The WGA has been sending e-mail updates to the membership on a more-or-less daily basis since the beginning of the writers’ strike. An update from about a month ago included this bit from the picket lines:
[Y]esterday, a middle-aged man who had come all the way from Michigan with his wife and children showed up at Paramount studios for the day. But when he saw the writers, he told them he was a member of a mechanics union and has never crossed a picket line in his life. They refused to go in.
Think whatever you want to about the strike; I do. What struck me was how much more effective even a fifty-word story is than a raft of statistics, because it creates an emotional link instead of an intellectual one.
What do you care what the DVD residual formula is, percent-wise? What do you care how much the average writer makes? (Assuming that you’re not a member of the WGA and your livelihood doesn’t depend on it, that is.)
But reading that anecdote, you can easily imagine a guy (you know guys), and his family (you have a family), on vacation far from home (you’ve done that). You can imagine that this guy has principles (you’ve admired people with principles, and you might have some of your own), but that now he’s torn. In just fifty words, you’re emotionally invested.
Tell a story, and let that make the argument.
Followed a link to a website pimping The Elements of Persuasion, a book on this topic, this morning. Somehow their take on the appropriate uses for this technique makes me feel dirty.
I loved that story, and think I saw the same website pimping The Elements of Persuasion.
What I read about it didn’t ping my “I feel dirty” button, but I think it would come down to where the text falls on the spectrum of using the exploitative vs. sincere narrative “hook”.
What do you think of the writer’s strike, Jeff?
My take on the strike is that the AMPTP is looking to rape the WGA, and they would be idiots not to fight back. And I do not use the word “rape” lightly.
Although I’m only a sideways member of the WGA myself (being a member of their New Media Caucus but not the Guild proper), I recently demonstrated with a dozen-plus local (to Minnesota) WGA members outside the Uptown theater on a Saturday night, leafleting moviegoers and getting my bad self on the 10:00 news in 7-degree weather. So I guess you’d call me a sympathizer.
But I also think that the WGA is a weird animal — a union of what are essentially freelance writers whose legal documentation and contracts bend over backward to create a series of strange legal fictions erected atop a system that only half exists in the first place anymore. There’s got to be a better way to organize writers (in both the literal and labor senses of the word), but heck if I know what it is.
But even if you’re not for the WGA, you should be against the AMPTP, a vile fount of disingenuous and self-serving corporate bullshit.
I only just now noticed the pimp there, by the way. Thanks for it. 🙂