Happy Saturday, Reader

When I was writing last week’s email, the idea of adaptation kept bubbling up. Not book adaptations into movies, but adaptations of other works that most people don’t know are adaptations. Movies like Anyone But You (Much Ado About Nothing), 10 Things I Hate About You (Taming of the Shrew), and of course, Clueless (Emma).

I think I was probably in my 20s before I learned that one of the beloved films of my teen years was an adaptation of a book I hated. And that’s probably why it worked. I had no idea I was watching one of the classics. It’s like making cauliflower masquerade as something else so your kids will get some veggies (no shade to cauliflower; I actually love it). The filmmakers took a story written in 1815 and made it feel completely at home in 1995 Beverly Hills.

And that’s the skill I want to focus on this week—taking your core ideas and making them adaptable so your audience can connect with them.

I found a scene that feels a bit meta here, as Cher is called on in debate class to weigh in on the refugee crisis in Haiti, and rather than speaking directly to the question asked, she translates her argument into a metaphor she and her classmates can understand.

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Watch what she's actually doing:

A birthday party has a host. It has a guest list. And the people on that list aren't random, they're there because the host chose them. And although proper etiquette is to RSVP, she’s saying that regardless of the RSVP, a good host can find a way to accommodate who shows up.

That's her whole argument, translated into a language a room full of sixteen-year-olds already speaks. Immigration policy becomes: who received an invitation, and how do we manage arrivals we weren’t ready for.

Is it a flawless political argument? Not even close. That’s not the point. Cher found a way to communicate her idea by meeting the class where they are.

This is where metaphor becomes a powerful tool in translation. It hands your audience a place to start. Cher's classmates already know what it's like to throw a party, to plan for a certain number of people, and then have more show up than you expected. She didn't teach them something new. She pointed at something they already understood, and let her idea be supported by that knowledge.

How can you build a bridge between your ideas and what your audience already knows and understands?

Finding a metaphor is probably one of the more challenging aspects of storytelling. I struggle with it all the time. What I’ve found that works is to start by asking one simple question, “What's an everyday situation that carries the same emotional or structural truth?”

A good amount of my speaking is around coercive control, a concept that is really difficult to describe in detail, and to appropriately convey the seriousness. One day, I was changing the batteries in my carbon monoxide detector and it hit me: much like carbon monoxide, coercive control is a slow and silent killer. People understand the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning, so it became the perfect metaphor for me to talk about coercive control.

Try it out this week! I’d love to hear what you come up with.

Until next week,