In my last post, Tell THE Story, perhaps I left the impression that telling a personal story or the larger story is an either/or proposition, but it occurs to me that good writers often find ways to do both. They use a personal story as a vehicle to bring the larger story into focus in a compelling and dramatic form.
The book and movie, Moneyball, is a good example of this. It’s the story of a change in the way statistics are used to evaluate the performance of baseball players. It’s not a very sexy subject, but the writer, Michael Lewis grounds it in the story of Oakland Athletics General Manager, Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team
Beane knew he couldn’t compete financially with the richest teams in the league that had many times more money to spend on player’s salaries. He needed a new approach to evaluating talent that could find hidden value in the players he could afford. So he used the Sabermetrics statistical approach to find players that had been overlooked by the big boys, and in the process, changed the game of baseball.
As a story, it follows the classic structure of a plucky underdog struggling to overcome a more powerful enemy through guile and strategy. The only element missing is the final triumph, but that was missing from the Oakland A’s season that year, too.
Lewis invests us emotionally in the “Why” of the hero’s struggles, before he introduces the “How” of mathematics and statistics. Sabremetrics, which even dedicated baseball fans can find intimidatingly dense, simply becomes “the plan”.
We don’t need to understand every detail of the plan, just as we don’t need to understand the details of Danny Ocean’s plan to rob the casino, in Ocean’s 11 or the details of Luke Skywalker’s plan to blow up the Deathstar, in Star Wars.
Lewis is able to salt enough information into the narrative to give us the general idea of what Sabremetrics is – a way to mathematically evaluate the true contributions of players to their team’s success, allowing a savvy General Manager to find players that were undervalued and would be cheaper to sign or trade for.
But even as his characters are explaining the mathematical “How”, Lewis never forgets that the “Why” is the heart of the story. It’s the heart of every story.
Why is the Euro collapsing? That’s the heart of the story.
Why is the Presidential campaign getting so nasty? That’s the heart of the story.
Why is the company facing bankruptcy, hiring new workers or closing its plant in China? That’s the heart of the story.
Every one of them is a story about people responding to pressures by making choices with far-reaching consequences.
That’s the “Why”. That’s the story.
The “How” is just the details.
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