As communicators, we all know stories are one of the most powerful tools at our disposal.
Studies confirm that creative storytelling has the unparalleled power to captivate audiences and persuade them to act in our favor.
But how do you go about crafting a captivating story?
Here’s a step-by-step guide to creative storytelling that will help you win hearts, change minds, and get the results you want—whether it’s convincing a customer to buy, an employee to get on board, or a skeptical public to see your point-of-view.
To bring these lessons to life, let’s start with a tale about creative storytelling, which I’ve told many times, including on this very blog.
It serves as the perfect illustration of the structure and process I’ll outline below.
Estela works in a candy factory, where she’s in charge of inspecting packages of gum before they leave the plant. I asked her what she does to ensure a quality product, and she walked me through her processes, demonstrated the equipment, and showed me an extensive checklist she uses.
It was impressive, but it didn’t grab me. So I asked her about her kids, and that’s when she lit up. “They call me the Candy Lady,” she beamed. She pointed to a code on the bottom of one of the packages that identifies when and where the gum was made, right down to the individual shift and production line.
Here’s the kicker: her children know the code. So whenever her family goes to the store, her kids run straight to the candy aisle, turn over the packages of gum, and when they find the right one, announce, “This is mommy’s gum! My mommy made this gum.”
The bottom line: it’s good enough for your family because Estela is down on the line every day making sure it’s good enough for hers.
Estela’s story relies on a simple structure: a character in pursuit of a goal in the face of a challenge or obstacle.
How the character resolves that challenge drives the narrative.
In this story, our character is Estela.
Her goal is to turn out a quality product.
The challenge she faces is how to stay focused on quality while spending hour after hour watching packages of gum go by.
She resolves the challenge by thinking of her customers as being as important to her as her children.
So there’s your structure.
Now, how do you go about your own creative storytelling?
Creating a captivating story involves these five steps:
Understand that this doesn’t have to be a sequential process.
It’s not like building a house, where you lay the foundation first and then construct the walls, before finally adding the roof.
For instance, it’s unlikely you will simply dream up the audience you want to reach, like customers or investors, without having an idea of what you want them to do.
But for the sake of this exercise, let’s break these steps down separately and in order.
Knowing your audience is the most important step in your creative storytelling. It’s what truly connects and resonates.
After you’ve identified your audience (employees, members, shareholders, prospects), be sure you understand them.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Estela’s story was part of an internal communications campaign.
So we reviewed employee survey results, collected anecdotal feedback from management and frontline supervisors, and interviewed employees to get a solid understanding of our audience.
What’s your goal? Do you want your audience to buy something, or change their behavior, or get on board with their support?
With Estela’s story, our goal was to get employees to understand that quality is their job.
It doesn’t matter if they’re on the front line or in the back office—everyone is responsible for quality.
Logically, it might make sense to map out obstacles standing in the way of your story’s goal—insufficient training, lack of teamwork, inadequate systems.
But in the real world, those challenges are often discovered as you research the story’s characters.
This is how Estela’s story unfolded.
We interviewed lots of different employees to find out how they go about ensuring quality.
Using that process, we uncovered a host of challenges—boredom, technology, supply issues, and shift changes.
We also discovered many resolutions—how they solved those problems—which shows this is not necessarily a linear process.
Your character is literally and figuratively the heart of the story.
They are the center of everything—the most important element—and they should make us feel something in our hearts, providing the emotional resonance critical to a story’s success.
So your number one job as a storyteller is to find a character to which your audience can relate.
(And what’s more relatable than a mom looking out for her children?)
Choose a character which is as close as possible to your audience in both situation and circumstance.
Employees will more easily relate to fellow employees, customers to other customers, insurance brokers to insurance brokers, and so on.
Think of your story as a Hollywood blockbuster.
In the end, the enemy is vanquished, boy gets girl, justice is served.
There’s a reason these movies are so popular: they give audiences what they want—a clear and satisfactory conclusion.
Your story should not be in the style of indie or art house cinema, where characters don’t change, and problems go unresolved.
The indie film may be truer to everyday life, but it’s not particularly satisfying for general audiences.
So make sure your story resolves itself in some way.
The most straightforward approach is the character achieving the goal.
Alternatively, the character may discover the initial goal wasn’t important after all, leading to personal growth or a new direction.
If you’re very lucky, stories will just fall into your lap.
And these days there are multiple ways stories come to us—online reviews, customer feedback, social media.
But even when they do, you’ll probably have to refine and shape them to bring out their full potential.
And when they don’t come easily, you’ll have to look for them.
This process should provide a practical, easy-to-follow roadmap for finding, shaping, and telling the kinds of stories that will get you the results you’re seeking.
Rob Biesenbach helps organizations and leaders communicate with purpose, power and impact so they can achieve their business goals and enjoy more success. He’s an award-winning communications consultant, an in-demand speaker and trainer, and the author of three fun, practical books that use lessons from the world of show business to help people with their business. His latest book is Unleash the Power of Storytelling: Win Hearts, Change Minds, Get Results, on which this post is based.