he pretty much couldn’t go wrong. But regardless, it still mattered whether he bored, confused or drew the audience in from the start. By opening with solid ABT structure, he guaranteed the latter.

Once you recognize that the speech opens pretty close to perfectly with solid ABT structure, I think it’s worth conceding that the rest of it, while powerful and effective, isn’t so air-tight for narrative structure as to deserve the label of “perfect.” What is good is the basic messaging of using a lot of repetition.

About two thirds through he hits a stretch where he starts eight consective sentences with “I have a dream …” That’s a little bit “And, and, and-ish,” but that’s okay. By that point he’s hammering home his message through repetition.

What’s worth considering is that there might have been a story he could have told. As great as the speech was, there could well have been an even better, more powerful version with tighter narrative structure. Who knows. That’s the thing about the narrative challenge — you can never prove that there doesn’t exist a better version.

But the key point is that MLK had deep narrative intuition, and that showed itself by how he opened the speech. He started simple, drew his audience in, then let loose with the exhortations they needed and wanted to hear.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING LESS IMPRESSIVE …

The New Yorker had a fairly painful and delicate article over the weekend about rape. The author, Jeannie Suk, was herself involved in the issue of a sexual assault case at Harvard that was presented in a new documentary. The article is both reporting on the politics of the documentary, as well as a statement of her opinion.

Because of the extremely sensitive nature of the issue, you can tell she has chosen every single word very carefully. What is interesting is to examine the ABT structure of her final paragraph.

Looking at it from the ABT perspective (and this is what I mean by the term “the ABT Framework”) you can get a feel for how delicate her word selection is. I’ve dropped in BUT and THEREFORE where you can sense they could go if you wanted to use them.

LAST PARAGRAPH OF THE ARTICLE:

Sexual assault is a serious and insidious problem that occurs with intolerable frequency on college campuses and elsewhere. Fighting it entails, among other things, dismantling the historical bias against victims, particularly black victims—and not simply replacing it with the tenet that an accuser must always and unthinkingly be fully believed. It is as important and logically necessary to acknowledge the possibility of wrongful accusations of sexual assault as it is to recognize that most rape claims are true. And if we have learned from the public reckoning with the racial impact of over-criminalization, mass incarceration, and law enforcement bias, we should heed our legacy of bias against black men in rape accusations. The dynamics of racially disproportionate impact affect minority men in the pattern of campus sexual-misconduct accusations, which schools, conveniently, do not track, despite all the campus-climate surveys. Administrators and faculty who routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases, including my colleague Janet Halley, tell me that most of the complaints they see are against minorities, and that is consistent with what I have seen at Harvard. (BUT) The “always believe” credo will aggravate and hide this context, aided by campus confidentiality norms that make any racial pattern difficult to study and expose. (THEREFORE) Let’s challenge it. Particularly in this time of student activism around structural and implicit racial bias pervading campuses, examination of the racial impact of Title IX bureaucracy is overdue. We are all fallible—professors, students, and administrators—and disagreement and competing narratives will abound. But equating critique with a hostile environment is neither safe nor helpful for victims. We should be attentive to our history and context, and be open to believing, disbelieving, agreeing, or disagreeing, in individual instances, based on evidence.

The first six sentences of the paragraph are a series of “and’s” with the fourth sentence even starting with the word “and.” This material is all exposition, setting up the overall argument using the ABT structure.

The seventh sentence is the statement of opinion. In the language of Gerald Graff, author of “They Say, I Say,” the first six sentences are the “they say,” the seventh sentence is the “I say.”

Try reading the sixth and seventh sentences the way she has written it, then try it again including the BUT. You can feel that the latter version is a little more powerful, a little more aggressive, a little more pushy — which is what she didn’t want to finish with given the sensitivity of the issue.

And then look at the next sentence — it is the clearly the statement of consequence or action. She is offering up her recommendation of what to do about this predicament (“Let’s challenge it.”). Of course hardly anyone uses the word THEREFORE, but you could definitley drop in “So, let’s challenge it.” But again, if you did, you’d be making the text more pushy.

This is what I’m saying about the delicate use of language here. Remembering that “the power of storytelling rests in the specifics,” you can see she went the opposite way, intentionally making her content less powerful.

The last paragraph is, of course, her summary statement of the article. It is also structured not just with the ABT, but actually with the five parts referred to by screenwriting guru Frank Daniel in his 1986 speech that I quote in my book. Here’s what Daniel said:

THE FRANK DANIEL QUOTE: In a dramatic story the pattern usually for the connecting scenes is: “and then,” “but,” “therefore,” “but,” and towards the culmination “mean­ while.” If you don’t have this “but” and “therefore” connection between the parts, the story becomes linear, monotonous. Diaries and chronicles are written that way, but not scripts.

If you look at the remainder of the text, you see the final two sentences match the five part structure described by Frank Daniel. Sentence #11 actually starts with BUT, and Sentence #12 is the culminating statement, “We should be attentive …”

This is what I’m talking about with the term ABT Framework. Once you learn these words and realize the narrative roles they play, you can start to break down the narrative structure of individual sections of text.

In this case, the ABT structure is present throughout the article, and nowhere more than in the final, wrap up paragraph.

MY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

When it comes to climate and humor it’s pretty much of a contradiction in terms. The only humor in “An Inconvenient Truth,” was Gore making fun of his clueless elementary school science teacher who, “probably grew up to become the science advisor to the current (Bush) administration” (way to alienate the Republicans you’re hoping to reach in the first ten minutes of your movie).

There are stacks of climate documentaries over the past decade, almost none of them funny. My friend Robbie Kenner did manage to finally bring a smidgen of humor earlier this year to “Merchants of Doubt,” but only a smidgen as it was still set in the overall holier than thou tone that has characterized the climate movement from the start.

There’s actually only one truly brilliant piece of climate comedy over all these years, which is the group in Australia behind, “The Hamster Wheel: Lord Monckton,” a four minute video in 2011 that punked oddball climate skeptic Lord Monckton at a level as skilled or better than “The Daily Show” in the old days. It was a true masterpiece.

But all the rest are overly-somber pronouncements on how we’re all doomed — the lecturing voice of a largely humorless community. So now let’s see how they deal with someone making fun of them.

In 2008 I took my shot at having fun with the climate issue. Following my movie “Flock of Dodos” in 2006 lots of people asked if I could make an equally entertaining movie about the attacks on climate science. I gave it a shot. I made, “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy.” You know what happened? Most environmentalists hated it.

The word got out I had made a piece of “climate humor.” Initially there was interest. I was invited to submit it to at least five “environmental film festivals,” in DC, Georgia, California, Wyoming and Colorado. But all of them rejected it. Two of them even wrote emails implying the overall tone of it was inappropriate. Climate bloggers were even worse, and the scientific journal Nature (that bastion of cinema savvy) gave it the only rotten review of my entire filmmaking career out of more than 100 published.

In the end we premiered the movie in Hollywood at the Outfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (two of the leads were gay and the festival values humor and not taking oneself too seriously) and the Woods Hole Film Festival (they were open minded enough to realize the movie was pro-climate movement, it just had an irreverent attitude, which is largely forbidden in the traditionally reverential environmental world).

One of the most memorable characters of the movie was budding climate skeptic Marc Morano. At the time he was the spokesman for the loudest climate skeptic in Congress, Senator James Inhofe. We had fun interviewing him in a senate hearing room. He was intrigued with filmmaking and seemed to have an inate feel for entertainment. I enjoyed his sense of humor and as a result have stayed in touch with him over the years, including having him on a panel discussion at a screening at Syracuse University. Also, I lobbied Robbie Kenner to include him in “Merchants of Doubt.”

TRYING TO WARN THE CLIMATE WORLD OF AN EMERGING VOICE

THE WORLD PREMIERE OF “CLIMATE HUSTLE” IN PARIS

I went to an advance screening of the upcoming movie, “The Big Short,” (coming Dec. 11) based on the Michael Lewis book. It’s a fascinating and challenging movie — forcing you to run full speed with them as they do their best to explain all the tricks and cons at work on Wall Street in 2006, when the housing market bubble was getting ready to burst.

It almost feels like a Discovery Channel show at times as they bring on all sorts of fun non sequitur cameos to explain the most complex concepts — like chef Anthony Bourdain at his chopping block using squid and halibut to explain derivatives (I think) or Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining another concept while of course sitting in a tub full of bubbles.

There’s also a lot of breaking the fourth wall — actors looking into camera to explain what’s going on — almost like having a “benshi” at times (the name of my old blog!). It’s very complex material, yet they don’t shy away from trying to get the audience to understand what happened.

If you read the section in my new book about the fundamental divide between the more narrative form of archplot versus the more truthful form of miniplot, this is a movie that draws on all its muscle of star power and creativity to do an honest, as-accurate-as-possible miniplot job of conveying the truth. At one point, for one particular sequence, an actor talks into the camera and admits the real events didn’t happen like this for this bit, but that only strengthens the credibility of the rest of the film — that they would concede the few places where they did significant fabrication for dramatic purposes.

It’s really an excellent movie. It won’t reach as large of an audience as if they had gone the more archplot route of synthesizing a fictitious character who could then experience all the stages of The Hero’s Journey. And that’s just more reason to admire the filmmakers.

One more interesting twist — it’s directed by Adam McKay. Let’s see, what great hard hitting dramatic epics is he known for? Let’s start with “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” and “Step Brothers.” That’s how much the producers pulled out all the stops to make this very difficult yet important material watchable for the masses — they knew they had the solid factual story from the book by Michael Lewis. To that they added an incredible team of actors topped off with a director who knows how to lighten things up.

In the end, it’s a fairly sad and cynical story. There really aren’t any winners. Even the guys who became billionaires from their investment savvy ended up feeling at least a twinge of guilt that they did it off the savings, homes and retirements of all the less fortunate of America. And as most people know, only one of the culprits from Wall Street ever went to jail while the corrupt system underwent just about no reform. It’s a tragi-comedy of Shakespearean proportions.

In 1992 I helped with running phone polling for Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaign in New Hampshire. I was a professor at UNH and it was still the first in the nation primary state. For probably a dozen nights I did phone calls with about five other people in the small campaign office in Portsmouth.

What struck me the most was the number of hang-ups. Not many rude comments, just the majority of people not wanting to answer the questions we were calling to ask. That was the start of my big time susipicion of all polling data. Why weren’t we concerned about the biases of this huge level of non-participation?

This is a major dimension of Jill Lepore’s excellent article in this week’s issue of The New Yorker titled, “Politics and the New Machine: What the turn from polls to data science means for democracy.” She has just the sort of critical perspective I subscribe to The New Yorker for, diggin waaaay back into the history of polling in America to show how much of it has been bogus for at least 70 years.

You would have thought polling itself would have gone extinct in 1948 when Gallup himself said of his prediction that Dewey would beat Truman the whole world would see, “how good we are.” He should have been tarred and feathered back then with “Gallup” being as culturally discredited as Benedict Arnold, instead of giving rise to the sacred Gallup Polls of today.

The article points out how the process of polling in America (which emerged in the 1920’s, back when it was exciting to be asked your opinion, resulting in over 50% participation), has now dwindled to “single digits” for almost all phone polling. Meaning I wasn’t alone with my New Hamphire “no thank you” experience.

In 2005 when I set to work on my documentary “Flock of Dodos” about the evolution controversy in Kansas I listened to my interview subjects talk about the “statewide” polls on support for the teaching of evolution. Which seemed impressive except for one minor detail — my younger brother, who at the time worked in the oil fields of Kansas — kept reminding me, “NOBODY in this state cares about this stupid issue — they care about jobs — it makes them angry when they see evolution on the front page of the newspaper.” Which I had already sensed just from talking to my old high school and college friends there. The public concern was largely manufactured by journalists.

The thought that kept running through my head ends up being exactly what Lepore addresses. She writes, “The first question a pollster should ask,” the sociologist Leo Bogart advised in 1972, is, “Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion.” EXACTLY!!!

That is exactly what I kept thinking — how many of these working class people in Kansas have really digested this issue of evolution versus creationism and decided they have a clear and strong opinion. The number was probably statistically indistinguishable from zero. So much bogusness.

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLLING

ABRACADABRA TRUMP!

Stories begin with AAA (and, and, and). It’s called exposition — an assemblage of neutral facts that don’t yet engage the narrative centers of the brain. Not enough exposition and the story is confusing. Too much, it’s boring.

The LA Times reviewer for the new video game Fallout 4 says it took him 10 hours just to get to “the game’s first major city,” which he says was the first moment he began to actually warm to the game. That’s kind of like the end of the first act — the story is finally up and running, the audience is engaged.

He goes on to lament about that being just too much time — pretty much like a movie that takes forever to get to the first dead body. That’s an AAA problem — too much, “AND then we learn about this, AND then we learn about this, AND then we learn about this …” Enough already, get on with the story.

What’s a bigger concern is the overall feel of the game being just too complex. After 10 hours of play the reviewer says, “It still feels as if I’ve opened a board game for the first time, and before me lies the virtual equivalent of hundreds of tiny plastic pieces and the overwhelming dread that mastery won’t come easy.” This is the situation I’ve described in my new book as DHY — Despite, However, Yet — representing the situation of too many narrative directions at once.

It’s clear that the game is just too muddled — too much narrative, too many directions, too much detail. It lacks the simplicity of narrative that make stories popular. He reflects this by making references to simpler games of which he is more fond, by saying, “I miss the ease with which Lara Croft traversed ruins, and I miss the relative svelte nature of its story.”

The point of this post is not about video games (I don’t have the time to spend 10 hours just getting into one, though I wish I did). The point is how broadly the Narrative Spectrum applies to any world in which story is present. Show me a story, any story, and I’ll show you the forces of AAA, DHY and ABT at work.

Last spring we developed our Story Circles Narrative Fitness Training, running four prototypes at three locations. They ran surprisingly smoothly with only a few bumps to iron out over the summer.

Now we’ve moved out of the development phase — Story Circles is now operational. We just launched two new Story Circles with the southeast region of USDA/ARS — one “local” with five research scientists at their Fort Pierce, Florida research station, the other “remote” — five research scientists from several other locations who will hold their sessions via teleconferencing which will be the first time for this.

I was in Ft. Pierce last week to run the one day orientation session for both Circles. Unlike last spring, where it felt like we were making things up as we went along, now it is feeling firmly established. It works, it’s relatively simple, and now it’s up to the participants to put in the effort to make it effective.

If there’s one thing we learned from the prototypes, it’s that you get back what you put in. The harder people worked on the materials, the deeper the feel for narrative structure they gained. There are several other government agencies now talking to me about introducing Story Circles to their employees. It looks like USDA/ARS will be the model for all the others.

Last Saturday night my favorite TV show, 48 Hours Mystery aired a seemingly silly, but ultimately fascinating case. It fits right in to the dynamic of the fish of truth and river of story dynamics I present at the end of, “Houston, We Have A Narrative.”

The murder case itself was pretty weird. A woman shot her husband of 15 years in the head twice, then claimed it was an accident, caused by their imitating a Bugs Bunny episode.

The story she spun in the initial trial was so unusual, specific and almost plausible that it ended up overriding the huge body of forensic evidence presented. The proscuting attourney, similar to so many prosecutors who present mountains of science-based evidence, was fairly stunned when the jury voted to acquit — as stunned as an evolutionist with all the science-based evidence who loses a debate to a creationist telling great stories.

Some of the jurors bought her story. She claimed that she and her wacky husband routinely quoted Bugs Bunny scenes to each other. In this case she picked up his handgun, he said, “no buwwets,” quoting Elmer Fudd, then she started “fan firing” the gun (similar to old western gunslingers holding down the trigger while “fanning” the hammer for multiple rapid shots). He leaned forward into the line of fire and oof, took two in the head, lights out.

Years later the woman was retried for the murder. This time around the prosecutor made a savvy decision. He opted to not present any of her post-arrest interrogation where she told about the Elmer Fudd thing in detail. Because of this, the whole wacky buwwets element never came up. The defense kept expecting him to get into it. He never did. As a result, all the jury got was the science-based forensics information.

Unlike the first trial where the jury ended up deadlocked after several days, in the second trial the jury took only one day to reach a decision — guilty. The prosecutor attributed it entirely to the removal of the Bugs Bunny element.

Bottom line, in the language of story — if you shrink the river of story (if it goes against the truth), the truth stands a better chance.