[This is preparation reading for the “Bad Story Guru Medicine” workshop to answer “why” do this!]
Many of us love the challenge of creating something we imagine.
Many of us also love to contribute to positive social change through what we create.
But a constant distraction is having to deal with folks who pre-emptively insist that we can’t do this and we can only do that.
Their blocks are regular, predictable, and unfounded.
If you’re someone who deeply researches what others say about creative practice (like me!) then you would have noticed a pattern. I’m not talking about the pattern that makes you think, ‘they all say the same thing, so it must be true!’ No, I’m talking about a different interpretation of that pattern, lol!
The blocks are exactly the same as what “story gurus” say.
Most “story gurus” give the same advice, and use the same tactics to get you to take on that advice.
What Does “Story Guru” Mean?
By “guru,” I mean the definition Bridget Conor uses: where it refers to the authors of screenwriting manuals who are the most widely cited. “Design guru” is also used, too, and applies to those in games, product design, and so on. I’m referring to all of them, really. But the examples I cite are mainly from screenwriting manuals because they have influenced a lot of people in film, TV, and games.
These “gurus” are not widely cited by working or veteran practitioners necessarily. But you can’t throw a search query without their books or someone repeating the ideas of their books coming up.
This is an issue because many creatives are self-taught. The recent Olsberg SPI & Screen Australia Capacity Report documents this for film, TV, and games. The increasing fees at education institutions, course closures, and declining enrolments are all part of this.
While the bad patterns can definitely be taught at institutions, they’re rife online and at industry training targeting newcomers. The folks listening don’t realise what they’re being told is a big red herring.
In her newsletter, ex-screenwriter and literary manager, Audrey Knox, says: “Writers need community. But seeking support from strangers on the internet will result in surrounding yourself with misinformation, discouragement, bad advice, and despair.”
This is why my online workshop (hang on, am I one of them?!) is called “Bad Story Guru Medicine.”
What is “Bad Medicine”?
I’m using “bad medicine” to refer to common persuasive tactics & narratives that are bad for us. They’re bad for many reasons (we’ll go over the tactics and their consequences in the workshop, including how they corrupt the creative’s relationship with their craft and themselves).
But, essentially, what makes the tactics bad is that they are built around non-mutual flourishing.
The guru benefits at the cost of others…the cost of the creatives they’re claiming to help, and the planet.
It’s also “bad medicine” for the story gurus because they’re trying to heal their own wound (lack of fulfillment, etc) through the wrong medicine. Fame and fortune won’t heal you.
What About Those Who Don’t Intend “Bad Medicine”?
I have unintentionally shared craft misinformation. When I was teaching interactive storytelling to film, games, animation, and multimedia students, I carefully made sure we covered multiple story structures. I gave the students many options and ways to choose them. But I also claimed they have that freedom as long as they stick to some core underlying structural beats. (This was due to the influence of a specific story system I ingested that won’t share here because I’m not sure if you’re immune to their tactics, yet!)
I wasn’t trying to mis-inform my fellow creatives. Instead, I spread it because I believed it was true.
So, it is true that some people share craft misinformation because they believe it.
But, it is also true that some people share craft misinformation as a tactic…because they mean it.
We know this as the distinction between disinformation and misinformation: between people who are manipulating and those who share the ideas because they have internalised them.
Both, however, are functionally misleading. Irrespective of whether one intends to or not, the very act of communicating something untrue is misleading. (I learnt this from a scholar I’ll bring up shortly.)
It’s always misinformation because it is untrue.
How do we know they’re doing misinformation or disinformation?
A good check is whether the tactics are actively maintained or even increased over time.
You see, nothing is fixed. My practice has changed. I change as I learn more from others and myself. But there are some folks who no matter how many times they make things (if they still make), and no matter how many people challenge them (there are always challenges), and no matter how much the landscape changes, they actively maintain their tactics. (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann call this “universe maintenance.”)
We can infer intent when these folks continue to use the same tactics across multiple editions, publications, courses, and they even expand the kinds of bad tactics they use (Chris Neilan will be talking about this in an upcoming publication).
Bad medicine is treating transformation as one-way.
But one thing that has niggled at me is the idea that they’re lying to me. I was never sure about that.
A person who helped me with this is Harry Frankfurt. He makes a distinction between a liar and a bullshitter. (Coincidentally, John August refers to Frankfurt’s book, called On Bullshit, in a recent Script Notes podcast — for a different reason.)
Frankfurt explains that the liar doesn’t want you to find the truth. They try to conceal and distract you from it.
The bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the truth. The bullshitter says things that are true and untrue! They don’t care about describing reality, just whether it serves their purpose.
Frankfurt explains that the liar and the bullshitter falsely present themselves as communicating the truth.
Both the liar and the bullshitter are united in their aim to get away with something.
So this is what sits better with me: A lot of story gurus aren’t trying to oppress us by leading us away from our creative agency. They just don’t care about what really helps us, only what helps them.
Shane Littrell’s work on bullshitting is relevant here, too. He says that bullshitting is functionally misleading (which I referred to before).
He also says that bullshitting is epistemically irresponsible (careless with knowledge), in that it is ‘constructed to sound superficially smart, impressive, or otherwise persuasive without genuinely being accurate, meaningful, or informative.’
Bad medicine is impression management at the cost of others.
Bad medicine is about non-mutual flourishing.
What To Do About It
A seemingly sensible action is mythbusting.
I know when I grew so frustrated with hearing craft misinformation repeated again and again, I felt the need to explain why that stuff is a myth.
Thankfully, before I did that, I learnt from George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!, that mythbusting doesn’t work. Why? Common mythbusting is about naming the myth and then explaining why it isn’t true. With that approach, you end up repeating their framing of the issue. Saying ‘don’t think of an elephant’ gets us thinking of an elephant.
Mythbusting centres their way of seeing the world, their way of seeing craft.
An intervention Lakoff recommends is a truth sandwich: Always start with the truth, then go to the myth, and then return to the truth. I used this method when I gave a talk on liberatory narrative design at a games conference, and explained why I was doing it.
Lakoff also says it’s important to start with your values. Activists draw on these insights. They frame their campaigns and frame conversations based on what is important to them and their audiences. Creative freedom? Adaptability? Etc. I try to remember this, too.
One thing I also tried was designing my classes and production meetings around liberatory design thinking and practices. I created an alternate world without the misinformation.
Liberatory craft creates a way out of that thinking, but I found it doesn’t stop craft misinformation.
Just being exposed to different ways of making did not stop my colleagues being susceptible to it (like I was). Studies have shown this, too: that just being exposed to accurate messages is not the most effective way to stop inaccurate messages.
That study said that another approach was more effective. I didn’t come to this approach through that study, but here it is:
Pre-bunking, or, inoculation.
Pre-bunking doesn’t mean it only works if you debunk before someone is exposed to misinformation (which is what I thought!). It means that misinformation is predictable and repeated across multiple sectors (multiple artforms, industries, and aspects of life). So, at any time you can find out what you’ll likely to be exposed to.
The process is about exposure. Like the way a vaccine works, you get exposed to a weak version of the idea virus — just enough to trigger what they call your mental immune system — without succumbing to it.
The approach can take the form of a game, too, where you take on the role of the person deliberately using the tactics. Personally, I usually don’t like taking on the perspective of selfish people. But when I played pre-bunking games with the intent to understand how manipulators do what they do, I found the experience insightful.
This is why I’ve jumped to communicating the how of craft misinformation.
I know some of you are on top of craft misinformation practices yourselves, but you likely haven’t experienced this pre-bunking approach. This is why I put these together.
What I also find extremely efficient about the pre-bunking approach is that I’ve been able to distill down the tactics and narratives that operate in all kinds of design, across organisations, government, neighbours, and families.
So that when we address it in our craft, we’re also more likely to address it in many aspects of our life.
We’ll also be doing this in a collective conversational manner, as this work can flourish when it is bottom-up and community-focused.
The Further Action
It’s important to me that we not only develop such tools, but we do it with mutual flourishing in mind.
To make non-mutual flourishing obsolete, we need to be deliberate in our relationships with our colleagues, design, ourselves…and story gurus. We can’t treat story gurus as they’ve treated us.
As educator Paulo Freire said in Portuguese originally, ‘In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.’
That’s because our relationships with each other are the crux of the issue and the way through. In the workshop, I’ll share mutual flourishing responses to craft misinformation. Here are some fellow thinkers in this work:
In Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales says:
The ecological crisis we find ourselves in is in fact a crisis of human relations, with each other and with the entire planet. It is a crisis created by a set of false assumptions about reality, the same assumptions that drive all systems of oppression.
In White Supremacy Culture, Tema Okun says this:
The invitation on this and every page is to investigate how these characteristics and qualities lead to disconnection (from each other, ourselves, and all living things) and how the antidotes can support us to reconnect.
In Right Story, Wrong Story, Tyson Yunkaporta says this:
Right story is not about objective truth.’ ‘Right story,’ he continues, ‘never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land.
Good medicine is about good relations, between the craft advisor and us (we’re all advisors and learners).
How to cite this page:
Dena, Christy (2026) “We’re Stopping Craft Misinformation So We All Flourish!” Next World Narrative, 3 June. www.nextworldnarrative.org/articles-2/how-to-effectively-do-myth-busting/