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Let’s dive into today’s topic:
Give your career a story spine
Once upon a time..
Why it matters
It’s tempting to write a biography like a CV: “They met at elementary school” ... “After their first show, the drummer left the band” ... “Their first album was well received by critically acclaimed media” ... “Now, after a five-year hiatus”. Etcetera.
The problem: Marketers can’t sell this. In music, club and festival marketers, labels, agents and fans are the ones who sell your brand on a daily basis. Not you. Others.
Storytelling frameworks fix this, and a simple, straightforward one is “The Story Spine”, which forces a story into eight sentences that only make sense in that order.
How it works
Playwright and improv teacher Kenn Adams created the Story Spine in the early 1990s to help actors build coherent scenes on the spot. A Pixar employee brought it into the studio a few years later, and it shaped the writing process behind Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo.
It’s structured as eight sentence starters, each one forcing the next, and can be applied to artists’ careers:
Once upon a time: the artist’s origin, like sound, scene, city.
Every day: their routine.
Until one day: the disruption: a new collaborator, a genre they got bored of, a crisis.
Because of that, because of that: the chain of decisions the disruption set off.
Until finally: the turning point: the release, the show, the reinvention.
And ever since then: what’s different now and why.
The mechanism is that every step must be caused by the one before it. Skip a step and the story breaks, which is what makes this useful for a bio, a pitch, or a video script.
Yes, but..
The Story Spine tells you what happens, not who it happens to. Brand archetypes like outlaw, hero, jester, magician, sage, and others can fill that gap. Branding by contradiction works the same way from a different direction.
Take action now
Artists can rewrite their biography as a Story Spine, one sentence per line, after picking either a brand archetype or two branding-by-contradiction extremes to decide who’s telling it.
Your thoughts
Further reading
The Story Spine (also known as Pixar’s Story Structure) (storyprompt)
Meet the creator of the Story Spine, an 8-sentence tool to create and analyze stories (NPR)
Clever artists make their marketers’ jobs easier (The Fanbase Builder)
Positioning artists as heroes, outlaws, jesters, and magicians (The Fanbase Builder)
Branding by contradiction (The Fanbase Builder)
How an artist’s career resembles a Netflix series (The Fanbase Builder)
Improve storytelling by evoking suspense, curiosity, or surprise (The Fanbase Builder)