Storytelling Archive - Page 2 of 12

The simple truth about storytelling

Contrary to what some storytelling coaches want you to believe, in the end there’s only one thing you need to understand about storytelling.

And it’s this question: “What happens next?”

I mean, of course, you can say a lot more about storytelling. The hero’s journey does work. “Show, don’t tell!” is useful advice. As is the three-act-structure and many other techniques …

But in the end, all of that is optional.

Because the only thing that matters is whether your audience is curious to learn more. If you nail that, it doesn’t matter whether it’s through the hero’s journey or some other fancy framework.

Storytelling really isn’t a mystical art locked behind gates of complexity. At its core, it’s simple, straightforward, and something anyone can absolutely do.

Just tap into your audience’s curiosity!

That’s it.

If your audience wants to know more, you’ve nailed it. Even if you’ve never heard of the hero’s journey or any other storytelling formula … when your story makes people sit up and wonder what’s next, you’re telling a great story.

“What happens next?” is the only questions you need to ask for that. The better you understand your audience’s needs, their desires, their questions, the easier it will become to find a compelling answer to that question.

If it’s using the hero’s journey, that’s totally fine (it means you’re using it right). But if you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry! The more important information is to know your audience.

So, what is your audience dying to know?

If your story is messy

… don’t add more; find its heart and show that.

Take a step back, subtract the non-essential, and amplify the essential!

The Tipping Point

There’s a tipping point in the journey of preparing a speech.

It’s that electric instant when heart, gut, and mind synchronize, and you’re swept up in a tide of confidence and pride because everything clicks into place.

It’s the best part of any session with my clients.

Imagine we’re pouring over your narrative, dissecting thoughts, and assessing arguments in an intense session. The walls begin to fill with thoughts. It still very much feels like chaos.

But at some point, things start to shift …

Slowly at first.

And then, rather suddenly, it happens. A wave of realization hits. You look at the wall and a genuine, irrepressible smile forms. You’re not just pleased—you’re thrilled! Your gut feels it, your heart swells with pride, and your intellect nods in staunch approval. Chaos has turned to order, confusion to clarity. The story now unfolds in your mind with crystal clarity.

If you closed your eyes at that moment you would maybe see yourself on the stage. The spotlight shines, not as a daunting glare but as a warm embrace. The audience fades into a blur, but their energy is palpable. As you deliver your story, each word is uttered with conviction. Each slide, each gesture, and each pause is deliberate, powerful. The world witnesses not just the speaker, but a storyteller in full command, an orator who has grown beyond their already impressive standards.

This is no fantasy. It’s attainable – a reality, in fact, that I get to witness regularly with my clients.

The storyteller’s rope

Why did the storyteller bring a rope to his talk? To tie his stories together, but he just ended up tangling them more!

No, seriously, there’s a stark difference between crafting a cohesive narrative and cobbling together a bunch of stories, hoping that something sticks. The latter is like trying to make sense of a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from different boxes. Sure, each piece might be colorful and captivating, but together they’re just a confusing mess. The former, however, is an art form – using individual stories to guide the audience to a meaningful destination on a meaningful path.

Kudos to anyone who can weave in that hilarious story about their cat, a trip to Bermuda, and that one time they met a celebrity in an elevator. But if by the end of it, I’m left wondering what the connection was, or worse, what the entire talk was about, then we’ve missed the mark entirely.

It’s not about how many cool anecdotes you can cram in. It’s about making sure every thread counts. Don’t distract with the flash and the flair. If you’re just shooting for the “wow”, you’re probably missing the deeper “aha”.

Storytelling is a powerful tool, but think first about how the talk itself can be turned into a compelling story and only then about which stories and anecdotes can be used to illustrate your points.

Cliffhangers

Cliffhangers s*ck.

You wanna know so badly what happens next but the show just won’t tell you. You’ll have to come back for the next episode. Which you’ll do.

Is there a moment in your communication where you could do the same? Where you could stop and your audience would be super excited and super frustrated at the same time because they need to know badly how the story unfolds?

If you stopped there, would they come back for the next episode?

If not then what could be a piece of information that does the job?

You don’t actually stop, of course, but you’ll have your audience glued to your lips.

Top speakers

Top speakers excel at speaking thanks to repetition.

They deliver (basically) the same speech hundreds of times. If you listen to them multiple times in a short period of time, you’ll notice two things:

Most stories, jokes, and punchlines are the same.
They are not exactly the same.

Great communicators tweak their communication and refine it. They don’t try to come up with ever new ideas and ever new ways of saying the same things.

They try to find the best way of saying that thing. If a story works, they’ll refine it until it’s the best version of that story to make that particular point (and, of course, if a story doesn’t work they’ll look for better ones).

The best speakers speak so often that they have many opportunities to test this.

How can you create situations to test your stories and refine them?

Backwards stories

Some of the best crime stories work backwards. We witness the murder and know who’s the murderer right from the start. And then we want to find out why they did it. Or if (and how) they can get away with it.

Traditional crime stories work the other way around: We don’t know who the murderer is but want to find out. Great movies exist for both approaches. That’s because none of the approaches is inherently better than the other.

It depends.

Great storytellers know that and will consider both directions before settling with how they tell their story. (In fact, they will explore even more ways to unfold the story than just these two.)

How about your story? What would happen if you turned it upside down? If you started with the big reveal and then used your audience’s curiosity to find out how that’s even possible and use that curiosity to craft a compelling storyline that leads them ever deeper into the fascinating details?

There are a million ways to tell a story.

Better than the truth

If your customers knew everything you know, would they still buy?

Well, of course they are never going to know everything, so the real question here is this:

Is the story you are crafting about your offering a truthful representation of what you do (and how you do it)?

Selfish marketers don’t really care. They will happily bend the truth, tweak a few things here and there, and leave anything out that would make the story sound less favorable. Selfish marketers look for ways to tell their story that makes it sound better than the truth.

An early client of mine, some 15 years back, was obsessed with giving their “effectiveness charts” more bang – the problem being that the underlying data had no bang at all. But rather than to optimize the product, they invested heavily in graphic design to make it look like it had bang.

Selfish marketers can’t trust the customer with the decision to buy because they don’t trust in their product, either.

The best brands are different. They start by building great products – products which are actually effective and which really do serve (real) people’s needs and desires in a delightful way.

And so these brands dare to tell true stories about their product and the experiences that their customers have.

The best part is this: For the customer, it will still sound better than the truth – their current truth. And if it’s a truly great product, it will even exceed these expectation. These products delight because the marketer was telling the truth.

Do you trust your product in delivering that experience? Do you dare to tell a true story about it?

“How long?”

“How long?”, she asks the doctor.
Immediately, we’re right in the middle of a story.

Which is typical for modern movies. It’s one of the aspects in which storytelling in movies has changed significantly over the past few decades.

The average early 90s movie is hard to bear for many teenagers because they started soooo sloooowww. Part of the reason was that filmmakers back then felt the need to start as early as possible so we would have the back story to understand what was going to happen later.

Today’s movies (and TV shows) are very different. They will start as late as possible, ideally right in the middle of the action … at the most captivating event.

And they will give us only exactly the pieces that we absolutely need to understand the action. They make us care first, before they inform us. If, at some point, we would need backstory to understand what’s happening, modern movies will give it to us at that point, a point where we absolutely need that piece of information to be able to follow along.

This makes for a much more tense story.

Actually, today’s most brilliant filmmakers push that principle even further. They will make sure that we want a piece of information, before they finally give it to us. They make us curious for the backstory.

In contrast, yesterday’s filmmakers considered backstory as pure information. Often, they would give us the information before we wanted it, just to make sure that we had it when we needed it.

How about your own communication? How do you treat background information? Are you starting your presentation with it? If so, can you re-structure your storytelling in a way that you’re giving the backstory at a point when your audience is dying to learn it?

How to charge 8x the price

This Moleskine notebook costs €13.

At your local grocery store, you can get a double pack of similarly looking, similarly equipped notebooks for €3.

Why would anyone pay 8 times the price for a Moleskine?

Because it’s not the notebook that they buy but this story that Moleskines come with:

“Moleskine is the legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin. This trusty, pocket-size travel companion held sketches, tones, stories and ideas before they were turned into famous images or pages of beloved books.”

A notebook is a simple tool. Yet, there’s a lot to say about it. We can speak about the size, the build quality, the material, the features, the variety, the price, and many more aspects …

Moleskine, the maker of that notebook, chose not to speak about any of those. Instead they told a story.

A story that turned a small Milanese publisher called “Modo e Modo” into a beloved worldwide brand. What started as a small independent book publisher now is exclusively devoted to making notebooks. The initial production was 5,000 copies of their notebooks. Today, the company has changed their name to “Moleskine” and runs signature stores in all major cities of the world. They sell millions of their notebooks each year.

For €13!

As I said, you can get a double pack of similar looking notebooks of similar build quality in our local grocery store for 3€. Again: Why on Earth would anyone pay 8x the price for a notebook? Isn’t it just a bundle of blank paper?

No, it’s not.

Because it’s not just any notebook. It’s the same kind of notebook that creative geniuses like Picasso and Ernest Hemingway used to scribble down their ideas. At least that’s what the story suggests. And just think about what became of them …

What Moleskine has achieved with this story is that this is not just a notebook, anymore. It’s a notebook for creative people. And if you are creative, too, then you need a notebook for creative people, right? It’s what all the great creatives used. Creatives can’t just buy a notebook from the supermarket. They must buy a notebook for creative people.

This is a real masterpiece in communication that achieves two things:

Moleskine didn’t change what people wanted. They didn’t make customers want a more expensive notebook. They made customers see that they are creative. And so, essentially, if you are creative, you don’t even have a choice. You can only buy their notebook. Because that’s what creatives do. Creatives use notebooks for creatives. Moleskines help creatives get what they want: feel creative.
So, essentially, they bring the future into the present. They make creatives visualise themselves becoming even more creative by using a Moleskine notebook. Just write your scribbles into a Moleskine and soon you’ll be becoming even more creative. And – who knows – even famous? This notebook makes creatives feel even more creative.

Posts in Tag: Storytelling