Something changed in the world of work.

You used to be able to stand out from the crowd by the virtue of your work, your product or your service. 

You could manage to focus on two things, 
the work itself and building great relationships, 
with your clients, customers or your peers.

You could get away by saying, 
“work will speak for itself.”

But something changed.

The attention economy came in and 
set new rules for this world.

On one hand it created access for people and young brands to stand out on merit rather than influential connections or deep pockets for advertising and marketing.

On the other hand, it made it extremely tough to stand out by just your ‘work’.

It’s 2026 and it’s tough out there.

It’s tough in this noise when everyone else is shouting.
It’s tougher when everyone else is shouting ‘me, me, me…’ 
It’s the toughest when your voice has no value for others.

Today, most brands, company or personal, 
have fallen prey to this noise.

In an effort to ‘guarantee’ success, they’ve started to copy and replicate others who’ve already been there and done that. Without considering the consequences of this ‘me too’ methodology.

The answer lies beyond, ‘Been There Done That’.
It lies in, Be There Do That.

What worked for them may not necessarily work for you.
It’s one thing to get inspired, and another to imitate.

The difference between some brands succeeding and many failing is the way they differentiate them from the rest. Doesn’t matter if it’s a personal brand or a company brand.

It’s easy to stand out when there is no one else like you.

If you create your own category you set the rules, not your competitors. It’s time to take control and stand out in this attention deficit world.

The path is simple, yet not easy.
It starts by mining your unique voice and ends with maximizing its value to your audience.

The path is simple enough, just not easy!
If you need help, ask me.


Archit Raj Thapar

The Story Doctor - Speaker & Author

Dr James McCabe is a pioneer in adopting classical story design from the world of arts to commerce. Classical storytellers such as dramatists, novelists and screenwriters are the professionals when it comes to human attention, because narrative is their only intellectual property. As the commercial world learns narrative IP rules in an attention economy, the opportunity exists for replacing rhetorical devices with narrative ones. Where rhetoric seeks to persuade, narrative seeks to involve - a much deeper connection involving not only hearts and minds but - uniquely - both hemispheres of the human brain. Storytellers know how to transform ideas into feelings so they live on in the audience around them. James is a master in transforming the authority, logic and proof of business rhetoric into the universal empathy, suspense and surprise now required to attract customers, investors, employees and the public. Your enterprise and your career exist between human attention and memory - two resources governed by the narrative faculty.

James McCabe

#Storytelling

Dear David,

You didn't miss much in the last decade.

When the roof of Notre Dame collapsed in flames a few years afterwards, I sensed the world was in for a damaging time. It wasn't a disaster, but something deeper. An omen.

So we had the plague and the war, the famine and the death, all four horsemen.

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, as Ovid said. All things change, nothing vanishes.

Ten years on, your changes still ring true, reinvention as a life strategy.

As Auden commemorated Yeats:

"He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems."

You disappeared in the dead of winter. The death of the singer was kept from his songs.

Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is not a single epic but a compendium of 250 stories. Like it, your life was not a story but a medley of narratives.

In seven chapters...

The Muse - the story of your influences and who you influenced. From Elvis Presley to Lady Gaga.

The Music - from Sixties music hall to hippiedom, from Seventies glam to electronica, from the bouffant Eighties to the angst-ridden Teens.

The Film - from cinematic aliens to video astronauts.

The Art - the shadow side of your storyworld, sound visualized.

The Voice - From Elephant and Castle to The Thin White Duke.

The Zeitgeist - your eerie predilection for astrolabing the future.

The Books - from the library you carted everywhere to the saga you lived.

From Greenland to the Steppes, from the desert to the jungle, the world's a jittery uncertain space. Your oddity prepped us for that, the slow burn. We could be heroes, but daren't.

You could have lived through it with us, but were better off in astral slumber.

When others sought to dominate the peripheries from the centre - centrifugal command and control - you always came in from the outside, centripetal inspiration and illumination.

Never fix a problem from the inside. Always start from the outside.

Beau geste, brave soul.

Ave atque vale.


-


[Image: The Archer, John Robert Rowlands]

#Storytelling

In Praise of Ghostwriters

Did Sherpa Tenzing reach the summit first?

Whether he was too humble to admit it, or whether he had agreed to give Hilary precedence beforehand, he saved Hillary's life before the conquest and he was roped together a mere six feet away. They conquered Everest "together, as a team."

In my experience, ghostwriters are some of the humblest and ablest of story professionals on the planet, and your bookshop would be very depleted indeed if every ghostwritten volume were removed from it. So would your bookshelves at home.

Once a dirty secret, ghostwriters are coming it into the open today, and it is a development I celebrate. The world has changed, changed utterly, it's 2026 already and there will be a huge demand for new interpretations, fictional as well as non-fictional. That distinction, by the way, is fictive in itself. Fiction is Latin for "shaping", and everything is shaped, for good or ill.

The book you are admiring within your mind is a Mount Everest you have no idea of climbing. The ghostwriter is your first reader. They read your mind. In fact, they read the book before it even existed. Every dollar you expend on their survival is money in your bank, year on year, decade on decade.

They are the sherpas. They know the terrain. They've climbed this peak before. They will save your life as you fall into the clefts of delusion and despair. They will get to the summit first but let you claim the crown.

Pay their mortgages. You are multiplying your own property portfolio.


-

#Storytelling

"Is it true?"

The most often asked question of my former child self upon watching anything on television or reading anything in a book. The same question could be asked a millionfold today among a proliferation of screens - desktopped, laptopped and palmed off in the hand.

The question is ultimate and refers to reality. Note that reality does not equate to factuality. "Is it true?" does not mean "Did this actually happen?" It means "Could this be true?"

That is the nature of story. Not the distinction between so-called fiction and non-fiction, but the gulf between human credibility and incredulousness.

This is my whole beef with so-called GenAI, which is more degenerative than generative. Now I know that so-called GenAI is not Artificial Intelligence (itself a tragic oxymoron) and that so-called Artificial Intelligence has many unguessed applications across industry, healthcare, traffic management and other vital infrastructures. But let's be extremely clear here - Generative Artificial Intelligence in the expressive space of the arts and media is not and cannot by its very nature be true or real.

GenAI in writing is the equivalent of CGI in film, a habit which exploded just as cinema audiences everywhere tailed off and vanished. Was there a connection? Yes, of course there was. At the very moment it became possible to visualize absolutely anything on screen at the click of a mouse, nobody gave a shit anymore. Because the stuntmen weren't stunting and the actors were greenscreening and everyone was merely phoning it in.

Your story isn't real if you asked the bot for ideas to begin with. That's called musing. That's called inspiration. Like a lazy fart you short-circuited it because you couldn't be arsed. Your story isn't real when your first draft is guessworked together by an algorithm stealing intellectual property from others, burning down the planet and building in as much hallucination, cultural bias and entshittification as it can. That's not a true story. You are unreal. 

It makes no difference if this is short or long form, fiction or so-called non-fiction. You phoned it in. Why don't you just stop watching Netflix and just download the summaries? Why listen to Queen or The Beatles when the bot can summarize the experience for you? I'll tell you why. Because you are still greedily lapping up the human experience for yourself. The one you're now denying the plebeians who are your employees, your customers and your readers. 

Yes, you are fast and efficient. Yes, you are modern. No, you're not true. No, you're not real. You lack reality. Pretty soon you'll lack the cinema audience too.


-

#Storytelling

Join us this Wednesday 21st January between 4 and 6 pm for the ninetieth Story Parlour. People often shy off because they don't have two full hours on a Wednesday morning or afternoon - the reason it is two hours is because you can catch some of it, come and go as you please, this isn't Skool...

The word Parlour is Latin in origin and, in the thirteenth century, referred to a room in a monastery where monks could speak with visitors. Parlour, Parler, geddit? By the high Renaissance, parlours had evolved into guest spaces in domestic residences for conversational exchange. How many educated conversations have you had this week with a non-work acquaintance or non-family member? Not many, I take it.

Attendees get to learn the story art, craft and trade conversationally, in exchange with yours truly as your tutor and your international peers as fellow travellers. The art involves the principles, chief among which remains novelty. The craft implies models, chiefly of which involves the sonata sequence of beginning, middle and ending. The trade means you can complete a story in any medium or genre and distribute it to the world.

Guests get to spark ideas off each other, compare notes on the narrative voyage, converse with veteran luminaries like Christopher Vogler (of "The Writer's Journey" fame) and Valerie Hemingway (Ernest's confidante and last secretary). Watch other people develop their independent story practices, start and develop their books, discover whole new themes and take executive artistic decisions. It's free so you can be as penniless as pleases. The only house rules are cameras on, no pitching, no flexing, no roadhogging. Invitation in the comments. Don't mention it.

Every Emmy winner was an infant in nappies once. Every Grammy winner was born without a musical clue. Every Oscar winner had to learn how to read and write. Every Tony winner stared at a snow-white blank sheet. Do it.


-

66:99 - Writing Content in Context for Search and Social

Another fascinating and illuminating session in Dr McCabe's Story Parlour yesterday! 


In an age where the big push is on to outsource our human critical and creative thinking to those Large Lying Machines, salvation may be reclaimed in humanity's innate drive for wondrous storytelling. A scribbler's crusade indeed!

Two hours in the company of the excellent James McCabe is a deep-dive into the secret anatomy of the writer's art and a masterclass of erudition and exposition.

Thoroughly recommended for all those writers of all backgrounds and experiences who want to step up their game or simply join a caravanserai of discovery.

#DrMcCabesStoryParlour #storytellerscraft  #writinghumancopy

#Storytelling

Can story structure apply to the real world?

Take the Crusades, for instance, that deeply complex and controversial period of history between 1095 and 1291.

Nine European invasions of the Middle East resulted in four Crusader states lasting well over a century and millions of deaths (estimates vary wildly).

The Crusades sanctioned religious violence, drove apart the three great desert religions and, ironically, brought about the fall of the Roman Empire they were designed to redeem. 

Dramaturge Kenneth Rowe taught Arthur Miller how to write plays and came up with the idiomatic sequence Attack, Complication, Resolution for the three-act structure.

Act I is Attack, when the status quo is pitched on its head and the drama unfolds. Apply it to the Crusades. It's 1054, fifty years before the first Crusade and the Christian world is torn in half by the schism between Catholic West and Orthodox East. At the same time, the Seljuk Turks overtake the Arab Empire in the Middle East. In 1071, they destroy the Eastern Roman army at the Battle of Manzikert. The stage is set for the Crusades. Emperor Alexios appeals to Pope Urban II for help, their historical schism only adding poignancy. The Princes of Europe come to the rescue, slaughtering as they go, commencing with the first great pogrom against the Jews in Europe. They take Antioch by treachery. They storm Jerusalem and bathe it in its own blood. They set up four Crusader states. End of Act I.

Act II complicates the plot as darker motives are revealed. When the Turks retake Edessa in 1144 it sparks a second Crusade from the French and German kings. They fail miserably to capture Damascus. A third Crusade in 1189 attempts to retake Jerusalem but ends in a stand-off truce. This is the most famous Crusade, the one involving Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, the one filmed in Ridley Scott's KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (2005). But it is the fourth Crusade in 1202-1204 that steals the show in Act II as the ultimate complication unfolds - to repay their Venetian shipmasters the Crusaders storm fellow Christians in Zara on the Adriatic and finally Constantinople itself, destroying the world's most eminent metropolis in the process. Act II culminates in a very dark place as the Crusaders are excommunicated by the Pope but make their own Latin Empire for what its worth.

Act III resolves the conundra as all future Crusades (fifth, sixth, seventh, eight and ninth between 1217 and 1271) fail in their primary objective to fully recover Jerusalem after Saladin has recouped it. (The German Frederick II manages a partial success in the sixth Crusade with a fifteen-year lease of it.) A Turkish Mamluk by the name of Baibars prises apart the last Crusader castles and strongholds, and the final outpost of Acre crumbles in 1291.

The denouement: religious tensions have not healed a millennium later. Eastern and Western Europe still deeply suspect each other and can still be said to be at war. 


-

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Archit Raj Thapar

James McCabe

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