Use Proposition, Backstory and Recommendations To Find Your Narrative.
Learn the key elements for all your social media and communications.
Thursdays will be devoted to the art of arranging your Proposition, Backstory And Recommendations so you can deploy them powerfully as you unearth your fingerprint story, the one that defines only you.
Regular readers of this space know the Proposition is the useful truth that grabs the reader because of its utility and quirky, counter-intuitive vibe: say the 4-Hour Workweek or Marc Petitpas great book, The 50 Year-Old Millennial. It’s your book’s title and you should be able to recite it in just a few sentences.
Next, the Backstory: the journey that validates the proposition because it proves not just the efficacy of the idea but the arduous path - the stops and starts - that came with uncovering such a powerful truth.
Finally, Recommendations: handy tactics that invite the reader to get on board through small achievable pieces of advice.
Here are some examples. They are fiction books, but only in that they do not exist. For fun, let’s make them all about painting.
Paint Until The Rooms Get Smaller.
Proposition.
The book can be about what Type A people love about painting: it’s fast, decisive and they feel that they can do it better than other people.
Backstory.
You have observed that a small percentage of homeowners buy most of the paint. These buyers aren’t professionals, they are instead owners who are changing their homes room-by-room in an endless cycle. They aren’t artsy, but they are extraordinarily particular and time-obsessed. The harder it is, the more they seem to like it. It’s like they are addicted to painting, which hardly ever happens.
Recommendation.
The author’s task is to show the reader as many ways as possible of flying their control freak flag.
Like auto manufacturers who plan their model designs years in advance, the Type A painter can delight in a constantly evolving colour scheme that always leads to their end goal.
The reader can keep one room as a riff room, a constantly changing experiment or designate permapaint room colours for areas that are to be left alone for eternity or at least until someone pries their paint brush out of their cold, dead hands.
Change Your Colours, Change Your Life.
Proposition.
We can manipulate, even invigorate our spirits through the colours on our walls.
Backstory.
A decade before, you helped transition your mom from her longtime family home to a retirement residence. Alone in an empty house full of memories, you gave the empty house one more walkabout and, as always, came back to the orange room in the back of the house. It was the only room in the house with its own distinctive name and there was always something mischievous and freeing going on within those walls.
Why do some rooms just feel better? Your intuition tells you the answer isn’t just available light or the orientation of the house to the sun. Welcome to the emerging avenue of colour theory, the marrying of colour not just to reflect the mood of the room but to optimize the mood of the homeowner.
Recommendations.
Your advice to the reader: determine how you want to feel in each room, not how you already feel, and paint accordingly.
Monochromatic schemes, riffing off different tints of a single colour, produces a soothing effect. Complementary schemes, a green and a red for example, attract attention to one spot and its corresponding task, say a workspace.
While a windowless room might seem to be calling for a light colour, a deep green comforts with a callback to nature. That, by the way, is why talk shows call the guest waiting area the Green Room, even if it isn’t green.
Keeping Mom Through Color.
Proposition.
Alzheimer’s Disease International tells us that the number of people with dementia will double every 20 years. Can colour ease a patient’s anxiety and, if so, could we use environment to keep our elders in their homes and out of institutions a little longer? Backstory.
Like so many, you found yourself looking for ways to help mitigate your mom’s distress as she progressed through the stages of dementia. Your mother wasn’t yet ready for a long-care setting but when you looked for ways to use colour and design to ease her stress, you found little that could help. That’s when you decided to reach out to support groups and find the latest research to give your mom the best possible home environment.
Recommendations.
The author can provide the latest research on colours and room features that soothe the elder. Photographs showing the elder as a younger person can be used as talking points and given more prominence in the room. As the dementia progresses, the risk of flight can be mitigated by using decals to disguise doors as bookshelves.