See a photo of Steve, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Q&A with Steve Spalding, Question 5:
Q: If you could share just one piece of advice or wisdom about story/storytelling/narrative with readers, what would it be?
A: Find the essence of the thing.
If you are telling your own story, you must “find your voice.” No, not the thing that your writing teacher told you to find in the eighth grade when she was making you write persuasive essays about capital punishment. I mean the thing you use every day to talk to your peers, the thing that separates the way you behave and the way you see the world from everyone else on the planet Earth. That is your voice, and before you can tell a great personal story, you have to tear away all the artifice and get in touch with that.
If you are trying to tell someone else’s story, that’s even harder because finding the essence of a product or service often means cutting through the great, big pile of nonsensical business jargon that is standing in your way. It’s the hardest thing in the world to figure out what makes a thing tick, because most of the time even the people who designed it don’t really know. People don’t buy products for their features. They buy them for the feelings they evoke. You buy a $1,000 DSLR or a $1,500 MacBook because it makes you feel a certain way, because a carefully crafted narrative is there and that narrative speaks to something real inside of you. If they tried to sell you on the shutter speed or the hard-drive size, they’d never see the inside of your wallet. Which makes most companies incredibly sad. Canon and Apple know this, and if you are going to tell stories for companies you have to know this, too.