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Happy Tuesday!
Great comedians, screenwriters, marketers, and politicians all have at least one thing in common. They know how to connect with an audience and communicate their ideas in a way that's engaging and memorable.
They're all world class storytellers.
What does it mean to tell a great story? You know one when you hear it. But how do they actually work?
Lately I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to communicate ideas in ways that are engaging and memorable. Initially I came at this question from the perspective of an aspiring marketer and founder but it's also true that the ability to tell a great story makes you way more fun to hang out with. Who doesn't like a good story?
Unfortunately I usually suck at telling stories.
I tend to begin with too much irrelevant context at the beginning, distract my audience with unrelated side tangents, ramble with no clear punchline, leave out critical details, mix up the order of events etc.
The ability to tell a great story always felt like some gift that other people were born with.
To me, great stories, movies, and novels have this magical quality to them and the people who make them seem like geniuses of human emotion and experience.
Therefore I was surprised to learn that almost all stories share common elements which make them engaging and memorable. Even more surprising was the fact that as a lifelong consumer of stories, I was already very familiar with many of these common elements.
Communicating ideas in a narrative format is probably the most ancient form of communication. It is the most natural form of communication.
Before the creation of written languages, before the widespread distribution of books, cultures had to figure out how to consolidate generations of wisdom and experience.
They did it through stories.
The oldest ideas in our culture have been passed down to us in the form of myths, fairytales, parables, songs, and scripture. Every ancient story that's stood the test of time has done so because it offers vivid insight into the human experience or because it makes a complex idea easy to remember.
So what are these ancient common elements? How do we make an idea engaging to hear and easy to remember?
In her book Stories that Stick, Kindra Hall describes a narrative structure common to almost all stories.
Sounds simple but a lot of us less skilled storytellers tend to use the following framework almost by default.
One version is just a retelling of a series of events, this is boring. This is what I usually do.
The other version contains tension. Another expert storyteller, Jay Acunzo, creator of the podcast Unthinkable, describes how the core element of any compelling story is tension.
Tension is what makes us care. Tension is what makes us want to know what happens. Mapped onto Hall's structure you can see how tension plays a key role.
What will be the result of this disruptive event? Will things go back to normal? How will they change?
It's easy to illustrate this idea of structure and tension with example stories:
Will he leave his family to go fight? Will he come back? Who is this new enemy? Narrative tension is established.
Will the new coach transform the team? Will they finally beat their rivals and win the competition? How will the team have to evolve? Tension!
In each case we establish the normal state of the world and then create tension through a disruptive event which threatens to change the norm and transform the characters involved.
What if we apply this idea of narrative tension to sales copy for Tide to Go?
What might a descriptive, as opposed to a narrative structure, look like?
Which do you prefer?
I've heard thousands of stories in my life and never noticed these narrative patterns.
Probably because that's the point.
When done well the audience shouldn't. Instead they should just be connecting with the characters, feeling the tension, and excited to discover the resolution.
I'm just a beginner and I'm still learning how to incorporate these ideas into my own life, into conversations with my friends, and into my business. How do you use the power of stories to communicate ideas in yours?
Cheers,
Nick