Abstractions
Travis Stone did not work on Sundays. That was the position, the one he'd held since the agency was four people and a shared Google Drive, and he believed it the way you believe a thing you've decided to be true about yourself. So on the Sunday this week opened, he did not work.
He just opened the calendar three times before noon.
Not reviewing anything. Not managing anything, specifically. Checking. The way you check a stove you already turned off, where the checking is supposed to be reassurance and instead is the first honest piece of information in the room. By three he was running client numbers nobody had asked for, building a July projection two weeks early, pricing a piece of equipment they weren't bidding on yet. Useful work. The kind of useful work a person finds himself doing on a quiet Sunday when the week is, he keeps saying, quiet.
He closed the laptop at four-thirty and took the dog to the park and threw the ball sixteen times and told himself the week was fine.
He was right. The week was fine. He was also, the whole time, telling one story with his mouth and running a different one with his hands, and the gap between the two was the entire episode. Nobody in the show ever named it. That's the point. This column names it, because that's my job on Sundays.
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## Abstractions
The Storyteller Tactics card that drove this week's Mavericks episode is called Abstractions, and it is one of the quieter cards in the deck. It doesn't tell you how to structure a story or how to hook an opening. It tells you something about people, and then it asks you to build on it.
Here is the idea. When you want to understand what somebody actually thinks, you have a few different kinds of evidence available to you, and they are not equally honest. The card lays them out as levels. At the top, least reliable, is what people say they do. Below that, a little more honest, is what people say they want. Below that is what people actually do. And underneath all of it, the bedrock, is what people do when they think nobody's measuring. The deeper you go, the truer the data gets, and the gap between the top layer and the bottom layer is where the real story lives.
It comes out of design research and ethnography, the discipline of watching people use things instead of asking them how they use things. Anyone who has ever run a user interview knows the trap. You ask somebody how often they'd use a feature and they say constantly, every day, this would change my life. Then you ship it and watch the analytics and they touch it twice and never again. They weren't lying to you. They were telling you the story they tell themselves, which is a real thing, just not the same thing as the behavior. The action is the truth. The words are a later, softer layer laid over the top.
What I like about the card is that it isn't cynical. It doesn't say people are liars. It says people are two channels at once, and most of the time they're not even aware the channels disagree. The narrator running in your head is doing its best. It's just always a half-beat behind the body, which already knows.
For a storyteller this turns into a craft instruction, and it's a good one: show the gap, don't explain it. Put the saying and the doing both on the page, let them disagree, and trust the reader to feel the distance between them. The distance is the meaning. The second you have a character announce "I say one thing but I do another," you've collapsed two channels into one and killed the whole effect. You haven't shown an abstraction. You've shown a person who has already figured himself out, which is the least interesting kind of person to watch.
That's the tactic. Watch what people do, not what they say, and build the scene so the audience does the watching.
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## How we used it
The episode runs the card as structure, not as a line of dialogue. Five people, a full week, and the camera never once stops to tell you what any of it means.
Start with Travis, because Travis is the clearest case. His narrative is fixed and he repeats it: the week is clean, everything's fine, we're ahead where it matters. He says it to the empty room twice on Sunday, which is already a tell, because a person with a genuinely quiet week does not need to say so out loud. He says it to Eddie in the hallway Monday. He says it at the fire pit Saturday, twice more. The words never change.
His hands tell a different story all week. The Sunday calendar, opened three times. The Monday client call he placed for no reason except that he'd noticed the deadline and needed to do something about it. The Tuesday pause before answering an email he'd normally have knocked out in thirty seconds. The second client call Thursday. None of it was wrong. The work was real and useful. But it was the restless, anticipatory, slightly-off-the-beat work of a man whose body had already concluded the week was not quiet, running underneath a mouth that kept insisting it was. The episode never reconciles the two for you. It just lays them side by side and lets you hold both.
Then it gives you the watchers, which is the smartest move in the build. Alexis reads Travis from the side - not the front, where he performs, but the angle you need when the front is performing something. Clark reads him from a step ahead, the way you read a pattern you've lived through yourself. Two characters, two completely different sets of data, arriving at the same shape. They are the audience's stand-ins. The show is teaching you, without a word of instruction, exactly how to do ethnography on a person: stop listening to the narration and start watching the hands.
Cole is the deep layer, the bedrock data. He holds the whole week up invisibly - the vendor call at six AM Wednesday, the Sunday logistics emails nobody asked for, three problems dissolved before anyone experienced them as problems. That's what people do when they think nobody's measuring, and the show's quiet joke is that nobody is measuring, because invisible is how you know it's working. And then Thursday he lets one thing slip. A text he doesn't send. He isn't sure he did it by accident. That's the bottom level of the card surfacing in a single character: a man watching his own behavior for information about what he actually wants, which turns out to be the hardest research there is.
Raven gets the cleanest one-line demonstration. "That's mine," she says about the layering technique. "I worked that out myself." Offhand, no weight, stated and acknowledged and the room moves on. On first watch it's nothing. On rewatch it's a person telling you, plainly, what she values and what she'll carry out the door if she ever leaves. The action and the words agree for once, which is exactly why it slides by unnoticed.
And the empty chair. Travis pulls the chair that pairs with his into the circle Saturday and sits down next to it and nobody sits in it and nobody says anything. He doesn't look at it. He doesn't need to. The whole episode is in that chair: a man performing a settled, easy week while his hands keep setting a second place for something he won't name. Nobody abstracts it for you. It's just a chair, in a circle, empty, all evening.
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## Three takeaways for your own work
Put the saying and the doing in the same frame and shut up. The strongest beat in the episode is Travis insisting the week is clean while the page quietly logs every unnecessary thing his hands do. The show never says "but his actions told a different story." It doesn't have to. It trusts you to hold both channels and feel the gap. In your own writing - a case study, a brand story, a profile - resist the sentence that explains the contradiction. Lay the two facts next to each other and let the reader close the distance. The distance is the whole point, and a reader who closes it themselves believes it in a way no narrator can hand them.
Assign somebody to watch from the side. Alexis and Clark exist so the audience has a seat. They model the skill the card is built on: ignore the front, read the angle the person isn't managing. When you tell a story about a customer, a founder, a team, find the character who's watching closely and not talking yet, and put the reader in that chair. It's a more honest vantage than the one the subject is performing from, and it lets your audience discover the truth instead of being told it.
The truest evidence is what people do when nobody's counting. Cole at six AM. Raven's offhand "that's mine." Travis opening a calendar he swears he isn't managing. The unguarded action outranks every stated intention, in fiction and in the room you're actually marketing to. If you want to know what a brand believes, don't read the values page. Watch where the budget goes when the quarter gets tight. Then build the story around the doing, because the doing is the only part nobody can take back later.
That's the tactic. The gap was the episode. Nobody named it, everybody lived it, and you only had to watch the hands.
The Tell is the directors-cut teardown. Each week one storytelling tactic, one episode, named and explained. The curtain comes up on purpose.
Listen to this week's Marfa Mavericks episode. Apple Podcasts · RSS
This is giovanni gallucci's agency. He built this world. If you want one built for your brand instead of a campaign, that's the work he does. gallucci.NET.
