And, But, Then: The Science of Story

Three simple words are all you need to tell a good story. And science needs good storytellers. Why? We want to tell you all the minutiae that we lose the forest for the tiny stomata of the leaves.

Scientist-turned-moviemaker-and-author Randy Olson is preaching his solution. The ABT template has three simple words: And, But, Then. These words undergird Olson’s new book, Houston, We Have a Narrative. After an early career as a marine biology professor in New Hampshire, Olson quit his job and moved cross-country to Los Angeles, home of the famed USC film school, and Hollywood, of course! Why did he do this? You’ll have to read his book to find out.

Olson would be the first to say that there’s nothing sacred about the three words. But they capture the essence of how to tell a good story. And allows you to set up the story with the necessary scaffolding facts. But is the pivot that introduces tension to the story. Therefore moves the story forward to its next step, or to its conclusion. Olson provides plenty of good examples, both historical and modern-day practical. (James Watson’s The Double Helix and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address are two.) But Olson also provides two templates for bad narrative. The AAA template (And, And, And) is boring, and we scientists do it all the time as we tell you fact after fact after fact. The DHY template (Despite, However, Why) just creates confusion. Since I had trouble remembering what DHY stood for, I’ve recast it as BBB: But #1, But #2, But #3, and the buts are disconnected.

With the help of Hollywood, Olson outlines a theoretical framework to classify different approaches to narrative. This is McKee’s Triangle, and it has three categories: Archplot, Miniplot and Antiplot. The classic Archplot is the tried-and-true approach to connect to the largest audience – the masses. Olson lists five key elements of Archplot movies.

·      Linear Timeline

·      Causality – things happen for logical reasons, not randomly.

·      Single Protagonist (or one main character that the audience follows)

·      Active Protagonist (the main character actually does stuff)

·      Closed Ending (story is resolved)

According to Olson, Miniplot movies “typically play in art houses, are cherished by movie critics, and often win Academy awards… These types of films garner critical praise but tend to play to smaller audiences.” Antiplot, on the other hand, rebel against “all the constraints of structure and tradition… not caring much about the outcome or how many people the y connect with. Of the examples Olson provides, I had only watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As a scientist who has experience with environmental concerns, Olson takes the time to analyze two different movies: The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth. One does a hatchet job with the science but connects to its viewers, the other just threw fact after fact after fact at the audience, and was both alarmist and boring, if that were possible. Olson appreciates the challenge of science communication involving a complicated topic, that doesn’t lend itself well to Archplot. Global warming has (1) no clear sequence to build a linear timeline, (2) no one simple cause, (3) no single or active protagonist, (4) no closed ending. Not to mention, people keep confusing the difference between weather and climate.

Given the challenge that scientists have in communicating their research to the public, what can be done? No, the one-day science communication workshop is not enough, it might even be problematic, according to Olson who has run many a one-day workshop. Learning narrative intuition takes time and work. Like building up muscle. I have to be honest that just thinking of the challenge makes me feel lazier and less willing to do the work. But thanks to Olson’s book, while working on a research paper yesterday, I rewrote the abstract to follow the ABT template. I was happy with the end-result, but it took a lot more time than I would usually spend crafting the narrative. The problem is that I hardly spend time crafting at all.

Two years ago, I actually heard about ABT from Randy Olson himself. He visited my institution and gave a fantastic seminar about the importance of science communication, and how we should take up the challenge. I think it made me work a bit more on my blog posts, at least for a short period while the inspiration lasted. Then I got lazy, and my writing has gotten sloppier. I’d like to tell you that this post was crafted and recrafted to follow the ABT template, but I’d be lying. “Houston, we have a problem” – it’s laziness. Present tense. Hollywood made the tense change when Tom Hanks delivers the iconic line. Apparently, the original spoken words were “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

I close this post with another reason that we scientists struggle with narrative. Quoting Olson on Hollywood’s changing the text in Apollo 13. “But this sort of text manipulation worries scientists. They want people to know how things are in the real world, and they dream of simply being able to ‘see it, say it’. They want to tell you the truth, exactly as they see it, without having to rearrange anything, because the rearranging process can be dangerous. Rearranging things comes with risks – at the mildest just getting it wrong, at worst deceiving people.”

But we scientists so easily forget, that in writing our papers we are editing the scientific story of our discovery, streamlining it for the journal we hope to publish in, and often eschewing communication to the general public. We need to do better.