By Maggie David Holley
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There’s a pattern to all stories that most of us recognize. We see it in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, and read it in almost every popular fantasy novel.
New Yorker cartoonist Roy Chast described it using the following sequence: “once upon a time,” “suddenly,” “luckily” and “happily ever after.”
“Once upon a time” introduces the story’s characters. It encourages us to relate to their traits, situations, and problems.
“Suddenly” messes up the characters’ lives, and we care about it because the writer did such as good job with “once upon a time.”
“Luckily” demonstrates how the characters deal with this challenge.
“Happily ever after” describes what happens to the characters as a result.
I’d qualify that “tragically,” “hopefully” and “to be postponed” can sometimes stand in for “happily ever after,” but all four elements have to be present or there’s no story. Or at least no story that anyone—except the most pretentious of critics—can intuitively understand.
Stories arouse emotion
Nothing sells products, services, and causes like a true story.
In the 2003 Harvard Business Review article Storytelling That Moves People, screenwriting expert Robert McKee wrote that using only logic to persuade rarely works, because while you are using statistics and quotes to make your case, others are arguing with you in their heads using their own statistics and sources.
As any salesperson would tell you, people buy on emotion and only justify with logic. So the best way to compel others to act is to unite ideas with emotion, which is best done through storytelling. “In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling, but you also arouse your listener’s emotion and energy,” said McKee.
Certain types of content pieces lend themselves well to storytelling. Case studies (a.k.a. product success stories) are the most obvious. The traditional case study format starts with the Company Background (“once upon a time”), then moves on to The Challenge (“suddenly”), the Solution (“luckily”), and finally ends with the Results (“happily ever after”). No wonder case studies are such powerful marketing tools.
But any type of communication that’s attempting to persuade can have—and ought to have—a story. Even webinars and presentations can have a story. Stories are stories simply because they evolve according to our collective expectation of unity: they have a beginning (someone has/had a problem), a middle (this is how we will solve/have solved the problem), and an end (this is how much better life will be/is as a result).
Stories help us remember and understand
In 2011, Washington Post reporter Brian Vastag asked us to “imagine a stack of CDs, each holding an album’s worth of digital music, shooting from the top of [our desks] to 50,000 miles beyond the moon.” He went on to say that that’s how many CDs it would take to store the amount of digital data the world produces in two months.
If you watch TV, listen to the radio, make phone calls, send e-mails and surf the Internet, then you personally take in a large chunk of this information.
Scientists from the University of San Diego-California—the same folks who calculated the massive amount of data Vastag cited—found that we are deluged with approximately 34 gigabytes of data every day. That’s enough data to make your laptop crash in a week!
Unfortunately, our brain’s evolution hasn’t kept pace with technology. We still respond to all this information the way we have since the beginning of time, when our cavemen ancestors gathered around a fire after a hard day’s work—by looking for the story to make sense of the experience.
We’re wired to tell stories—not just to each other, but to ourselves. We think in schemas and metaphors because they help us understand and retain information. Chances are, you can still remember what you wore on your first date with your spouse, even though it was many years or even decades ago. Even if you can’t remember what you wore to the office last Tuesday.
In the absence of a conscious decision to remember, certain details stick to our minds because they’re nestled in a story. We forget facts and figures, but we remember stories. Fortunately, we’re also more likely to remember facts that are placed within the context of stories.
So tell a story. Nothing sticks—and sells—like a story.
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