What's the story?

IT’S HARDER THAN IT LOOKS

I recently had a transformative experience. I got up on stage at The Moth LA and told a story in front of a live audience. HA. I’m still recovering. If you don’t know The Moth, it’s an organization that hosts regular storytelling events across the globe. Anyone can get up and tell a five-minute story, which is then judged for its quality and power. For a first-timer, it’s a nerve-wracking experience. For anyone in the audience, one thing immediately becomes clear, telling great stories is not easy. Like most things, there are a few folks with natural talent - but for most of us it’s a challenging assignment. At Wee Beastie, we’ve been telling brand stories for decades, but the thought of getting up on stage and telling a story to a live audience induces sweaty palms and nervous twitches.

Storytelling is trickier than it looks. Spend a few minutes scrolling LinkedIn and you could be forgiven for thinking that the AI revolution is going to turn us all into bot-powered Herman Melvilles, but according to the Wall Street Journal, companies are desperately seeking storytellers. 

Why is it difficult to hire someone who can spin a few ripping yarns in service of a consumer brand? Surely that’s not too difficult a request. Are we not all experts? We are immersed in story from our earliest years. Barely out of diapers, we act out our imaginations in lively role plays - from bus driver to ninja warrior, from snow queen to stuffed-animal vet. We spin tales (tall and otherwise) to friends and parents, and live every thrilling moment of the stories we experience on the ever-present glowing screens. When our head hits the pillow, we spend a significant part of our sleeping hours immersed in magical narratives conjured by our own brain.

If we are all creatures of story, then why is it so hard to tell a good story?

In reality, storytelling is one of those skills that seems magical from a distance, but up close is a set of procedures and steps anyone can learn. And like everything, practice makes perfect.

Homo Narrativus 

From birth, we humans are primed to be storytellers. Scientists have shown that our whole system of memory works is based on story. We encode episodic memories as narratives, with each scene built from moments tied together in a sensible order with cause, effect and underlying meaning. The isolated facts we encounter decay quickly, but events with narrative coherence persist in our memory.

Why did we evolve this narrative method of memory? It turns out that it’s exactly what we needed to survive. According to scientists, the brain’s primary function is to act as a prediction machine. We are always asking ourselves, “given what just happened, what follows?” or “who did that, and why” and “what does this mean for me.” The primates that developed the best method for predicting the future based on the past tended to be the ones that passed on their genes to the next generation, iterating until we reached Homo sapiens, or as Walter Fisher proposed - Homo Narrativus. We are the story people.

The power of story allows us to share knowledge, values, norms and warnings with our tribe. Even our sense of self is held together by a personal narrative: “this is who I am, this is what I did, this is what happened to me and this is what it led to.”

Story is an entire cognitive scaffold for memory, meaning, identity and prediction.

This is the powerful communication tool that brands want to tap into. In an increasingly cluttered, dopamine-addicted world, creating deep engagement through story has become one of the most successful ways to connect with consumers.  

How do you become a better storyteller?

Storytelling is a skill we must learn, even though we may be intimately familiar with the medium. It reminds me of our relationship to music. We are bathed in songs, symphonies, rhythms and melodies from the time we are first aware of sound, but playing music is a whole other kettledrum of fish. Most of us can face down a piano keyboard and knock out a few notes, but performing a polished Chopin nocturne comes with only work and dedication. The good news is that storytelling is a lot easier to pick up. The best place to begin is telling stories of your own life.

The first step is to realize that story is not a sequence of events. Our daily life is packed with interruptions, confusion, unexplained consequences, partial information and incomplete pictures. Our memory-building brain works in retrospect. It selects what mattered, edits out the irrelevant and then paints in cause and effect while replacing the randomness with meaning, creating a coherent story, suitable for memory storage. This process is a lot harder than it looks and while we have the ability to do this for ourselves there is not guarantee we can get others to listen to our tales without nodding off, “no - I’m listening… honest.”

The sharing is hard because storytelling is an act of theory of mind. We are not automatically great at simulating other minds. To tell a good story we need to know:

• What does the audience already know?

• What do they care about?

• What will confuse them?

• What will make them lean in? 

A concept I’ve always found useful in brand storytelling is “resonance.” For me it began with the acceptance that the audience/viewer/consumer really does not care about our product or service. To create engagement, we must find out what it is they care about and address that. We only share our brand attributes, values and benefits when the door is open and we are welcome over the threshold. When we find a story that resonates, the door is more likely to open. 

What does the audience care about? The writer Jonathan Gottschall says, “Our stories must be about something that matters to the audience. Stories are about fear of death, the challenges of life, about power and the desire to wield influence and escape subjugation - they are not about going to the bathroom, driving to work, eating lunch or making coffee - unless those activities can be tied back to the great predicaments.”

Gottschall describes story as “…where we go to practice the key skills of human social life.” Psychologist Keith Oatley calls stories “flight simulators of human social life.”

So, remember this when you are writing for a brand: Whatever the marketing department needs you to say about the product, you had better make sure you are telling a story that addresses the (subconscious) need of the audience to learn how to live a meaningful life in this crazy world.

How to structure a story

1. There must be a PROBLEM. If there is no problem, there is no story. And that problem is usually rooted in some sort of conflict. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee describes three key types of conflict: conflict with another person, conflict with yourself and conflict with society. I would add to that, conflict with nature. These are easy places to look for your problem. So many brands are designed to ease or resolve some sort of conflict experienced by the consumer. This creates a straight line between product benefits and brand storytelling.

2.  There must be a hero. The story must have a protagonist. As an essential part of the experience for the audience is to step out of their own identity and experience the story through the person of the protagonist.

3. There must be an attempted solution to the problem/conflict.

4. The audience must learn something new about life/the universe/the human condition.

 The equation

Take your “sequence of events,” transform them with this formula and you are well on your way to creating a good story.

Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted extrication.

Here is an expanded version of this equation as a list of questions to ask yourself. 

• When did this happen?

• Where did it happen?

• Who is the protagonist?

• What is their problem?

• Why does it matter? (The “resonance.”)

• How do they solve the problem?

• What was the outcome?

• What do we learn about life?

Once you have these answers, you can begin to flesh out your story in a series of cause and effect beats. Use Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s formula: This happened, BUT then this happened, and THEREFORE this happened. The best stories have surprising twists and turns and the ending should always be unexpected.

Once you have your story roughed out, compose the hook. If you have spent any time creating stories for social media, you will know the importance of a good strong hook to break through the audience’s “wall of indifference.”

• I was driving home after a long day when I felt a lump in my neck.

• We were grocery shopping with the kids when we saw a teenage boy pull a knife.

• The doorbell rang. It was the police.

Now test it. Speak your story out loud to a trusted friend. Five minutes of conversation will expose all the holes, gaps, confusing elements and extraneous content. Then go back and revise. Do this a revision process a few times and your story will begin to develop it’s very own magical power. It will have transcended from a sequence of events to a hand-grenade of meaning, ready to explode in the minds of those you relate it to.

The better your personal stories, the better you will be able to write stories for paying clients. In the AI future, the human ability to spin a compelling narrative is going to be at a premium. Those who know how to do it well will command high salaries and have powerful career leverage. 

So let’s hear your story…