Create stories worth their attention

Think about what catches your attention; what stops you from scrolling past a post; or why you visit an online store again. Which particular newsletter do you actually open? Usually, what they all have in common are stories that offer something of value—whether it’s insight, news, amusement, empathy, hope, beauty or entertainment.

Although most dictionaries define ‘content’ as any substance that fills space, the recent use of the word has taken a definite focus on information designed to be consumed online. When we say digital stories, we’re talking about stories made to fit your online platforms and appeal those audiences.

When creating digital stories, we recommend it supplement your business goals in a way that customers look forward to hearing from you. Effective digital stories work because it’s meaningful; it also helps in making your brand memorable for the right reasons. Just consider how you subconsciously place value in the conversations with those who habitually send those 'Good morning' messages on WhatsApp, and those who share interesting stories in the group chat.

Stories for websites, blogs, and social media are the most common digital stories that our clients order, followed by commissions for film scripts and online publications. Occasionally, we take on more complex digital story forms too—like playlists.

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Read more about spaces with stories here.

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We help our clients develop consistent and meaningful digital stories that align with business goals. As you know, there is less friction when customers trust who and what they're buying. We found that connecting with customers through shared values and affinities is a good place to start building trust. If you follow a consistent narrative that, over time, turns into a sort of kinship. Whether it be growing your brand awareness, turning customers into advocates, improving customer retention, driving sales, growing a community, or establishing authority and industry expertise, our experience has taught us that stories designed to supplement business goals have the best return on investment.

Tell us what you’re looking for.

Monthly Story, October 2022

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Image → Lionel Wendt (1900-1944)

Archetype → Creator

Rasa → Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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Yesterday echoes in me; traces of its faces and voices sweep in through my seaside window, retelling stories and laughing. Like a song, they lift me to heights of rapture at times and cease altogether at another moment, dropping me back to Earth, only to begin again. I had been let into a secret world on this island so far from my home.

It was when I visited a house named Alborada in Colombo—my first social gathering since moving to Ceylon eight weeks ago. Taking a liking to my writing, Alborada’s owner had invited me to an evening of drinks. Upon entering, I was transported by a goddess statue framed between the leaves and roots of a philodendron creeper climbing the walls of Alborada. Her ethereal form—atop a lotus, holding an instrument of music—shone through the earthliness of the red clay that it was crafted from. She emanated a beauty that I can only describe as sanctified—beyond the grasp of human desire. It bathed the world in a light of sacred delight. I walked from room to room, drinking cooled tea and arrack insisted upon me, drifting between the many paintings of seascapes and the wilderness that are as exuberant as they were sincere. I shifted dreamlike between photographs of beautifully sun-coloured men and women—their skin more akin to bronze than flesh—and meeting their real-life counterparts visiting Alborada that evening. Artistic savants, oriental misfits, musicians who pronounce your name like a song, writers, actors—all resting comfortably between east, west, classical, and neoteric. They befriended me with ease, opening new layers of the quiet, natural extravagance inherent to this place. I realized that, along Albarado’s leafy verandas and courtyards, I’ve encountered Colombo’s bohemia—a secret island within an island.

Back here at my house by the edge of the sea—where my only companions are Muthu the cook and Kalu the feline—the brief world at Alborada seems like a daydream. I long for my next invitation to revisit. But, in a sense, I remain part of that world with its allusions overwhelming me still. Outside my window is the miracle that is the sea. In the way the sea rebirths old rocks and sand trembling anew with its salty fluids, I remember the textures of a particularly beautiful painting at Alborada. The way the sea glimmered this morning—with fish throbbing in bright yellow, ultramarine, streaks of sanguine, and gleaming fertile greens like forests come alive—left coloured stains on my mind. The curves of the woman selling fruits blended gracefully with those of the mangoes, guavas and sapodillas in her basket; the rhythm of her walk and the rise and fall of her breasts were timed with the chorus of the ocean. Watching the fishermen—their browned muscles as taut as the ropes pulling their sails— I recalled the many nudes pinned up in the photography studio room of my host at Alborada. I can no longer help seeing a sense of natural innocence in everything that is sensual.

I think of the goddess at Alborada. Someone said she was Saraswatī—a divine symbol of life’s ever-persistent will to create beauty. I feel her again and again in the call to absorb sights, chroma, taste, and scents that flood my senses and in the revel of pouring it out through my pen.

I realize how much the encounters at Alborada had changed me. I no longer feel like an outsider on a faraway island; I’m no longer limited to a house by the sea and the work of the embassy. Instead, I find myself an unwitting devotee of Saraswatī who had chanced upon her playground. It makes me feel like a child and a king, all at once.

Although I’m alone, the colors of the fish, the taste of tea, and the memory of being made part of a secret world surround me. I allow myself to get lifted with the smell of frangipani, scatter in the rustle of palm leaves, and melt into the call of Saraswatī.

Read the previous story

Go to Reading List for this story.

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Reading List, September 2022

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

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Rasa → Bhayānakam (भयानकं): Horror, terror. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: black, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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Archetype → Ruler

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This story was created based on the ruler archetype in the teachings of Carl Gustav Jung. According to his theories, the human mind is not a blank slate at birth (tabula rasa), and instead, inherits biological aspects, fundamental, and unconscious elements of our ancestors. This is where archetypes—proto patterns of the human mind—come in. Among the twelve archetypes of the human mind described by Jung, the ruler is one of the most recognizable and corruptible. The core desire of this archetype is gaining power and exercising control. The Ruler archetype is one of the most dangerous archetypes in its shadow, becoming authoritarian.

In the current socio-political context across the world, and in Sri Lanka where a majority of our subscribers live, we’re witnessing examples of the shadow rulers establishing totalitarian and authoritarian governments leaving little space for public opinion, let alone dissent. Jung’s teaching can help us develop a view of the world and its problems that includes the spiritual, psychological and the cultural.

Parallel to this, we worked with two main aesthetic flavours from the eastern Rasa theory—bhayānakam rasa which brings on moods connecting to terror and the adbūtha rasa evoking the strange and the mysterious. This reading list includes some of the literature, writing, music and films that inspired us in the making of this story.

• The emotion of terror, or bhayanaka rasa, has its origin in the dominant state of fear. The vibhavas of this state are hideous noises, sights of ghosts, panic, anxiety, staying in an empty house, sight of death, and the captivity of dear ones. The anubhavas of this state are the trembling of the hands and feet, change of colour, and the loss of voice. Its bhavas are paralysis, perspiration, fear, stupefaction, dejection, agitation, restlessness, inactivity, epilepsy, and death.

• Wood from kaluwara, Diospyros ebenum, or kaggawali, commonly known as Ceylon ebony, is highly valued for its incredibly dense heartwood, which takes at least a hundred and fifty years to mature into its coveted deep black. Kaluwara is a strictly protected species, but this rare wood is still illegally harvested by people and companies of influence.

• 2002, Female Ruler Archetype of Empress St Helena. Homza Christian,

• Stanford Experiment; The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was designed to examine the effects of situational variables on participants' reactions and behaviors in a two-week simulation of a prison environment. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led the research team who ran the study in the summer of 1971. What happened when a few normal people were given absolute power and what they did with it. A cautionary true story about the human factor in cultism today.

• Don Juan Dharmapala or Dom João Dharmapala Peria Bandara (1541 – 27 May 1597) was last king of the Kingdom of Kotte, in Sri Lanka. He is also known as the puppet king of Sri Lanka, controlled by the Portuguese, he once bequeathed his entire realm to the King of Portugal. The Portuguese takeover of Kotte, however, was resisted by the people and would only be completed much later after Dharmapala’s death.

• There are few who have been stalwarts of Sri Lankan politics in the last half-century quite like the man often referred to as “the fox”. Ranil Wickremesinghe gained the nickname for his apparently wily ability to repeatedly resurrect his political career from the worst failures. Finally, last July, Wickremesinghe achieved what had appeared to be a lifelong political dream: he took the executive office of the president of Sri Lanka without a single vote from his citizens and through a parliamentary secret ballot.

• The leader who transitions from the shadow to the light side of their archetype understands their role as a compassionate facilitator instead of a tyrant. The Indian emperor Asoka and Paul—a disciple of Jesus Christ, are two charismatic leaders who played historic roles in the rise of their faiths, embodying this transition from the shadow ruler to the more benevolent form of the archetype; This paper—Asoka and Paul: transformations that led to effective leadership—by Cheryl Patton (Eastern University, St Davids, PA, USA) states.

• 2004, Tarot Cards: An Investigation of their Benefit as a Tool for Self Reflection. Gigi Hofer, Concordia University.

• The Sri Lankan devil bird: In Sri Lankan folklore, the Devil Bird or Ulama is a creature said to emit bloodcurdling human-sounding shrieks in jungles at night. Its precise identity is still a matter of debate although the spot-bellied eagle-owl matches the profile of Devil Bird to a large extent.

• The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil is a 2007 book which includes professor Philip Zimbardo's first detailed, written account of the events surrounding the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) — a prison simulation study which had to be discontinued after only six days due to several distressing outcomes and mental breaks of the participants. The book includes over 30 years of subsequent research into the psychological and social factors which result in immoral acts being committed by otherwise moral people. The book won the American Psychological Association's 2008 William James Book Award.

• 1991, Administrative Adaptability: The Dutch East India Company and Its Rise to Power. D. Gerstell.

• Kane's content mainly consists of short films as well as animations that induce terror asan aesthetic flavour. He has made films based on the Backrooms, and animations based on Attack on Titan. More of his work and details reveal Kane’s impressive knack for understanding the emotion of terror.

• New research digs deeper into the social science behind why power brings out the best in some people and the worst in others

• The Last King of Scotland is a 2006 historical drama film directed by Kevin Macdonald from a screenplay by Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock. Based on Giles Foden's 1998 novel, it depicts the dictatorship of Ugandan President Idi Amin through the perspective of a fictional Scottish doctor. The film stars Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy in these respective roles, with Kerry Washington, Simon McBurney, and Gillian Anderson in supporting roles. The title of the film refers to Amin's claim of being the King of Scotland.

• Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

• IDLES - MOTHER

• Colombo is not Sri Lanka’s capital, but it is the one city that you can’t avoid in matters of gaining access, and sometimes even viewpoints, to the world beyond. Understanding Colombo has much to do with exploring its unshakably commercial soul and origins.

>> Read the previous reading list