A Call to Storytellers: “Change the way people see the world”

The 99U Conference is an annual event held in New York City:

The goal of the 99U Conference is to shift the focus from idea generation to idea execution. Providing road-tested insights on how to make your ideas happen. We bring together some of the world’s most productive creative visionaries & leading researchers to share pragmatic insights on how ideas are brought to life.

One of the featured speakers in 2015 was Franklin Leonard, founder of the Black List. The subject he was given to talk about: Changing the world. Here is a video of his speech:

Here is how Franklin ended his comments:

So here’s what I’d like to offer, and feel free to take or leave this advice. Lord knows that in 36 years, the one thing that I know is that I don’t know much. And it’s something that I’m reminded of every time I turn on the news and see the rising death toll from somewhere in the world or reared that the explanation offered in Freddie Gray’s death is that he severed his spine and crushed his larynx himself in the back of a police van.

But worst case scenario, use this or me as an excuse to free yourself from whatever paralysis and or feeling of failure you may feel that is at all similar to the one that I’ve struggled with for the better part of the last decade and a half.

If you want to change the world, stop trying to change the world. It’s impossible. Fix something broken, solve a problem, make something, make something better, make something beautiful, tell a story, hold a mirror up to the world and show the rest of the world how it is.

If you absolutely must be more ambitious than that, do any of those things in a way that changes the way a few people see the world. Maybe they’ll do the same as a consequence and maybe, just maybe, you’ll end up doing that first thing which will go unnamed without realizing it. Either in your lifetime or long after you’re gone. Absolutely worst-case scenario, doing it that way usually makes it a little bit easier to wake up the next morning and try and probably fail to do the same thing all over again. It’s the only thing that’s worked for me. Thank you.

When the video floated across my Twitter feed yesterday, I was reminded of something I shared with my university students the day after three young lives were claimed in a tragic racially motivated shooting in Chapel Hill. How to respond to such a devastating event?

As writers.
Screenwriters. TV writers. Playwrights. Novelists. Poets. Journalists.

We can use words to write…
Stories.

What can stories do?

In stories, we can create characters…
Who put a human face on others…
On The Other.
People whose skin color is different than ours.
Whose religion is different.
Whose sexual orientation is different.
Whose socioeconomic and cultural background is different.
Whose behaviors, language, clothes, and habits are different.

We can tell stories that convey the humanity we all share.
We can shrink the emotional and psychological distance between…
This person… and that person.

With stories, we can create a sense of personal identification.
So instead of looking at Them as an It… They become You.
With more stories, You becomes We.
And with even more stories, We becomes Us.

With stories, we can transform The Other…
Into a Brother… or a Sister.

There is power in words. Power in images. Power in stories.

We cannot change the world… but we can change how people see the world.

How people see others.

How people see themselves.

How people… see.

To read a transcript of Franklin’s 99U Conference presentation, go here.