If you tell a story in the woods and nobody understands it, does it make any sense?
The way Abraham Piper puts it, authors who want to be understood need to consider how their readers think. Of course, a storyteller could just take the stance held by Megan Casey at Squidoo, and when they don’t “get it,” label their audience “unimaginative”*.
Now sure, in the latter case you’re insulting a (vast?) portion of your audience in an effort to boost your own ego (”surely it’s their problem, not mine!”), but you can always double back and talk about how much you love the poor idiots, no really, and how it’s not their fault—they just can’t help it.
There’s a quote I’ve heard for years. It’s probably mangled by each person who references it; I know it’s been attributed to a few different people, including Einstein and E.F. Schumacher. Anyway, the quote goes like this: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.” If you find that your story (or business plan, or advertising model, or political platform) leaves most people scratching their heads, perhaps you’re not telling it well.
Surely this is one of the biggest reasons why Ron Paul failed to successfully capture the hearts and minds of the American people. He’s got some brilliant ideas, but he never quite figured out how to communicate them in a way the audience could understand and believe. (”Guns and butter,” anyone? I didn’t even get the reference, and I’m one of those “crazy Paulites”!)
The whole point of telling a story to an audience is to communicate something they don’t already understand—because if they truly understood it as you do, then they’d already be doing it. So if your audience doesn’t get the story before you tell it, that’s normal and to be expected; but if they still don’t understand after you tell it? You’re just not telling it well. When that happens, it’s your problem, not theirs. Don’t insult their intelligence (or their imagination) because they didn’t immediately jump on your particular train of thought.
Now please don’t think I’m just going to pick on Megan: she understands the proper course of action. She goes on in that same post to provide examples of different ways to tell the Squidoo story in an effort to help more people “get it.”
I guess it’s just the terminology that bugs me. As I see it, to judge an audience’s intelligence by how quickly they grasp your particular concept is lazy… and it can prove suicidal to your business. Megan contrasts the “imaginative” person (who made over 100 Squidoo lenses) with the “literal-minded” (unimaginative) person (who made 1 lens, was confused by or unimpressed with Squidoo, and left) and says that of course the “imaginative” person is better (and implies the “literal-minded” person requires hand-holding)! Me, I’m thinking maybe the latter person had enough imagination to see that no matter what was done, a Squidoo lens wasn’t going to meet their needs. It’s a completely valid conclusion, unless you have a cult-like lack of imagination obsession over the object of your affection.
Now if you want nothing more than a cult following from the far reaches of the long tail, then maybe this sort of attitude is okay; but if you’re trying to appeal to the masses—trying to bring in the “unimaginative”—you can’t afford the sort of narcissistic arrogance which blames others for not recognizing its “obvious” beauty.
