How to write a compelling story
- Set a goal: What the listener needs to understand, feel, or think.
- Decide what story will best help you reach your goal:
A story about following a goal in spite of the challenges; A discussion of life lessons, understanding what the obstacles gave; A demonstration of how you, your team, or your company became stronger by overcoming the challenges – the “defeating the monster” story.
A story about the importance of learning from your mistakes and gaining happiness through overcoming difficulties; The ability to take risks and accept failure; Demonstration of how a hero (employee or company) earned his or her success – the story “From Rags to Riches”.
A story about the benefits of being open to new experiences; A story about how the hero became a new person; A demonstration of the power of friendship – “The Journey” story.
A story about the importance of sticking to one’s beliefs; Trying to succeed, the hero changes emotionally; Demonstrating the power of teamwork – The Quest story.
Narrating the beginning of the difficulties of a partnership – romantic, friendship or business; Discussing what experience your hero had in a difficult situation; Demonstrating how both parties begin to accept and support each other – Comedy plot.
Using a strong, principled character to highlight problems in society; Comparing your own principles with those of a negative character; Demonstrating how not to act, we can learn from the negative character’s mistakes – Tragedy story.
Storytelling about a cautionary experience; When to show the importance of having support from loved ones; Demonstrating that everyone can change for the better – the “Rebirth” story.
Use different meta-story elements in telling the story.
Most meta-stories are variations of the following scheme:
a) Expectation – the invitation to adventure, and the promise of what’s to come in the book;
b) Dreaming – the hero or heroine initially succeeds in something – everything seems to be going well, sometimes with a sense of having fallen into his or her own dream;
c) Crash – the first confrontation with the real enemy. Everything begins to fall apart;
d) Nightmares – point of maximum tension, disaster strikes the heroes and it seems all hope is lost;
e) Resolution – the hero or heroine wins and gets all the goodies.
- Don’t be afraid to change the storyline.
Do it once or even several times – the more events around the hero and the more unexpected the ending, the better.
It was about a girl – and in the end it turned out to be about a cat. The heroes played chess, but they themselves were pawns in someone else’s game. The more sense, the more interesting it is to read.
- Make sure you haven’t forgotten any of the important elements of the story:
- the location of the action,
- the appearance of the hero,
- the character of the hero,
- the essence of the conflict,
- the hero’s attempts to solve the problem,
- changes in the hero and/or the situation,
- resolution of the conflict.
- Check the language of the story:
- whether emotions and feelings are involved,
- whether you are using clerical language and clichés,
- whether there are metaphors, hyperbole, litotes, and other means of expression,
- whether the story has room for the reader’s imagination (a frame),
- whether the distance to the reader is chosen correctly and whether it is not violated in the course of the story,
- whether it is possible/wanted to retell the story to a friend.
And finally, a few more words about storytelling today. Many people think that this word means some magical tool, a magic wand, which you take out and start telling stories, like Scheherazade, and everyone magically gathers and listens to these stories. Actually, of course, that’s not true. It doesn’t work that way.
Of course, people are inherently grounded in stories, the whole genre of written communication grew up on stories we were once told. But not every story works. There is only one story format that lives on in social media today-the hero’s journey.
This is the format that everyone reproduces endlessly. While there are at least four story plots in world literature. Borges tells us: there is the story of the hero’s return, the story of the search, the story of the heroes storming and defending a fortified city, and the story of God’s suicide. Christopher Brooker offers seven plots, and Aristotle as many as 36.
But for some reason everyone stubbornly reproduces one story: “I walked, I walked, I faced difficulties, then I found magical helpers, then I won. And now I’ll tell everyone how to win, come to me for training.
Because there are so many of these one-type stories, people’s sensitivity to them has dulled. This is what happens with any stylistic device. It used to be terribly popular to start a text with questions, then it stopped working. Because the reader began to understand what was going to happen next, already at the pitch stage. Then there were the “pain-more pain-solution” posts. They became so numerous that people stopped tolerating them and, accordingly, stopped reading them. And then came the fashion for storytelling-let’s tell the hero’s journey.