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The Seeker
Every Tuesday, The Productive Disruptive delivers storytelling science, message makeovers, cultural commentary, and a little rebellious hope for anyone still stubborn enough to believe communication can change the world.
Dorian Johnson
September 01, 2026
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So there’s this meme, right…
I truly love the internet sometimes. It feels appropriate to start here since I’ve spent the past week grieving Dolly Parton.
I did not know this woman, and she did not know me.
But she deeply impacted me.
I’ve joked for years that my life can be divided into two acts: pre-Dollywood and post-Dollywood.
I remember watching 9 to 5 for the first time in my now-wife’s parents’ old basement, conveniently around the same time I was getting deeply into my bourgeoisie/proletariat bag and thinking more intentionally about power.
Years later, I finally made it to Dollywood. Truly changed my entire life.
Inside her Songteller exhibit, surrounded by evidence of this absolutely bonkers career, I saw these words stretched across a wall:
“It all gets back to… I am, first of all, a songwriter and a singer.”
Dolly built an unfathomable empire by any stretch of the imagination.
And underneath everything, she was saying:
I’m a writer; that’s what led to all the other stuff.
Dolly was one of my storytelling teachers, and you best believe I was a Padawan to that Jedi!
Everything is material.
I’ve been inhaling old Dolly interviews across decades, and one thing that kept surfacing is how seriously she took an idea whenever it arrived, even if it felt like something to throw away.
She’d capture it on whatever was available, keeping a pad of paper and something to write with everywhere, even in places where she would apply makeup.
Famously, a dry-cleaning tag became the first home of “Coat of Many Colors”, a song she widely regarded as her favorite song she wrote.
Writer’s gon write, and whatever you can record a thought on counts.
Thankfully, we got a notes app or voice memos now, but sheesh, respect that game.
And tune in, because everything is material.
She treated what she noticed as potentially worth keeping before she knew exactly what it would become.
And I think that’s the part we often get backward.
We wait until we know something is a story before deciding it’s worth capturing.
But sometimes, you just don’t know yet.
Sometimes it’s just a sentence you can’t stop thinking about. A line or quote you heard that shifts your perspective. A moment that made you go, huh.
You don’t need the story yet. You need the raw material.
Capture first. Make meaning later.
Then, when you come back to it, you can start crafting the story.
And stories really don't need much to get going: a character who wants something and some kind of conflict getting in the way.
Always remember that.
And conflict doesn’t have to be good versus evil or some save-the-world shit, either.
Sometimes, two people simply want different things, or there are different interpretations
In “Coat of Many Colors,” Dolly is a little girl excited to wear the coat her mother made her. She gets to school, and the other kids make fun of her for it.
She sees something made with love. They see something worth ridiculing.
And then there’s “I Will Always Love You.”
Dolly wanted to leave The Porter Wagoner Show and pursue her own career(and thank fuck she did🙏🏾)
Porter wanted her to stay.
Again, that’s enough.
No need for some massive external threat looming in the distance.
Dolly wanted something. Porter wanted something different.
Conflict.
How might this inform your next story?
🧠 Story Science Side Note: Get Concrete.
There’s a reason “Dolly grew up poor in Appalachia” hits differently than a little girl walking into school wearing a coat her mother made from scraps.
Concrete details help turn abstract ideas into something we can mentally represent: a person, a place, an object, an action.
The data gives you the orchard: the patterns, conditions, and landscape.
The story gives you the apple: one concrete experience within it, with all the specific qualities that make that apple that apple.
You need both. But if you want someone to buy into a story, hand them an apple from the orchard.
📝 Message Makeover:
BEFORE:
Families in rural Appalachia experience high rates of socioeconomic hardship.
AFTER:
What can socioeconomic hardship look like for one family in rural Appalachia? A mother stitching scraps of fabric into a coat because buying a new one isn’t an option...
Move from the population-level condition to one concrete way that condition can show up in someone’s life.
🛠️ The PHacilitator’s Corner: Catch it before it disappears.
Borrow from Dolly this week.
Collect three pieces of raw material from your everyday life.
A sentence that sticks with you. A conversation that happened. A detail you noticed somewhere.
Make sure you capture it somewhere
Notes app. Voice memo. Notebook, etc.
Don’t even worry about what any of it is for. Just catch it.
Come back at a later time and see what, if anything, is there.
Maybe there’s a story. Maybe there’s a question worth exploring. Maybe there’s a connection you didn’t notice before.
This small thing truly could be a gateway to so many stories to tell.
A random conversation with coworkers about American Girl dolls eventually became a LinkedIn carousel about public health and infectious disease history.
So yeah, ya never know😂
RIP Queen Dolly