People are storytelling creatures. We evolved to tell stories.
From 30,000 to 100,000 years ago, out great ancestors began telling stories. It happened around the time that the size of clans expanded and those clans began to wander longer distances and then come home again.
Sitting by fires or in caves, by streams or in mountains, our ancestors told tales that helped them understand the day-to-day perils and potential of life. They warned each other of predators (“Bear in woods!”), discussed the weather (“So hot!”), angled for advantage with potential mates (“Hubba, hubba”), and taught their young with stories (“In my day …”).
More than anything else, the power to tell, hear, and remember stories separates humans from other species. Other species eat, find shelter, reproduce, and make things. Some species—like apes, chimps, whales, and birds—use language. Others—including chimps, birds, dolphins, and elephants—use tools. But as far as we know, only humans tell stories.
Stories take us away from the here and now, move us emotionally and intellectually, and help us understand and organize our lives. “We experience our lives in narrative form,” the novelist Jonathan Franzen once remarked. “If you can’t order things in a narrative fashion, your life is a chaotic bowl of mush.”
So what are the essential skills of storytelling? Consider these seven “must haves” for all stories:
1. Develop Compelling Characters
Start with characters. Nothing excites our brains more than images of our own kind. We’re a narcissistic species, so find or create characters with strong qualities. Make sure you know the characters’ deepest desires. Present these characters in all their complexity—avoid cardboard heroes and villains—and show how they deal with conflict and adversity.
Put those characters on a journey. Put them into action. Show how they interact with different people and situations. Show them fretting and fighting, arguing and negotiating, holding and helping, guessing and calculating, wondering and deciding. Emphasize the word show.
Put these scenes in a setting that helps tell the story. To really bring your story to life, find the details about your settings that help explain the characters and action. How you depict places—homes, offices, schools, parks, cars, camps, churches, prisons, streets, and parking lots—will set the parameters for your characters and stories.
2. Show the ‘World of the Story’
Every story needs a container. We need places for characters to go and to interact. Simple enough.
But places do more for storytelling than to offer a sandbox for characters to play. They also offer insights into the values and abilities of the characters and community.
The world of the story shapes how people feel and behave—and are perceived by others. Well-designed places make it easier for people to do what they want to do. They boost people’s energy and focus. Poorly designed places disorient people, sap their energy, and alienate them from others.
Put your characters in different places. Note how they change as they go from home to school to work to mall to ball field to theater to pizzeria to pub. Place determines possibilities. Create settings that make the characters who they are.
3. Give the Reader Action and Emotion.
We live in the Age of Science.
Science has made all kinds of wondrous things—cities and skyscrapers, cars and rockets, machines from digital pens to and the energy to fuel them, medical miracles and yottabytes of data. Those advances come from a vast accumulation of data, equations, rules and laws, and analyses. It’s all very abstract.
Which is great. But …
To connect with readers—to get and keep their attention, to explain complex ideas—you need to show action and tap into emotions.
Animals—including the human animal—are programmed to respond to movement, sounds, touches, smells, and changes in the environment. Action arouses our attention. Your job as a writer, quite simply, is to attract and keep people’s attention. So show action.
What do I mean by action? It could be anything from a wink or nod to a riot.
A scientist named Paul Eckman has developed a whole system for interpreting people’s “microexpressions.” As the name suggests, microexpressions are small and often last for just fractions of a second. A psychologist named John Gottman can assess the likelihood of marital bliss in couples by watching their microexpressions for five minutes.
So, you see, you don’t need a lot of explosions or chase scenes to show something meaningful happening.
So what makes someone’s wink or nod “action”? And does that mean everything that moves, great and small, is action?
Action must matter. Somehow, to count as action, something has to change. Suppose I sit in a crowded theater and nod when a speaker says something. If our story focuses on the speaker, my nod doesn’t change anything. It’s not meaningful; it’s not, therefore, action. But suppose the story focuses on me and my struggle to understand an idea. When I hear the speaker’s words, I nod. That nod constitutes action if it changes my story.
What about emotion? Do stories really need emotion?
Absolutely. Emotions don’t just help people stay engaged. They also help people to understand. In fact, brain researchers have found that rational thought is not possible without emotion. The intellectual development of many autistics, to take one example, gets stuck when they cannot develop or express feelings.
Emotion compresses ideas. If I feel emotional when I visit my old primary school, it’s because that image distills all kinds of ideas—about my family, friends, childhood, hopes, fears, successes, failures, losses, and more. When I need to understand something about education, my emotions help me to organize my ideas.
4. Provide Details that Show Something New
Just as action arouse the reader, so do details. So what do we mean by details?
You could look at details at two levels. On one level, a detail refers to anything specific in a piece of writing. So if I describe a cafe, I might provide details about the tables, the aroma, the crowd, the murmurs of conversation, the interaction of customers and baristas, and so on. But there’s a problem.
Most readers could anticipate most of these details. But it doesn’t make sense to just tell the reader what she already knows. Readers want to learn something new, not get told what they already know. Readers want to be surprised.
So that’s the second level of details. To be effective, a detail requires some kind of surprise. As a writer, you need to discover new and fresh information and insights, something that adds to the reader’s knowledge. So before you include a detail in your descriptions, ask: Would this surprise the reader? Would it add something new to her knowledge or experience?
For inspiration, consider this passage from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables:
There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.
The appearance of the butterfly in such a grim scene is surprising. But it makes sense. Whatever tragedy happens, life goes on. Look for the details that offer not just a surprise, but also a contrast–and which speak to the larger realities of life.
5. Organize Events Into a Narrative Spine.
The most important of all resolutions. In this day of blogging and cable TV shout programs, everyone has an opinion. Which is fine. But if you really want to capture your reader’s attention, tell a story. For most writing, you can tell stories at least once a page. If you tap into the reader’s hardwired love of narrative, you will be to explain even the most abstract concepts.
Put the reader in a time and place, with a character struggling to realize some goal and encountering resistance. Use concrete details. Try to inject at least one surprise in every paragraph of narrative.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Aristotle, in The Poetics 2,500 years ago:
A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.
An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.
A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.
A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end haphazardly, but conform to these principles.
Dividing all drama into a beginning, middle, and end might seem simplistic. And many authors violate the rule. The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once quipped: “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” But for most stories—and for other kinds of communication as well—readers need a journey that moves through these stages.
6. Give Characters Props.
A simple object—a key prop in a classroom, a small knowable place—offers instant insight into a stern, dreaded primary school teacher.
Avery Chenoweth, a wonderful storyteller, told me he uses props to break out of writer’s block. “If I’m stuck, I get my characters to work with their hands–fixing a light bulb, changing a tire, anything sweaty and detailed that will get me into his or her skin. Being in that intensely focused problem transports me out of my chair and into the page.” But you don’t have to wait for writer’s block. Show a character working with his hands to start a scene or an analysis.
I realized the full power of the prop when listening to a radio interview with the economist Barry Bluestone. Talking to Tom Ashbrook of NPR’s “On Point,” Bluestone described working at a Ford plant in during his college summers in the 1960s. Bluestone brought an object for show-and-tell. “This is a two-barrel carburetor from 1964,” Bluestone announced, as if the audience could see. “It went into a Mustang and there’s a good chance that I built that thing.” Bluestone then recounted watching a worker at a McDonald’s restaurant a few days before. “I’m looking at a guy operating a fryolator and he’s going through the exactly same motions that I went through but he’s making one-fourth what I made.”
When I heard this, I was amazed. Simply bringing an object into the conversation, acting as if we listeners could see it, Bluestone activated the visual parts of our brains and our memories. He put us on that assembly line in Roseville, Michigan, and in that fast-food restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts. The power of props to enliven a scene—even when you can’t see them—is profound.
Wherever you set your story—at home or work, out in the larger world or on the road—create a container for the characters and action. Show the characters develop themselves there. Put objects around them; better yet, put objects in their hands.
Once your characters have established themselves in small, knowable places, they can venture into the big, unruly world outside.
7. Use Storytelling Techniques Even for Technical Subjects.
S.I. Hayakawa, a linguist who also served as a college president and a U.S. Senator, used the image of a ladder to explain the range of ideas that people need to use. At the low rungs, we see lots of detailed information-specific people, places, actions, and results. At the higher rungs of the ladder, we see abstract ideas—concepts like war, justice, fairness, and mind.
He called the “the ladder of abstraction.” And he explained that good communication requires climbing up and down the ladder, to talk at the appropriate level of specificity or generality.
I like to think of it this way. All writing is about storytelling. It’s just that some stories are on the lower rungs of the ladder—and others are at the higher rungs of the ladder.
Stories talk about particular people doing particular things in particular places at particular times, with particular results. So: Dorothy pined for a place “over the rainbow” after being shooed away by her aunt and uncle and attacked by an angry woman named Miss Gulch. Then a tornado came along and …
Analysis talks in categories, in generalities—at the higher runs of the ladder. Rather than talking about specifics, analysis gathers up whole batches of information to talk about how things tend to happen. Now think of Dorothy as just one of countless children.
So: Young people need to belong and feel special. When adults ignore or scold them, they dream of going someplace else. Not just Dorothy, but young people everywhere and all times. Not just Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and Miss Gulch, but all adults. Not just over the rainbow, but any kind of place far from the pains of growing up.
Get it? When you tell a story, get particular; when you analyze, generalize.
