Journalistic Practice: Science Storytelling: Why science must tell stories (essentials) 3658338571, 9783658338572

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Martin W. Angler

Journalistic Practice: Science Storytelling Why science must tell stories

essentials

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Springer essentials provide up-to-date knowledge in a concentrated form. They aim to deliver the essence of what counts as “state-of-the-art” in the current academic discussion or in practice. With their quick, uncomplicated and comprehensible information, essentials provide: • an introduction to a current issue within your field of expertise • an introduction to a new topic of interest • an insight, in order to be able to join in the discussion on a particular topic Available in electronic and printed format, the books present expert knowledge from Springer specialist authors in a compact form. They are particularly suitable for use as eBooks on tablet PCs, eBook readers and smartphones. Springer essentials form modules of knowledge from the areas economics, social sciences and humanities, technology and natural sciences, as well as from medicine, psychology and health professions, written by renowned Springer-authors across many disciplines.

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Martin W. Angler

Journalistic Practice: Science Storytelling Why Science Must Tell Stories

Martin W. Angler science journalist Bozen, Italy

ISSN 2197-6708 ISSN 2197-6716 (electronic) essentials ISSN 2731-3107 ISSN 2731-3115 (electronic) Springer essentials ISBN 978-3-658-33856-5 ISBN 978-3-658-33857-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33857-2 This book is a translation of the original German edition „Journalistische Praxis: Science Storytelling“ by Martin W., Angler, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors. © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Responsible Editor: Barbara Emig-Roller This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

This book is dedicated to all those who have a clear goal in mind, actively pursue it and dare to venture outside their comfort zone to achieve it.

What You Can Find in This essential

• • • • •

Why science needs to tell stories The building blocks of good stories Structuring stories Story formulas from television and cinema Style rules for better writing

vii

Preface

With his fictional Netflix hit series “Black Mirror”, Charlie Brooker has sensitized more people to the consequences of blind media and technology consumption than all sophisticated columns in the world put together. Nothing more needs to be said about the power of stories.

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Contents

1 Why Science Needs to Tell Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 We Cannot Afford Otherwise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 How Stories Affect Our Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 3

2 Story Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Narrative Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7 8 11 12 13 14 15

3 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Common Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Opinion Pieces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17 19 21

4 The Rule of Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

5 Story Formulas from TV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25

6 Story Formulas from Cinema and Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31

7 Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1

Why Science Needs to Tell Stories

1.1

We Cannot Afford Otherwise

Is science allowed to tell stories? Does it lose credibility? And what is there to gain? These questions were buzzing around in my head when I called journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Hart in Oregon last winter. He was sitting at home, recovering from a fall in a blizzard in front of his house, and told me: “By all means! Science is full of stories.” Hart was a newspaper editor at the Oregonian, where he used to craft award-winning stories with his writers. He developed a structure for it, based on ancient storytelling rules. Hart’s structure is essentially a graph into which authors can insert important story events. Hart’s stories work because they use storytelling elements such as protagonists and suspense curves. This almost always works because we are all wired to instantly recognise stories as inherent truths. Hart is a journalist and storyteller. Scientists usually are not. Why not? Stories are as old as humanity itself. Each of us knows instinctively what makes a good story. But nobody teaches us how to write a good story. That does not happen in schools or universities. Instead, teachers in language classes often focus on literary text analysis and lyrical interpretation. Storytelling certainly is not part of most academic curricula. It should be. There should be dedicated courses for it, and here is why. Not teaching storytelling as a school subject is a bad choice, because if you are able to tell good stories, you will go far, both privately and professionally. Good stories are always in demand. Science is no exception, even though (or precisely because) it is complex. On the contrary, precisely because it has to convey complex

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 M. W. Angler, Journalistic Practice: Science Storytelling, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33857-2_1

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1 Why Science Needs to Tell Stories

content, science needs story techniques to convey it. However, the way science writing is taught at universities, is that teachers wean their students off from any storytelling intuition they may have picked up as young children when listening to bedtime stories. The impersonal and insipid kind of writing that is taught at schools and universities as part of scientific curricula is designed to convey a false impression of unlimited objectivity—something science cannot provide. Science is a human endeavour. Science speaks a special language that is cryptic to the outside world, and that is fine. With that in mind, it seems obvious that science in its professional communication form cannot be understood by society. That is a pity in many ways, because science does not work in isolation from society, but should rather act as an integral part of it, that is, with and for society. Climate change policies, for example, can be influenced by scientists, but the decisions are ultimately made by politicians. In order for them to make sound decisions in everbody’s interest, in the very sense of the categorical imperative according to Kant, scientific advisors must be able to communicate clearly the gist of their research stories, including the motivation for their projects. There are a number of storytelling techniques for this, and we will look at some of them in this book. They are not manipulative techniques but rather cater to the fact that we are wired to react instinctively to stories and to memorise the conveyed hard facts for a long time. Much learning happens through stories, and not through absorbing bare enumerations of information. That is why scientists need to get out of the ivory tower. Just presenting the facts, one by one, does not ensure they will be remembered. The scientific method (if there is one at all, or rather: if there should be one) must not stop with the self-adulating publication of results in glitzy journals. Science must spark a dialogue with society. On the one hand, this is their duty, because society enables research in the first place. On the other hand, it is in scientists’ very interest to achieve widespread dissemination of their research results and thus increase citations. Given how current research evaluation schemes are designed, this approach usually promises career leaps. Hence, if you tell better stories, you will be read by more colleagues and have a higher probability of being understood by the general public. To be fair, I must add that this does not always end well for scientists. Rockstar astronomer Carl Sagan had a special talent for telling stories and realized that explanations and narratives and their formats had to be adapted to the audience. Although he received much praise from the general public for this, he was met with fierce criticism from his scientific colleagues. They criticized the quality of his scientific work. Wrongly so, because until today Sagan has been cited

1.2 How Stories Affect Our Brain

3

almost 30,000 times on Google Scholar (if this may be a measure of quality at all, but at the moment this is the status quo). The phenomenon of criticizing scientists for their public relations work went down in the history of science as the “Carl Sagan effect” (Martinez-Conde, 2016). That kind of fear inhibits many scientists from doing outreach. Just like fear, stories have an influence on our brain and our biochemistry. Let’s see how.

1.2

How Stories Affect Our Brain

When we see or hear stories, our brain releases messenger substances like dopamine (feelings of happiness) and cortisol (stress and attention). In addition, there is the “love hormone” oxytocin, which is released as a messenger substance on physical contact. The oxytocin level increases during breastfeeding, during orgasms, and after taking MDMA. Gestures of trust, kindness and comfort also increase the level. Increased oxytocin levels make us more empathetic and increase our willingness to cooperate with others. Hollywood blockbusters but also novels rely on the audience identifying with the protagonist. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak therefore took blood samples from test persons before and after consuming stories and found that character-driven stories in particular cause higher oxytocin levels in the blood (Zak, 2014). But that is not all. More oxytocin also means a higher willingness to help. In follow-up studies, Zak found that the build-up of tension in narratives not only captured the attention of the subjects, but also kept them upright on a tension plateau. If this succeeds, the audience identifies so strongly with the characters that they continue to imitate their behaviour and feelings even after the end of the story. Zak therefore recommends always showing the meaning of a business with real characters first. It works the same way with science. In fact, Zak also found that we react particularly strongly to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and retain information conveyed in this way for the longest time. On the downside, this also implies that we retain information that was put together loosely and with structure, is not likely to be remembered. Information sticks because it is structured. Stories are specific, ordered and seemingly causally connected events. As BBC storyteller John Yorke writes in his book “Into the Woods”, stories are our way of making sense of the world’s chaos. In some instances, this happens unconsciously. For example, we tend to attribute a causal relationship to events that simply happen one after another. Studies show that we cannot help but establish a causal link

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1 Why Science Needs to Tell Stories

between events. If “B” happens after “A”, we instinctively judge that “B” happened because of “A”. This is one of the reasons why science journalists often suggest false connections. A classic example is the implied transfer of mouse (or rat) research to humans. For example, the portal wissenschaft.de (commissioned by bild der wissenschaft) in January 2020 headlined: “Stress turns our hair grey”. However, the study to which the article refers is only about experiments on mice. Even if this is made clear in the text: the title alone is misleading. And especially on the net, up to 60 percent of readers read only the post’s title and lead, while never opening the actual article. The pronoun “our” alone suggests to readers that researchers have found out what makes human hair turn grey—and not mouse fur. In reality, they have not. The German weekly magazine SPIEGEL does a better job, coming up with the headline: “Study in mice shows: stress causes gray hair”. The danger of reporting false suggestions is twofold. On the one hand, it erodes readers’ trust in science (and journalism) as soon as it becomes clear that the authors in fact are wrong. On the other hand, it also shows that we all like to establish causal connections when there are none at all. Evidence of this can be found in both biology and psychology. The well-known “confirmation bias” phenomenon, i.e. the confirmation of existing world views, strikes the same chord as the phenomenon of false connections. Confirmation bias is unfortunately also the reason why we can hardly be dissuaded from buying into a worldview once we have constructed it. Pure information is usually not enough in order to do that. That is why simply presenting scientific fact checks do not work once the audience is emotionalized (Bardon, 2020). Once an audience has been emotionalised, even nifty storytelling techniques only work to a certain extent. Emotion-laden Information enters the brain through fast pathways and triggers the audience’s reflexes before the rational, more energy-consuming and slower part of their brain (much of it is located on the prefrontal cortex) has a chance to kick in. This also explains why emotionally charged topics on social media are commented on immediately, way before readers even consider clicking on the link that would open the underlying article. This happens to about 60 per cent of Facebook posts. Opinion-forming apparently works without information, and certainly irrationally. When we consume stories, our brain activity also changes, as Israeli neuroscientist Uri Hasson showed. He slid his study participants into an MRI system and showed them first just incoherent snippets of speech. He then played back stories in reverse

1.2 How Stories Affect Our Brain

5

(which obviously did not make any sense), and then he played back regular stories. What he found was a phenomenon he dubbed “neural coupling”. It causes the audience’s brain waves to synchronise across brain regions (Hasson, 2016). This effect only happens when entire stories are played back that activate complex brain areas such as the cerebral cortex. The whole process works independently of language. Listening to the same story in either Russian or English activates the exact same brain areas. The listeners are literally tuned to the same wavelength. The same effect manifests between the storyteller and the participants. And the effect carries on by itself: when one of the participants tells the same story, the same phenomenon unfolds in the brains of the new audience. It is no wonder that shared culture and experiences connect entire ethnic groups. This is exactly why science must finally tell stories. Not only the journalists, but also the scientists themselves. There is no other way. The alternative would be to leave the field to the fake news producers and internet trolls and Orange Men of this world. That is not an option. Fake news works because it always tells stories. They may be unfounded stories, but they are convincing precisely because they make deliberate use of storytelling elements. A US case study shows that our innate ability to connect concatenated facts and consider them as causally related has had a major influence on the vaccination debate. In 2007, eight days, after his birth, Ian Gromowski received a hepatitis B shot. “Hours later he cried inconsolably, refused food and adopted a tense posture. His platelet count plummeted.” This was the description given by his parents, who blogged about the incident. The photos of the bloated boy with the rash quickly made the rounds on the net. Ian Gromowski died on day 47 after his birth. After his parents had ruled out all other potential causes, they concluded it must have been the vaccination. This has not been proven to date, but it has added fuel to the fire of the vaccination debate (Shelby & Ernst, 2013). The Gromowskis had spread a false message. It was narratively conclusive and sounded like the events logically followed each other. That is why Ian’s story spread fast, fueling the anti-vaccination debate. However, Shelby and Ernst also found out that that stories can as well serve as antidotes for false stories. Two aspects stand out: First, anti-vaccination activists cannot easily be won over, not even by laying bare all the evidence. Such a change of heart requires deep insight, which many people only gain, as described in another case study, after catastrophic cutbacks (in the case study this is the near-death of the child of a former anti-vaccinationist). This leads us to the second aspect: purely positive anti-fake news stories do not work as an antidote. For example, whenever they show the success rates of vaccinations or portray a child who has not fallen ill

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1 Why Science Needs to Tell Stories

due to vaccination. For them to work, anti-fake news stories must be just as negative as most fake news stories. The fact that negativity has such a strong impact on society is due on the one hand to the common understanding of news values. The most effective news value is still negativity, as Norwegian sociologists Galtung and Ruge defined in a scientific essay in 1965. Unfortunately, the media industry has misunderstood the catalogue of the two and used it as a template for selecting news for 55 years. In truth, Galtung wanted to warn against them. Science alone cannot withstand the onslaught of fake news. Science needs stories to tell fact-based, compelling stories. In the next chapter, we will look at what ingredients a story needs.

2

Story Elements

There are many definitions of what a story is. Most of these definitions already contain all the important story elements. In its simplest form, a story is a problem and its solution. This is why social media ad texts work wonderfully according to this scheme: “You have a problem, we have the solution”. Of course, this requires a character who has the problem in the first place. The path from problem to solution and overcoming obstacles is also part of the story. The definition becomes a little more complex if you look at the Hegelian dialectic. A thesis is confronted with its antithesis, and ideally the two combine to form a synthesis. This reflects pretty much the sequence of events in Hollywood films: the thesis (introduction of the protagonist in his normal environment), the antithesis (complication leading to the pursuit of a goal), and the synthesis, i.e. the connection of both worlds. In monster horror films, for example, the antithesis to the protagonist is the monster itself. It possesses qualities that the protagonist lacks. In the course of his or her trials, the protagonist gains knowledge about the monster, with which she can defeat it; to do this, the protagonist usually has to get to know herself better. In the film these three entities are clearly divided into three acts. The Hegelian dialectic represents the very act of learning itself: Students have a previous body of knowledge (thesis), they are then confronted with new, hitherto unknown knowledge (antithesis) and merge both into a new state of knowledge (synthesis). For BBC storyteller John Yorke, this is a story in its most basic form: Two opposing opinions (thesis and antithesis) meet during dialogue. One of the two (or both) interlocutors, experiences something new and expands her level of knowledge (synthesis). What is the approach in research projects? Itis quite the same. A scientist (protagonist) starts with the current state of knowledge (thesis), finds a gap or a problem in it (antithesis), formulates a goal, overcomes a number of obstacles, gains a new state of knowledge through her research (moment of insight), © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 M. W. Angler, Journalistic Practice: Science Storytelling, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33857-2_2

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Story Elements

and thus returns to the world of research to share her findings. The status quo has changed. So Hart had good reason to tell me that science is full of stories. This scheme roughly corresponds to the heroic journey of the US-American literature professor Joseph Campbell. Campbell analysed numerous mythical stories and found recurring patterns and elements. He brought in Jungian psychology and published the book as “The Hero’s Journey.” In The Hero’s Journey, a protagonist has a problem that throws him out of his comfort zone. So he steps from the known world into an unknown one to solve it, meets obstacles and returns to his normal world changed and enriched by at least one insight. This can easily be applied to almost any research project. Almost 30 years later, in 1977, a young Californian graduate student read the book and wrote a film according to Campbell’s scheme, which was bound to become one of the most successful film franchises in Hollywood. The screenwriter’s name was George Lucas, his film “Star Wars”.

2.1

Characters

The term “hero’s journey” is a bit misleading, because one instinctively associates infallible characters with it. “Star Wars” protagonist Luke Skywalker is anything but perfect. He is moody and angry. This is part of the secret why we connect with characters: they have imperfections. Stories only work if their characters are threedimensional and round. This includes the following (adapted) characteristics: • Positive character traits: In science this can be expertise, persistence or simply the desire to make the world a little better. • Weakness: What makes the researcher human? It does not always have to be a flaw, it can just as well be the motivating, human factor that drives a researcher to his or her project. Unifying weaknesses such as perfectionism are understandable. But not serious ones like malice. • Problem: This usually refers to the overarching problem that led to the research project in the first place. • Goal: A character actively pursues a clear goal. If this is missing, he is not a worthy protagonist. • Obstacles: If the goal could be reached without resistance, there would be no story. • Conflict: Obstacles are conflicts, but usually external ones. Characters often have to deal with internal conflicts (there is a separate subchapter for this). No

2.1 Characters

9

matter which conflicts are involved. Without conflict there is no knowledge, and no change. • Status: In science, status is often synonymous with reputation. The representation of status symbols often says more about a character than long descriptions. The rule here is: “Show Don’t Tell,” meaning show, not tell. • Journey and change: In Campbell’s sense, the hero’s journey corresponds to the protagonist’s arc of action. In the course of his journey he goes through various changes. After each obstacle overcome, the protagonist grows beyond himself. Change is one of the key concepts in storytelling (and in life in general). Each scene should contain change and either bring the protagonist forward or at least expand his knowledge (or that of the audience). Films often begin with an introduction to the world of the protagonist, before the excitement that shakes his world. The calm before the storm, so to speak. When writing, this introduction is descriptively possible, but the character traits can be better shown by the “Show Don’t Tell” principle instead of describing them. An example: If you want to describe that the protagonist is impatient, you can either tell the readers (“Dr. Hoferman is impatient”) or show them (“Dr. Hoferman has a bright red head and he frantically presses the ’close lift’ button”). Describing elements is still necessary. Usually, two or three adjectives describing the protagonist’s outward appearance are sufficient. The rest is left to the readers’ imagination. In the first phase (exposition, more about this can be found in the chapter about structure), the aim is to show the status quo. To do this you have to create vivid images in the readers’ minds. Stylistically, this means using accurate and as precise adjectives as possible. Often concise verbs and nouns are sufficient for this. No one needs adverbs. Weaknesses can be identified in the same way (although I will use the term carefully here). Only by showing weaknesses a character appears well-rounded. Otherwise it appears to the audience as polished and therefore unauthentic. Everyone knows that there are no flawless people. And this is exactly where the self-portrayal of science clashes with reality. It hurts to admit mistakes. Even if someone does not want to admit weaknesses, you can recognize them by their actions and status symbols. For narrative journalist Tom Wolfe (author of “The New Journalism”), external status symbols such as clothes and cars are of great importance. This sounds almost unintentionally ironic, because Wolfe in particular liked to put himself in the limelight in bright, flashy suits with hat, walking stick and gaiters. The generation of literary journalists after him shifted their attention more towards social status symbols than material ones.

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Story Elements

Status symbols reveal the character traits and weaknesses of the characters. Acting teacher Susan Batson has developed a system that allows her protégés (including Nicole Kidman and Juliette Binoche) to delve deep inside themselves to explore the different layers of the characters they play. The results are extremely tangible, three-dimensional characters. Batson distinguishes between three levels of a person. The “public persona” is our image that we project of ourselves for our surroundings. This is how we want to be perceived by our surroundings. A person can change their public persona depending on their social environment. This corresponds roughly to Luigi Pirandello’s concept of the mask of the human being, with which we disguise our need and which does not have to match our inner self-image (for an example, see the subchapter “Conflict”). Susan Batson is aware of this concept, and therefore encourages her participants to search for the inner “need”, i.e. their basic human need. Even though Batson primarily means that the actors should explore their fictional characters with it, she admits that the exercise of dealing with it can be meaningful for everyone. Most people mask their needs out of fear. Who knows what need is behind scientific misconduct? It could be many phenomena, such as (non-pathological) narcissism. The desire for recognition, egomania, greed for money, or the need to consolidate or extend one’s own status. I am convinced that many of these phenomena can be explained by a deep basic need for love, the one great need that unites us all. If this need remains unfulfilled, it appears as a degenerate expression after superficial affection, for example in the form of workaholism or promiscuity. It is obvious that this cannot be helpful for the salvation of the soul. Batson here cites the third level of the characters, the “tragic flaw”, which reveals itself as self-destructive behavior. Batson takes herself as an example. Her need was the love of her mother. However, as an active civil rights lawyer, she could not fulfill her daughter’s need. Susan Batson found out that as a mothering drama teacher she could at least calm this need. This is her public persona. If that does not work, her tragic flaw will come out. Then Batson withdraws into herself, which hurts her even more, because then her need is not fulfilled. To find out these three components within herself is difficult enough. To sense them in other people, or even to demand that these people have dealt so deeply with their own being seems almost impossible. Nevertheless, the effort pays off; especially in science, scientific misconduct, sexual harassment and toxic laboratory culture can be explained with it, at least in retrospect, to a certain degree. These meta-scientific stories are anyway underrepresented in science journalism, although they are particularly suitable for stories because conflict and change are inherent in them, which we will deal with in the next two subchapters.

2.2 Change

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Change

I am always surprised when I meet people who are afraid of change. The other day I had a conversation with a biologist, at night and out in the winter’s cold. She was convinced that nothing in her life and in her social constellation would significantly change in the future. I was surprised. It sounded downright absurd to hear this from a biologist who I believed to buy into evolution and therefore change. At the end, we agreed to disagree. My point is that everything is in motion, at all times. You can actively change situations, or they change by themselves and outside of your own sphere of influence. In either case, all states and situations are temporary and fleeting. The biologist did not see it that way and did not believe that other factors (in the case of social constructs: people) could cause changes which amazed me. Because in science, it is actually the same. Research projects are not started in order to maintain the status quo, but to change it and to gain an expanded knowledge base. That is change. In principle, this world view coincides with the Buddhist concept of existence “anicca”, and it is also connected with the vanity concept “vanitas”, i.e. the rejection of the transitory (which in turn represents change). Change is the stuff of which life is made, and change is also the stuff we unconsciously need as an elementary component of stories. Good stories are therefore a single collection of changes. The easiest way to check this is to look at the protagonist at the beginning of a story - and at the end of the story. Has he gained insight, acquired new knowledge, is he returning to his status quo as a changed person? If so, it is a story. Stories about scientific misconduct are of course prime examples of this. Julia Merlot’s SPIEGEL story about the brain researcher Nikos Logothetis, for example, contains a lot of changes - although it is very short. Opponents of animal experiments had infiltrated Nikothetis’ laboratory in Germany, and published recordings of monkey experiments, which had brought him into disrepute. Nikothetis’ career began as a renowned brain researcher in Germany, who will now move to China to continue his career there, because he does not see his reputation restored even after the proceedings have been discontinued. He claims to suffer from sleep disorders and depression (Merlot, 2020). This is a lot of change in the life of the protagonist. The point here is: stories in which nothing changes during the course of the character’s life as well as the narrative arc are not stories. That also applies to music, for example.

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Story Elements

Rhythm and dynamic changes are essential, to make pieces of music attractive. Otherwise, we find them monotonous. It is not for nothing that rhythm changes are also reflected in writing (more on this in the last chapter).

2.3

Conflict

Conflict usually arises over characters. Fiction distinguishes between internal and external conflict. The two are usually strictly related. Internal conflict often manifests itself in external conflict and vice versa. We learn in moments of conflict. It is no different with characters in stories. If you confront a character that is in conflict, it becomes clear what they are made of. As a journalist, I do this regularly in interviews and in particularly personal articles such as portraits. Conflicts show the true face of the characters; this applies in fictional stories as much as in real life. But how do conflicts arise? Usually from the characters themselves. When two characters meet and each pursues a clear goal, and when these goals contradict each other, conflict is inevitable. If the goals are contradictory, i.e. if the goal of one character prevents the other from achieving its goal, conflict arises. An example: Last year, after numerous workshops, I had to cancel the last of my workshops because I was ill. My goal at that moment was clearly to maintain my health. I told one of the organizers and expected an understanding reaction; also because the person in question likes to present himself as a philanthropist. My expectations were disappointed, however, as he reacted in a snotty, insulting and arrogant manner. His goal was apparently to organize as many workshops as possible, and my cancellation put a damper on his plans. How exactly this is connected to his inner need (according to Batson) I can only guess. For me, the gain in knowledge was enormous, because I expected him to understand the Conditio Humana. Since then we have gone our separate ways, because this discrepancy does not fit into my value system. The whole incident is morally neither good nor bad, it is simply the normal state of human existence: different characters pursue different goals. If they fit together, coalitions of private and professional nature will emerge. If they do not, the worst that can happen is hostility. Conflicts are natural learning moments with a very high potential for insight and knowledge gain. Moreover, such discrepancies between expectation and counter-reaction are a sign of good scenes, as script teacher Robert McKee repeatedly emphasizes. There is already a lot of story power in my little case study: a

2.4 Dialogue

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beginning, a decisive moment (the illness as an arousing moment), characters with clear goals and a resulting conflict (the middle part of the story), gaining knowledge, and an end where the status quo (hold workshops for the respective organizer) has changed (no holding workshops for him). Conflict and change are therefore very close to each other.

2.4

Dialogue

If it is true that dialogue is the most basic form of story and an embodiment of the Hegelian dialectic, then it makes sense to consider dialogues as mini stories within stories. Journalistic forms of presentation like the interview show how popular even simple dialogues between journalist and interviewer are. Dialogues are a natural way to acquire knowledge. Just as with quotations, dialogues are about making a choice. Dull passages that do not expand the knowledge of the characters or the readers, or do not advance the story, have no place in the text either as a quotation or as a dialogue fragment. In my experience as a science journalist, it is often the case that scientists confirm what is already in the text. If this is the case, I, as the author, have to make a decision: Either you delete the descriptive passage and leave the dialogue in the text or vice versa. Repetitions (in the sense of repeated ideas, not words) bore the reader. The GEO editor Vivian Pasquet has included dialogue in her award-winning play “Impfen! (Oder etwa nicht?”/“Vaccinate! Or not?”) which appeared in GEO 3/2019). She did so in order to illustrate the conversation between parents and a pediatrician during a vaccination consultation. Dialogue bring texts to life. Dialogue is one of the cornerstones of scripts, stage plays and of course fiction. Science journalists like Mary Roach use them in their non-fiction books to convey complex issues. Dialogue is particularly good when it uses subtext, for example with the help of irony or sarcasm. Selecting dialogues from a recorded interview is not always easy. There is far too much material for that. But if you make a thesis beforehand, you will have a common thread that will help you to select texts more easily.

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Story Elements

Thesis

The thesis of a text is the answer to the question: What is the text about? The answer to this is all too often the subject of the text. The two words sound similar, and in English the likelihood of confusion is even greater because there the preferred expression is “theme”. A column in Spektrum der Wissenschaft illustrates this (Rahmstorf, 2019). The title of climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf’s text is “Do trees save the forest?” and leaves the answer open. When asked what Rahmstorf’s text is about, most people would answer with “climate change”. Or “reforestation”. But these are only topics. They contain no momentum. In most cases, the interviewer would shrug his shoulders, frown and ask the counter-question: “So what?” The reaction is valid. The thesis of a text should answer these questions: What is the author trying to tell me? What should I keep? What is the moral of the story? This is not always immediately obvious when writing. Some authors first formulate a thesis; some only find it while writing. Both approaches are legitimate. What is important is that you formulate a thesis at some point during the writing process. Journalist and writer Lajos Egri usually formulated theses as a process of change. For Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, he cited “Love conquers death” as the central idea (find many more examples in his work “Dramatic Writing”). Most of his examples can be formulated as “A leads to B”. According to Egri, an opinion must also stick to good theses. Is it a good thing if A leads to B? This should be heard. And it is precisely on these two points that literary thesis often clashes with science. Firstly, many scientists do not like to lean out of the window and take a clear standpoint, but rather see themselves as neutral disseminators of knowledge. But there is no such thing as neutrality, not even in science. Scientists are not trained to express opinions. What should readers do with seemingly balanced information, with pros and cons? Nothing. Secondly, theses imply causality, and many scientists are afraid of that. Only: in writing and communicating information, this narrative causality must be distinguished from scientific causality. A text without a thesis or central idea is in any case a text that should not exist (with the exception of creative writing exercises, such as freewriting). Texts without a central idea do not answer questions and meander to the point where they leave readers with more question marks than answers. If you can find a thesis right from the start, use it for selection. When editing a text, the thesis is a valuable tool for checking its consistency: anything that does not fit the thesis, is out. This may sound like coloring, but information selection takes place everywhere, even in scientific treatises. This is even necessary, and one of the thesis of this book: selection leads to better texts. Thesis are

2.6 Narrative Perspective

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especially clearly formulated in essays and columns. Climate researcher Rahmstorf already hints at his thesis in the opening credits (“Trees alone are not enough”), and he fully formulates it in the last paragraph of his column: Only a rapid end to fossil energy use will be able to stop CO2 emissions in the long term. Learning to formulate theses in this way also makes sense in science. Anyone who can get to the heart of the meaning of their research in a short time will write better research proposals, better scientific articles and convincing presentations. Once the thesis has been formulated, a structure with the most important key points can be derived relatively easily.

2.6

Narrative Perspective

Do not worry, this will not be a narratological treatise on narrative perspectives. The perspective from which a story is told is crucial to how much the audience is drawn into the story, and how much they identify with the protagonist. That is why I want to address them briefly here. What science suffers from is the academic writing style. Scientific manuscripts are usually about giving the impression that nobody was really the culprit. Scientists are urged to transform a clear “I” into “we”; even if it is known who did something, the passive is still the expression of choice in science. It is not for nothing that the passive is also called the “suffering form”. Science is not doing itself any favours by this. It violates the clarity rule of good writing and expresses itself unnecessarily incomprehensibly. How well readers understand a story also depends very much on the perspective, that you are telling them about. In the authorial narrative perspective, the narrator knows everything and hovers like a helicopter over the events and characters without them having to know about it. The personal narrator has a less god-like status. He knows only what he can experience from the perspective of one (rarely: several) characters. His level of knowledge is therefore limited. He describes characters, like the authorial narrator, mostly from the third person. Then there are stories from the first-person perspective, which build up the strongest identification of the reader with the narrator. Finally, a neutral narrator has the most distance to the story and characters. He does not comment, and he does not judge. You should therefore make a choice for each story and (at least at the beginning) stick to it. In doing so, an important storytelling principle becomes visible: choice. Sebastian Junger, for example, chooses the first-person perspective for his text on post-traumatic

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stress disorder, and thus brings the reader very close to his story. Structure is just as important. Here you have to make a selection just as early on and be careful to link all the facts and events in the right order so that the text “flows” logically.

3

Structure

Although structure is also a story element, it is so complex that it deserves its own chapter. Stories are not built up randomly. Many good writers first outline their stories and give them structure before they start writing. Among them is the US bestselling author James Patterson. A structure is not yet a story, but it is a blueprint. In his work “Poetics” Aristotle divided sections of stories into beginning, middle and end. This sounds reasonable, but it is not very helpful if you want to build a story from scratch. Aristotle’s three parts, by the way, were taken from the script teacher Syd Field and put into the three acts of script writing. And it is precisely in screenwriting that paradigms merge: for Tom Wolfe, the narrative journalist with the status symbols, scenes were one of the essential building blocks of literary journalism. Of course, it’s the same in Hollywood. Structure is the selection and linking of scenes (I have called scenes up to this point events) into a narrative. Not all elements have to be causally linked. This is illustrated by the famous example of the author E.M. Forster. • “The king dies, and then the queen dies” is what he calls a “story”, a sequence of events without the necessary causal connection. • “The king dies, and then the queen dies of grief” gives the story a causal connection. For Forster, it becomes a “plot”. In reality, events happen one after the other. As the storyteller, however, you determine the order in which you give the audience information - and which information you withhold from them in the first place. Among other things, this builds up tension. And, as we all know, tension leads to empathy with the characters, as neuro-economist Paul Zak noted. The St. Petersburg folklorist Vladimir Propp, like Joseph Campbell, examined folk tales and mythical stories for common, recurring © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 M. W. Angler, Journalistic Practice: Science Storytelling, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33857-2_3

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Structure

patterns and created a list of 31 functions. But Propp also recognized a distinction in the chain of events that is actually obvious, but which is rarely consciously recalled. The “fable” is the actual sequence of events, as it happens in real life. The “subject”, on the other hand, is the arbitrary arrangement of events as the author wants to show them to his audience. The most prominent example of this is the film “Memento”, in which the subject is arranged in such a way that the events take place chronologically almost exactly the opposite way to the actual course of events (fable). As early as 1863, i.e. before Propp and Campbell, the dramaturge Gustav Freytag published the blueprint of a structure in five steps. Freytag drew the structure of drama as a pyramid; the following list reflects this order (I only comment on the first act, the other four are de facto self-explanatory). • Exposition: Introduction of the figures. You know this moment in films. Elegantly done, exposure happens “en passant” without the audience noticing. Which works great: Confront the characters with conflicts and show how they react. The Netflix series “Stranger Things” thus introduces the four most important characters in the first episode of the first season. Problems are only hinted at in this act. • Rising action with exciting moment • Climax and peripetousness • Falling action with retarding moment • Catastrophe Meanwhile, Jack Hart is on the phone again, telling me over a crackling landline from Oregon that he has just walked in the door from a second dog walk in a snowstorm, and is pouring himself a bourbon before telling me more about arcs of tension. Hart plots the arc of tension on a coordinate system like a normal distribution shifted to the right. On it he plots the events, the so-called “turning points”. Turning points change the course and direction of history, such as the peripetousness in Freytag’s Pyramid. They surprise the audience because they are unpredictable. Basically, Hart tells his stories chronologically, but often uses a certain narrative technique to draw the reader into the story right at the beginning. Hart does not start the story at the actual beginning, but at the height of tension (crisis). He calls this an “in medias res” opening. Then he rolls up the events by means of flashbacks, i.e. jumps back to the beginning and continues telling the story chronologically until it reaches the crisis. So from the beginning, the reader has no choice but to read on to find out how the moment when everything is on the line ends.

3.1 Common Structures

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Common Structures

To limit the excursion into structure theory at this point: The film industry uses rigid structures that are basically knitted according to the same principle. There is a first act with exposure, an arousing moment that sets the action in motion, a problem that imposes a goal on the protagonist that he has not had before, a second act in which the protagonist enters a new world (in Campbell’s sense) and leaves the familiar one. There he encounters obstacles and trials that give him new knowledge, is faced with a crisis at the end of the second act, and has to make a decision there: Will he turn back and give up, or does he go up against the antagonist? Then follows a moment of perceived defeat, from which he recovers by reflecting on a hidden talent or acquired knowledge, and thus defeats the opponent (climax). Afterwards he returns to the known world. This at least roughly describes the classical comedy. In tragedy, success and misfortune of the protagonist are twisted accordingly: the triumph over the adversary turns into defeat. Can science be cast into a narrative structure? Sure. But not by force. It is not about making up story lines where there are not any. It is also not about finding all the elements and building a complete narrative. Especially in science, it is often enough to illustrate complex facts and dry material using a human example, so that readers will forgive a long digression into scientific explanations. There are two tried and tested methods for this: • The journal approach: Journal texts often start with a “human touch”. Just like in Jack Hart’s narrative scheme, this is a moment of tension, which is at the same time descriptive enough to create a scene in front of the reader’s inner eye and thereby build up tension. The author introduces the protagonist and his problem. The reader becomes aware of what is at stake. Such tangible passages then alternate with comparatively abstract passages in which the science behind them is illuminated. These are the explanatory passages that easily come across as dry by themselves. The first such transition from tangible to abstract can usually be recognized by progressions like “This shows… “…or “How great the scale is…” So there is a transition to a paragraph that briefly explains to the reader why the underlying problem is important and why it is relevant now (this paragraph is called “Nut Graph”). Winfried Göpfert calls this technique “AB technique” (“A” stands for “General” (“Allgemein“) and “B” for “Special” (“Besonders“)). USAmerican science authors like Emily Sohn also call this technique “layer cake”. The change from the concrete to the general is called the narrative technique

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Structure

“zooming”. Such texts usually offer the resolution to the initial problem only in the last passage, in order to encourage the reader to hold out until the end. If an almost complete list of story elements can be found, this approach is particularly useful. • The bookend approach: The first and last passages are in principle structured like journal texts. In contrast, there is only one scene that illuminates a larger problem. The transition to the “Nut Graph” is also present here, but the authors remain in explanatory mode for the rest of the story. If the beginning is structured correctly, i.e. if a problem is only touched on but not completely solved, the readers will be able to go through longer explanatory passages even with this technique in order to reach the resolution at the end. The mode of operation is the same as with a “cliffhanger”. However, if the resolution does not follow in the end, the text remains unsatisfactory. Every story needs an ending, no matter if it ends well or badly for the protagonist. How does all this fit into Campbell’s structure? Just like Olson (2015), PhD student Sara ElShafie argues that scientific publications already contain all the necessary story elements, but in a different order than Campbell’s story structure, for example. She compares the IMRAD structures of science with Freytag’s Pyramid (ElShafie, 2018) as follows: • • • • •

Introduction → Exposure Methodology → Rising action Results → Highlight Analysis → Falling action Discussion and conclusions → Denouement

These elements are all present, but in the wrong order, i.e. not as they actually took place (“Fabula”). ElShafie defines the following elements, which are a mixture of story elements and structure, as essential. Protagonist (with understandable weaknesses such as bias), arousing element, obstacle (as a prerequisite for change), risk (what is at stake if the protagonist misses his target? In science these are often career and status), and thesis (the audience should not have to ask: So what?).

3.2 Opinion Pieces

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Opinion Pieces

One structure that works well for both academic writing and storytelling is the structure of columns and essays. It works well because it follows one of the minimal forms of storytelling: Problem and Solution. The structure is simple and contains all the important story elements. Columns often start with a topical headline. The Guardian, for example, demands that column proposals are always linked to current events. Then the author puts forward a thesis. This can be formulated with pleasure in all clarity. However, this is a frequent failure in science, because not all researchers like to lean out of the window and take a clear position. Linguistics professor Nick Enfield has done this in the op-ed column “Comment is Free” for the Guardian, and has put forward a clear thesis: Science must tell stories (Enfield, 2018). The introduction is a dispute between two scientists about whether storytelling is permissible in science or not. I interviewed both of them for my book “Science Journalism” (Angler, 2017): However, some things turned out to be a misunderstanding. The current reference represents the legitimation of the treatise for the readers. The second part, the thesis, represents the author’s point of view. The thesis must now be substantiated in concrete terms, otherwise the text remains just an empty assertion without substance. The main part of the column thus contains a logical sequence of arguments supporting the main thesis. You must in turn support each of these arguments with scientific literature or with valid thought experiments in such a way that they attain general validity. Enfield, for example, puts forward sub-theses, such as that humans are biologically wired in such a way that they cannot think completely objectively and emotionlessly. He states this rather superficially at this point (without references; I would have quoted Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence” here). But Enfield succeeds in making a very coherent and elegant transition when he writes that even seemingly objective scientists still have an emotional audience. So there would be no other choice than to use a Judo technique. Instead of fighting “cognitive bias”, researchers should use story techniques, interpret facts and give them meaning, because storytelling means nothing else. The nice thing about stories is when, like Nick Enfield, you can follow the author’s train of thought. By the way, he has shown another important element of opinion-based texts: The author must provide a solution to the problem at the end of the story. This does not always have to be a concretely implementable solution. In some cases, a thought game or a hypothetical solution is sufficient. Under no circumstances should a good story end with a repetition or summary, which is unfortunately too often the case.

4

The Rule of Three

At the cost that this sounds far-fetched and anti-scientific: I have to insert a small intermezzo about the number three. Right here and now. It plays a special role in storytelling. The scientifically unproven rule of three in writing says that we are particularly receptive to information that we experience in groups of three. This applies to adjectives such as example sentences. The rule has its origins in Aristotle and its tripartite structure in “poetics”. Hegel’s dialectic also consists of three parts (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis). Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is divided into three parts (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise), each of which is divided into 33 books. Suzanne Collins “Hunger Games” is a book trilogy with nine chapters each. Many jokes and fables consist of three parts (the third usually forms the punch line or illustrates the thesis of the tale), for example in the fable “The Three Little Pigs”. The thesis here is: Laziness leads to death. Contemporary advertising legends use the rule of three, to distribute as much liable information as possible. This is why adjectives such as “thinner, lighter, faster” are often used in product presentations in groups of three. When Steve Jobs presented the first iPhone in 2007, he rhetorically packaged it as a triptych, which he showed in succession as a telephone, iPod, and Internet navigator. Then he makes it clear: The new iPhone is the trinity of all three devices. Aristotle analyzed the Greek tragedy in his work “Poetics” and found three important moments: Peripeteia is a sudden change in action— either from good to bad or vice versa. It is often the climax of the story, the point at which it becomes clear whether the protagonist can solve the dramatic problem or not. This is a moment that Freytag also found later and placed in Act 3 of the period drama. Aristotle The second element of tragedy is anagnorisis, i.e. the transformation of ignorance into knowledge, or the recognition of persons. This includes Oedipus’ realization that he killed his father © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 M. W. Angler, Journalistic Practice: Science Storytelling, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33857-2_4

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and slept with his mother (Angler, 2020a). The third element is pathos, i.e. severe suffering, as happens to Oedipus or the Trojan women in Euridipes (Rees, 1972). Triplets are also often found on the front pages of magazines and books. ZEIT Wissen titled “Should I interfere? Private life, profession, society: … “ on the cover of the July–August 2017 issue. But how does the rule of three fit in science? Pretty well: Scientists put forward a thesis (“an effect exists”), but do not try to prove it. Instead, they put forward the corresponding counter-hypothesis (null hypothesis, “no effect is present”) and try to prove it. If the null hypothesis cannot be proven, the thesis is correct. The current state of knowledge and the now filled knowledge gap merge into a new status quo, and thus form the synthesis. In the following chapters on structural techniques from the entertainment industry you will find examples based on the same figure.

5

Story Formulas from TV

It was the mid-nineties. Marine biologist Randy Olson was a year younger than I am now, and he had already achieved all the status symbols that an academic could wish for: He received a PhD in biology from Ivy League University Harvard in 1984, and eight years later he was appointed full professor at the University of New Hampshire. This made him tenured and in principle he could do whatever he wanted to (as long as it was legal). But what did Olson do? He quit his job and moved to California. There he went back to school, and learnt to write scripts. That did not go very well at the beginning, and he even got thrown out of a lecture and off campus. He made documentaries about climate change and had some success with them. Olson wrote books about how scientists were bad communicators of knowledge (“Don’t Be Such a Scientist”), for which he sometimes received fierce criticism. But Olson always emphasized that scientific papers already contain all the story elements anyway, just packed in boring writing and stuck in rigid structures. In the course of time, Olson had come to a realization that stems from the cartoon series “South Park”, of all places. Its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have developed a simple formula for tedious stories: Replace all occurrences of “and” with “but” and “therefore” Their argument is that “and-and-and” stories lack narrative causality. All actions of a story must have a cause and an effect. Otherwise, they are simply a series loose connections. Parker and Stone must know. They produce each episode of the successful series within six days, from idea generation to broadcast. If they did not have a system for that, it would not be possible. This causality can already be found in Lajo Egri’s formula for finding theses. Olson noticed it, and has used it for storytelling and reformulated it. He calls the formula “ABT” (English for “and-but-therefore”).

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 M. W. Angler, Journalistic Practice: Science Storytelling, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33857-2_5

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The ABT formula is divided into three parts and reflects the Hegelian dialectic - and a short form of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey at the same time. When formulated, it looks like this (Olson, 2015). _________AND_________ _________THEREFORE _________

The two points before and after the “and” first show the status quo of a story. In science this is usually the current state of knowledge. Then follows a contradiction, introduced by the “but”. In dramas, this is the “exciting moment” (see Freytag) that starts a journey. In principle, this part answers the “why” of a research project (and thus brings the already mentioned order into the story). The part that follows after the “therefore” additionally brings causality for the following action into the chain of events. The audience inevitably perceives the end of a story because of it. The climax (peripeteia, climax) is therefore often called the “obligatory scene”. At the beginning of a story, the exciting moment builds up the tension and poses the dramatic question in the audience’s mind. This question must be answered at the end of the story, otherwise it is unsatisfactory and incomplete for the audience. The whole sequence seems intrinsically convincing through this causal concatenation. This, by the way, is one of the arguments that makes scientists sceptical about storytelling techniques. This is a mistake. First, because complete neutrality and truth do not exist, not even in science. At least not time-independent. Secondly, science thus omits one of the oldest mechanisms for conveying information. People learn through stories. This has always been the case. The stories about storytelling around the campfire seem to be at least partly true: As anthropologist Polly Wiessner (2014) noted in a study, the Ju/’Hoan Bushmen in South Africa spent 81% of their time around the campfire sharing stories. In retrospect, and with the knowledge we have today about the effects of stories, this makes perfect sense. If emotions are involved, we remember information better. If the structure is narratively conclusive (i.e. causal), it is convincing. Thousands of years ago such stories were necessary to ensure the survival of all of us. Not that today we have to listen to stories about fleeing from lions. But resourceful people are using storytelling techniques to spread false information. That is why science must use the same storytelling techniques to spread correct information—and do so in a way that the audience remembers the information. The deficit model of science communication, which relies on the audience having gaps in knowledge that one generously intends to fill, is not only outdated and false,

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but also arrogant. This way of communicating is one of the reasons why the general public lacks trust and why the ivory tower cliché of science persists. It is also one of the reasons why science is often perceived as boring. Olson has recognized this, and has therefore made use of entertainment techniques. In his story workshops for scientists, he has the participants describe pictures. Without the ABT method, they usually take more than twice as long. And that is exactly the point: anyone who wants to outline a story can do so in one sentence, if necessary simply with the thesis, as described according to Lajos Egri. “A leads to B”. Or: “A implies B”. The ABT method leads to one or two sentences, which can just as easily tell a whole story in a few seconds. In Hollywood this is sorely needed, because producers do not take the time for aspiring screenwriters. In science journalism it is no different. When I interviewed a US editor in 2015 about pitching stories, he told me: “If you send me an email, you will get exactly one minute of my time. If the first, or at the latest second sentence, does not tell me a story, I will delete your message”. As a scientist, story skills in all areas of life. Whether you want to convince donors, write research proposals (which is basically the same thing), get a promotion, position your paper well and simplify its review: storytelling techniques are universally applicable. Just like the ABT method. Marine biologist Tullio Rossi applies Olson’s technique to scientific presentations, distinguishing between two types: First, the “and-and-and” presentation is the standard variation that scientists traditionally use. “In our research project we did this, then that, and then something else”. This kind of presentation is deadly boring and will scare the audience away in no time. But if you give structure to the same presentation and then, secondly, come to the causally connected ABT form, explaining why you tackled the research project and what the logical consequence of that is, then you give your presentation something that most explanations in the world do not have: meaning. By the way, in my storytelling and science blogging workshops I recommend that participants (science communicators and scientists) apply the same pattern in all scientific fields. They can use the ABT technique very well in the abstracts of their scientific papers. This also increases the likelihood that their work will be taken up by journalists. Or that they quote other scientists. As long as the scientific quality measure is unfortunately still quantitative (h-index and impact factor are just two examples), this is at least an advantage in the world of science. If funders are the addressees, it is important that research proposals are written in such a way that they are remembered. Even if reasonably objective review mechanisms are used:

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Ultimately, it is people who decide who wins an application. Good stories have a clear advantage. I can remember that for years I hardly won any calls for scholarships, although I had a solid portfolio and all the good arguments for it. That changed when I wrote the letters of motivation according to the ABT technique. In 2019 alone, I won more scholarships than I could take advantage of. The technique works. In fact, Abraham Lincoln had already used it in his famous Gettysburg Address long before anyone had formulated it. Martin Luther King used it. In science, Crick and Watson used the ABT technique in their famous 1953 research paper on the DNA double helix, according to Olson in his storytelling book “Houston: We Have a Narrative”. There they describe in principle the status quo (the current state of DNA representation), BUT this standard does not work, therefore they introduce a new explanation and representation. As so often, in storytelling it is difficult to find an author of a certain technique. Olson has found the former director of the Sundance Festival, Frank Daniel, as the possible originator of the ABT technique before Parker and Stone. Regardless of their origin, Olson still distinguishes a few variations of the ABT. • iABT: A long sentence containing all the necessary information (hence the “i”) to convey a history of knowledge in its entirety. Olson recommends not to use this variant in public performances. • cABT: A variant of the ABT technique that focuses more on the tone of the conversation (“conversational”, therefore as “c”) than on the content. Olson recommends describing research in this way: At first we looked at a problem in a certain way, but because X happened, we see it differently now. This variant makes research comprehensible even for absolute laymen. But it is important to first understand who the target group is in order to select suitable examples. • kABT: This variant merges the styles of iABT (pure information) and cABT (pure story) and ideally eliminates the deficits of each method. The iABT is far too jargon-heavy, and the cABT is usually too simple to convey information at all. All ABT variants are a further illustration of the rule of three and the Hegelian dialect (which, by the way, is not by Hegel himself, but by Johann Gottlieb Fichte). Indeed, all three ABT variants are a perfect example of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. And something else can be formulated from this. If hard, objective science is the thesis, then storytelling is the antithesis to it (especially because scientists often resist storytelling techniques). If this is true, then the synthesis of the two must be.

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Science and storytelling come together to convey good, real, true stories. Stories in which the audience simultaneously takes in information without consciously perceiving this information intake. In principle, this works like any kind of Hollywood storytelling. Studies complain about dwindling attention spans, but how often do people get up from the cinema or put away a good book on the beach? It practically never happens at all, because the narrative chain does not give the audience a chance to escape from the story. To discover this narrative power in a history of science, Olson recommends another template, the Dobzhansky formula. It looks like this (Olson, 2015): "Nothing ______makes sense unless you understand______”

Stories are about change. Olson argues that in order to understand a scientific discipline, one must first understand its history of change. He has compiled several examples of scientists for this purpose. One of them is like this: nothing in biology makes sense unless you understand evolution. Another example: nothing in geology makes sense unless you understand plate tectonics. The Dobzhansky formula helps to summarize the quintessence of a story in one word. Olson named and adapted the formula after the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. It could not be more condensed. If you want to summarise the question “What is the story about?” in one word, and do not want to use the often wrongly used topic or scientific discipline (“climate change” or “biology”), then the Dobzahnsky formula is exactly right because it implies change. The fact that Olson’s techniques are in demand is shown by the fact that he offers them as training to scientific institutions. The US National Park Service, for example, uses the ABT formula to explain to the public why it is tackling certain projects. At the same time, such formulas are a valuable tool for making the work of a research institution transparent. Transparency creates trust, and that is something that science sorely needs, despite its popularity, or maybe because of it. This would also include the disclosure of weaknesses, but that is not in keeping with the scientific spirit of the times. There are many meaningful science projects, and sponsors such as the EU Commission require a certain amount of public relations work. Twitter channels are being set up, websites are being built and Facebook pages are being created. But they do not provide the tools to build good stories. That is why most of these “outreach” initiatives simply bob along as unidirectional information. This is unfortunate, because many research projects have a clear narrative thread by nature. Not to cast this thread into narratives using one of the formulas is wasted potential. That is

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why storytelling techniques like those of Randy Olson are an integral part of my workshops. If you like animated films, the next chapter will interest you.

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Story Formulas from Cinema and Theatre

Back to Steve Jobs. After being dropped from his company, Apple, in the mid1980s, he bought Pixar in 1986. In the same year, the animation studio produced his first two-minute short film, “The Little Lamp”. The film won an award and was even nominated for an Oscar. The successful series continued. Today, Pixar is known for producing lavish films, and the budgets for these run well into the triple-digit million US dollar range. Productions such as “Wall-E”, “Cars”, and “Toy Story” easily flush the costs back into the studio coffers with up to half a billion in profits. Why does practically every Pixar film become a success? Even if it sounds very uncreative: formulas. Almost all successful Hollywood productions adhere to story formulas, which have been developed and formulated by screenwriters over time. What paradigm an author follows is irrelevant. They are always structural formulas that function as rough blueprints. Scriptwriting teacher, Blake Snyder, shows in his book “Save the Cat” a very formulaic scheme that shows the 15 most incisive events of a film. Snyder goes so far as to assign a fixed page in the script to each of these events, at which, for example, the exciting moment must pass. This has earned him much criticism from film critics. The accusation: all Hollywood films are gradually becoming the same. Screenwriter Christopher Vogler, adapted Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to the Hollywood machinery and published it in his work “The Writer’s Journey”. Vogler works as a story developer for major Hollywood studios, currently for 20th Century Fox. Vogler’s Hero’s Journey has twelve steps, one for the story itself and one for character development. What does all this have to do with science stories? A lot. Ultimately, all formulas are a sequence of events that must happen in a story so that the audience unconsciously perceives it as a satisfying story. Whether it is 12, 15, or 22 (as with script teacher John Truby) does not matter in principle. The steps

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are named differently and yet always mean the same thing. Pixar has discovered a structural skeleton for himself that is simple, understandable and highly effective. The “Story Spine” is an effective structural template, after which the studio roughly builds up its stories before the storytellers write them down. It consists of only eight steps and begins like a fairy tale (Adams, 1991): Once upon a time... __________________ Every day __________________ Until one day. __________________ Therefore __________________ Therefore __________________ Therefore __________________ Until finally __________________ And since that time. __________________

But this basic structure does not come from Pixar, even if it can often be read like this on the Internet. Kenn Adams, a theatre director, author and acting teacher, was the first to find this scaffolding (and named it together with a friend of his). So, the Story Spine was written by him. Adams teaches improvisational theatre and uses this technique to have another participant plan the story at each step. The result is a rough outline that has no subtleties at all, but clearly defines the course of the story. If you are still wondering now what theatre has to do with science, here comes the resolution. In the German-speaking world, in fact, still little. In the USA, on the other hand, there are some initiatives that use this technique to describe scientific “heroic journeys”. The whole thing works. Californian PhD student Sara ElShafie works with Pixar artists to apply their narrative techniques (including the Story Spine) to science. Her argument is that these narrative techniques help, among other things, to convey why scientists have come to their field of research (ElShafie, 2018). She is right. Science thus moves away from hypocritical objectivity and neutrality and instead gives itself an authentic face, with all the rough edges. The story of the scientists thus becomes personal and often already contains the three levels of characters according to Batson, the Public Persona, the Need and the Tragic Flaw. Just as ElShafie formulates her own career, the most important elements of the story become visible: it contains structure in the sense of logically connected turning points (the most important events; in other words, those that catapult the story in a new direction). The story contains a protagonist (ElShafie) with all the uncertainties (which can be

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seen as comprehensible weaknesses without value), decisions (which she made at the turning points; this fulfils the criterion that protagonists must act actively) and her inner need, the need. ElShafie is not alone in applying this technique. The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science teaches scientists exactly this technique in story workshops. The “Story Collider” initiative also brings scientists to the stage. I talked to creative director Erin Barker last year, and she told me that she uses Adams’ Story Spine to coach scientists. They then appear, prepared as they are, in different places in the USA, usually as a duo, and they tell their science like in a cabaret, with humour, irony and tangible descriptions. Barker has also used the scheme herself to vividly tell the story of two diseases of her vagina in one episode. The Story Spine reflects the Hegelian dialectic. Science (dry, unemotional) and human (comprehensible, emotional) paired result in informative entertainment as a synthesis. That is why I also use the Story Spine in my Science Storytelling workshops for scientists. I encourage researchers in the workshops to rewrite their CVs according to Story Spine, to include only the most important “awakening moments” and to give their life (and research) history motivation. The work is hard, because most people find it difficult to choose incisive events. Afterwards they present their stories. At this moment I observe the other participants from the corners of my eyes: are they looking at their smartphones, at their laptops? Are they sinking into thoughts? In the vast majority of cases this does not happen. On the contrary: I see captivated spectators who can easily retell the story afterwards. So the benefit of such exercises is great, because what scientists learn in the process is in principle again a triumvirate: • Select events • Arrange events • Describe events Selecting events is really a hard nut to crack. We are wired in such a way that we perceive practically everything we do as important. Housekeeping (including and especially “mental housekeeping) is therefore difficult for most people. Nevertheless, it is important because otherwise they quickly get out of hand and meander in directions that only marginally support or demonstrate the thesis. It helps if you follow a few simple story guidelines: 1. Does an event advance history? 2. Does an event reveal new information for the audience or characters? 3. Does the event fit the thesis?

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4. Is anything active happening in the event at all? If you cannot answer yes to at least one of the questions, the event has no place in history. At the latest at this point you will groan if you, dear reader, are a scientist. Of course this is selective, of course it distorts the truth. But also no more than scientific work itself already does. Because even there the space for explanations is limited. Researchers must make a selection of the information they want to convey. This does not necessarily depend on the truth content, nor on the claim to completeness, but rather on the rigid IMRAD structure (“Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion”, Olson, 2015) and the expectations of the publishing houses. Selection is necessary in all areas of life. No matter what we do, we always take a trade-off. We trade something for something else. I am writing these lines here on a Saturday night. I trade time with friends for that. To have that time, I traded time with my relationship, a scientist I dumped a week ago. If you are reading these lines, there is something else you are not doing. Everything is a trade-off! Always. The writing itself is the same. More than 95% of all research material ends up in the bin and, although interesting, does not make it into the story. It still makes sense because it helps me find the thesis and formulate it precisely. Strictly speaking, storytelling can be traced back to a single, simple technique. I never tire of repeating it in my workshops: 

"Select & Reject".

Selection and rejection (all that which does not strictly fit the story) is a necessary principle that allows us as storytellers to focus the necessary attention on a matter. This is the kind of attention that the psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman calls “top-down wiring”, that is, the controlled steering of attention that we can control from the neocortex. We decide. In contrast, the paleo- and archicortex also exists: if, for example, fear determines our attention, we can do little consciously about it (Goleman, 2013). Screenwriters think and write in scenes (which I would like to equate here with events, even if scenes do not necessarily depict complete events. Scenes reflect the overall structure of a story in their structure: Each scene has a protagonist who pursues a scene goal and acts actively for it. Each scene has a beginning, a middle part and an end (even if not all three are always clearly visible). Scriptwriter Robert McKee writes in his textbook “Story” that in scenes there must always be a gap

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between the expected goal of the protagonist’s action and the actual reaction of the world to his action. Change is as essential for entire stories as it is for scenes. At the end of a scene nothing should be like at the beginning. Because it all sounds very abstract or far-fetched, here is a practical example: In an article for Vanity Fair 2015, journalist Sebastian Junger wrote about his own experience with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In his text there is a scene in which he shows his readers how he first came into contact with PTSD. The choice of scene alone is important. It was an aha-experience for the author, a decisive moment that led to the story in the first place. Junger begins his story with his traumatic experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan. The second and third paragraphs then describe the actual scene. Junger begins the scene with how he had swallowed and thus underestimated his experiences until that day. This is a form of “foreshadowing” (epic foreshadowing), a technique that already gives the reader an inkling that something negative is about to follow. Junger then describes how he suffers a panic attack in a New York subway station. He presses himself against a column, can no longer move, there are far too many people around him. It is Junger’s internal conflict that now manifests itself externally. This is storytelling to perfection. It is also the turning point of the scene, its exciting moment when the tension suddenly shoots up. As a reader you ask yourself the question: How does the panic attack end? Will Junger still make it home? Junger dissolves the scene. No, he does not manage to take the train. Instead he runs back (Junger, 2015). This scene has a beginning (Junger goes to the subway station), a conflict-driven middle part (the panic attack with all its details), and an end (Junger has to walk home). The scene also shows the change Junger goes through during the scene. He enters the subway station as a “normal” person and comes out as a PTSD-sick person. Junger achieves a crucial insight at the climax of the scene (the climax or peripetia): he instinctively connects the anxiety attack with his time in Afghanistan. The gap between the protagonist’s expectations as described by McKee is clearly visible. Junger actually only wants to take the subway, an everyday event. But that doesn’t happen, and he has to act. Junger’s scene therefore meets all the requirements of a good script scene.

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Style

If you stick to one principle, chances are that your story will be well received: it should be understood by the audience. It is never about presenting yourself as an author as cleverly as possible. Good stories can be recognized not least by the style of their author. This is understandably different for each author. Alice Munro writes differently than Stephen King. But there are some universal ground rules that you cannot go wrong with. One of them is a style trio from journalism, the “ABC". It stands for: • Accuracy: The more precisely you use language, the fewer misunderstandings there are. But this principle is also about semantic correctness. The facts must be correct. • Brevity: If there is a short word in your native language, use that and no artificially inflated jargon or foreign words. This is what the Guardian’s science editor Tim Radford taught me. • Clarity: Fewer misunderstandings and ambivalences are also the goal with this principle. The audience should develop clear images before their inner eye. I have included the rest of the style rules as a list, so you can easily refer to them again and again. • Jargon: Jargon has no place in any text, except in scientific papers. If you do need to use jargon, then use the following scheme: introduce the term first, explain it simply (!), and then continue using it in the rest of the text. You can use metaphors, for example. • Metaphors: Developing good metaphors is hard work, but it pays off. Try this: Think about the season, the animal or the feeling your scientific discipline

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is close to. In my workshops, scientists from all kinds of disciplines meet. Another thing that helps to tinker with metaphors is sensory language. Sensory language: Words that inevitably make the audience think of colours, shapes, smells, feelings and sounds usually work wonderfully as a common denominator of understanding. These include in particular onomatopoeic verbs such as hiss, flutter or clack. Adverbs: Does not need anybody. Especially not in direct speech, where authors like to use adverbs to describe exactly how the speaker says something (without wanting to point the finger, but Dan Brown almost always does). Expressive verbs and nouns do the job, without any adverbial devilry. An exception are transitions, where adverbs can build up great references to the previous logical unit (in the sense of the ABT formula: “therefore”). Rhetorical stylistic devices: Alliterations that begin with the same initial letter remain in the audience’s memory for a long time. They are particularly effective when combined with the rule of three. Science journalist Carl Zimmer, for example, has done this in his new book. The title is: “She has her mother’s laugh: the powers, perversions, and potential of heredity”. Zooming: Zooming is a literary technique that is often used in journal texts and documentation about science. The English professor Samuel Ichye Hayakawa has developed the Heads of Abstraction for it. It reflects how concrete or abstract the text is at the moment. At the top of the ladder is the highest level of abstraction. This is where you look at the concept or basic problem of a text. As described in the structure chapter, magazine texts often start with a very concrete, tangible part. This is located at the very bottom of the abstraction ladder. The transition to the underlying problem, the overarching theme of the text (e.g. forest fires) is located much higher and often deals with numbers, statistics, implications and the “big picture”. The trick is to alternate between the two modes - following the layer cake technique. Irony: Irony is unfortunately not everyone’s cup of tea, as I have to painfully point out again and again. Nevertheless, it is a simple and wonderful stylistic device which, taken literally, says the opposite of what the author wants to say. But apart from that there is also the dramatic irony, which means something completely different. If the audience knows something that one of the characters is not yet familiar with, then they share this knowledge with the author. The two become accomplices. One example is the feeling in horror movies, that comes up when the audience knows that a murderer is lurking behind the door, but the protagonist does not know it and runs blindly into his arms. This is dramatic irony.

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• Writing scenically: Writing scenically means writing descriptively. Depending on the story, you may want to describe the environment first (if it is relevant to the course of the story; in a story about pollution, a description of the unspoiled environment would enhance the empathy effect in the audience. • Rhythm: Sentence level: Long sentences should alternate with short ones. The median of good sentence lengths is about 17 words, but that depends of course on how often jargon and foreign words are used. Long sentences increase the reading flow and speed, but at the same time reduce the amount of information absorbed. Short sentences slow down the reader and therefore function as a stylistic device to emphasize an idea. Which brings us to the next style tip. • Ideas and logical units: Sentences and paragraphs form logical units of thought. Each sentence should be content to contain an idea. Otherwise, sentences quickly become too nested, and readers do not keep a multitude of ideas anyway. The same applies roughly to paragraphs. They are also logical units that should not represent more than one idea. The following applies: To allow good reconciliations, the first sentence of a paragraph should refer to the previous one. This is not witchcraft: Pronouns work well for this. The last sentence of a paragraph should already be written with the intention of making a transition possible. Finally, the middle section contains the actual idea, which, as in columns and essays, is divided into argument and argumentation. So good paragraphs are (surprise) divided into three parts. • Repetitions: The scene rule applies here. Every piece of information that the reader receives needs a raison d’être, i.e. it must provide new information. Repetitions of concepts and ideas fly out without exception. Unfortunately, this principle is often twisted into the opposite when it comes to words: words may and should even be called the same again. However, many authors paraphrase the same person or object with a new term every time they mention it. This is more harmful than useful, because clarity and precision are usually lost. An example: If I first refer to Charlie as a chimpanzee, then as an ape, then as a monkey and finally as a mammal, I dilute the term a bit at each step. In the end, the readers will wonder who or what exactly is meant. But that should not be the case. There is nothing to be said against repeatedly calling a chimpanzee a chimp. By stylistic blossoms and frequently changed terms, one can recognize great authors who want to boast with their vocabulary. But it is always about the audience, never about the author. • Transitions: Sentences need logical transitions, just like paragraphs. You can form such transitions with pronouns, adverbs or connectives.

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• Active or passive: There is hardly any reason to use the passive (the suffering form!). Unless you are afraid of being nailed down as an author for your statements. But good writing should actually do just that, and it can be recognized exactly by that. An exception is when you really do not know the author of an action - or when you use the passive on purpose to build up tension. • One last word about suspense: If you write an anecdote as a starting point for a text, you provide the reader with some information. Instead of writing, for example: On day X, I caught two students having sex on the lab table (a true story, by the way, although not my own), you can write: It was nine o’clock in the morning when I entered the lab and caught them having sex. At that moment you immediately have the readers on the hook for asking the dramatic question: Caught me doing what? No matter what happens next, they will read until the end. So the deliberate withholding of information is a stylistic device that builds up suspense and works excellently time and again.

What You Can Learned From This essentials

• • • • •

Why science has to tell stories The building blocks of good stories Building plans for stories Story formulas from television and cinema Style rules

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References

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