I have an insatiable appetite for story and character. I will consume anything – books, long-form and short-form articles, long-form and short-form videos, running posts from favorite opinionators, fiction or nonfiction, poetry – as long as I can hook into a storyline and the characters. This is the power of narrative, which I’ve written about before—or, to quote from one of my favorite novels by Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus, from one character to another:
…Just about everything is in books. No, that’s wrong. We recognize in books what we’ve met in life. But if you’d read a few books you wouldn’t have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin. You’d see a few things coming. About love, for instance.
My appetite for stories and characters fuels the work that I’ve done and am still doing in communications. I’ve worked across so many different issue areas – education, affordable housing, criminal justice, healthcare reform, climate change, clean energy, racial justice, and equity and at one point, I found stories and characters through the vehicles of campaigns and messaging. Now, I write longer pieces, case studies that detail the who-what-where-when and why in what I hope is compelling and readable and accurate prose. But overall, the motivation remains the same, whether I am in content-producing or content-consuming mode: I want people to care about the characters and the storyline. I want people to get invested, the way I did when I read the extraordinary pieces that have come out recently about Brittney Griner’s unjust and terrible, terrible imprisonment at the whims of the Russian Government.
Most communications professionals I know are like me. And I think we are facing a collective challenge lately, which is that the audiences of our work are struggling to absorb stories that are rich in character, story, nuance, and complexity. We seem to have a diminishing capacity to hold many things to be true at the same time, to feel compassion for all, and not just for one side.
The central example of this, of course, is the Israel war in Gaza that began with the atrocities committed by Hamas and have continued with the perpetual killing of people in Gaza. I noticed, immediately, that the majority of people I knew or followed online who either identified as Gen Z or younger and/or Black were so solidly pro-Palestine, there wasn’t a whiff of ambiguity in their online activism. Nor has a whiff of ambiguity or ambivalence appeared to this day. Similarly, watching a CBS Sunday Morning News story about an exhibit dedicated to the young people who were murdered, kidnapped, or assaulted by Hamas while at a rave, I was struck by a parent of one of the murdered young women who, when asked gently whether she recognized the devastating toll of the conflict on children and civilians in Gaza, remained defiant and angry about the genocide that followed. In her heartbreaking grief, which I on many levels resonate with as a parent, she simply could not see another side to the matter.
All along, I’ve been struck by how people, when it comes to this devastating conflict, this series of atrocities that is taking place, are so committed to picking a side. And the sides are so brightly defined, and so absolute. You are either for Israel and for the Zionist movement, or you are anti-Semitic. You are either for Gaza, and the thousands of people who have been massacred there, or you are pro-genocide.
Plenty of other people, many of them smarter and better-read than me, have written entire treatises about the polarizing effect that social media and 24-7 news cycles have had on our discourse. But as a communications professional, one who has worked for almost three decades in getting people to care about really critical issues, I am feeling particularly flummoxed by our current state of affairs. I don’t want to have anything to do with communications that gets people to care about something if a by-product is that they turn viciously against something else. I want them to care in ways that will lead to more benefit for more people – for less inequality and more fairness and equity and justice. I want people to embrace all the storylines and the characters, so they can find ways to agree and work together towards shared goals.
In other words, I want people to embrace stories, characters, and complexity. And I want them to exercise and develop the intellectual and emotional muscles so that when things get unequivocally horrible, which seems to be happening a lot these days, they will question whether screaming at the other side, and screaming at people for not taking YOUR side, will actually serve a greater purpose. I agree that vocal, sustained, and peaceful forms of activism do serve a purpose, when it comes to raising awareness, but I don’t see where the road of finger-pointing and yelling at each other actually leads.
Does this sound impossibly naïve? I’m sure it does. And I do want to acknowledge that what I am wishing for is not easy. There are days when I feel exhausted and depressed by all the hatred, the violence, and the grief we are being asked to bear in this world. I feel guilty about these feelings, because I am not directly impacted by any of the events; I bestir myself to donate money, educate myself, listen to others, but that’s about it. But still, it feels really hard to hold complexity and compassion, some days. For one thing, the darker storylines have a way of amplifying and compounding the already-challenging things that go on in people’s life –things like illness, death, and divorce. For another, holding and understanding complexity and nuance means accepting that light comes with dark, joy comes with sorrow, hope comes with despair.
As I wrote recently, I entered 2024 in a mood of ambivalence about work, and ongoing questions of whether I would ever return to a full-time job that embraced many different aspects of communications, not just the writing I’ve been doing over the past couple of years. As a part of sitting with and trying to understand this ambivalence, I revisited my work output for the last few years because my God, I’ve done a lot of writing – not just here, but paid work, for clients. I noticed one common thread that links all of my projects: wherever and whenever possible, I am working to highlight the elements I think are missing from our public discourse about current events: compelling stories about real people who are working within contexts that are often complex and nuanced. What I also try to elevate, in those stories, are themes about people who are trying to make progress, who are trying to move forward, despite the fact that their work is often informed by many, many different points of view?
It’s not uncommon for me to hear that the pieces I’ve been commissioned to write are too long, and I think that’s fair: our attention spans and indeed, our caring capacity, have been sorely tested by the internet and the news cycle. But while I often find the writing of these longer pieces to be a long, arduous slog, I am surprised by how much I and others like the final results. Because they provide a break from the never-ending strife and disagreement we are seeing so much of in our online discourse these days. There are no characters or groups insisting that their side is the only one that is right, the only one that matters. Instead, there are groups of people, often from very different backgrounds and with incredibly diverse perspectives, who agree that it’s the positive change that matters. This is the type of storytelling I want to keep doing, as an antidote to the vitriol, the frustration, and the despair I keep seeing elsewhere.
Minna Jung Consulting 