How To Use Parallel Storylines
How To Use Parallel Storylines
📗 Inspired by a book I’ve recently read
Hi friend,
How are you? As summer winds down, I’d like to share one last book you can add to your summer reading.
Call it my book club, if you will.
There is no content deal with the publisher or anything, just me sharing a book I enjoyed.
Do you have regrets about potential career paths you’ve ditched? Places you’ve been fantasizing about living at? People you should have said yes or no to?
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig tells the story of Nora Seed, a thirty-something girl from Bedford a small town two hours north of London.
She works at a music store until one day her life seems to fall apart. She loses her job, her cat dies, and her brother ignores her.
At her lowest point, when she decides to call it quits she finds herself in the Midnight Library - a twilight zone located between life and death where time is frozen at midnight.
There she meets her childhood Liberian who helps her sample “books” that represent her alternative storylines or parallel lives - another take on a popular science fiction theme (for a physicist perspective, see The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene).
Olympic medal celebrity if she stuck to her swimming training, a mega-popular singer-songwriter if she didn’t leave her local band with her brother, a life where she has a daughter she never had before, her dead parents are now alive, and so on.
In this fashion, Nora gets to play a guest in parallel storylines, comparing and contrasting to her root life - the life she came from.
We all have regrets about the road not taken and sometimes engage in possible what-ifs.
It’s only human.
Every decision you make means you don’t choose the alternative options.
Every decision you make triggers a cascade of actions, people you meet, and projects you do - that send you on a unique trajectory.
Not to mention indirectly influencing outcomes for people several degrees from you.
What if you could explore every possible trajectory of your life, with each storyline representing a different path, free from regrets?
Which one would you explore first?
Yeah, it's like tasting different flavors in an ice cream parlor before committing to chocolate - again :)
Interestingly, you may find that the dream life you yearned for, lo and behold romanticizes the actual not-so-rosy reality.
Things you never considered in your perfect story start to bother you.
Or maybe you would feel right at home.
It’s impossible to tell unless you decide to take the plunge.
The closest example in business I can think of is people who make radical career changes to experience new professional identities.
Say a CTO that decides to set a lifelong passion free and open an artisanal panini gourmet café.
What does all this mean to your brand?
You can use the book’s premise when dreaming up stories to bring to life your brand narrative.
A simple way could be, showing your customer taking 3 alternative decisions around solving a problem related to your product, and their negative consequences while highlighting the benefits of the right choice.
Another direction could be leveraging the Groundhog Day movie premise.
You can have your customer, the hero, reliving the same day with slight changes each time that result in unexpected outcomes.
All these storytelling ideas focus on manipulating decisions across the timeline and exploring possible outcomes.
If you recall I also covered the time theme in
What do you think? How would you use parallel storylines in your brand storytelling? Feel free to share your thoughts.
See you next time!
Best,
- Shlomi
Shlomi Ron
Chief Storytelling Officer, Visual Storytelling Institute
story > visual > emotion > experience
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