What can you learn from Norm Macdonald’s Twitter tribute to Robin Williams?

Here’s how to serialize your story, how to get the word out in 144 (or 288) characters or less — and when to stop typing.

What to learn from this serial

Here are six tips to take from Macdonald’s tribute:

1. Tell a story.

Heck, tell two stories. Why not make it three?

Macdonald’s 19 tweets compose three stories: the Jewish tailor story, the Chinese order-taker story and overarching the “Funniest man in the world walks into a dressing room” story. Robin Williams was his own secondary character.

2. Serialize your story.

Newspapers have been publishing serial narratives since a young reporter named Charles Dickens wrote the first one for London’s Morning Chronicle in 1836.

Serializing your story is a great way to make your tweets go further. But do it right:

• Break it up. Macdonald sees his story as a series of scenes. That makes it easy for him to break it up into tweets.
• Keep it together. You can repeat the main headline, add Part I and Part II or use words like “therefore,” “continued” and “update” to signal that these tweets have something in common. Macdonald uses the hashtag #RIPRobinWilliams to organize individual tweets into a complete story.
• Post in reverse order so readers see the “first” tweet first in your stream. Macdonald tweeted in order, which means followers must read this Twitter tale backward.

3. Start strong.

The most compelling stories have one strong summary sentence close to the beginning, Catherine Burns, artistic director of the Moth, a New York City-based organization dedicated to storytelling, tells Real Simple.

“‘I fell into the pool in my wedding dress,’ say, or ‘A violent stomachache ruined our first date.’”

Macdonald’s lead strikes the same chord: “It was my first stand-up appearance on Letterman, and I had to follow the funniest man in the world.”

Notice that Macdonald saves the background section for after he gets your attention: “I was a punk kid from rural Ontario and I was in my dressing room, terrified.”

4. Keep it short.

All three of Macdonald’s stories together weigh in at less than 350 words, give or take a few hashtags.

5. But don’t compress the life out of it.

Notice that Macdonald didn’t lose details when he tightened his tale into tweets. Regardless of how tight the space, Macdonald keeps our attention with concrete details like:

• He was a Jewish tailor, taking my measurements.
• He went down on his knees, asked which way I dressed.
• The place was out of Moo Shoo Pork …
• … he ended with a Windsor knot.
• He spoke mostly Yiddish …

6. Know when to quit.

Endings are as important as openings. Macdonald finished his story, though, a tweet before he stopped typing.

Notice the many ways that the final tweet does not work with the rest of this piece:

It adds emotion to observation. Tell the story you’ve observed, then let readers have the emotional response. This rule is also known as, “Make the reader cry; don’t tell the reader you cried.”

“Have you ever noticed,” asks a character in Richard Yates’ Young Hearts Crying, “how your sympathy for someone’s story — anyone’s story — tends to evaporate when they get to the part about how long and hard they cried?”

That’s what happened to me when I read Macdonald’s last tweet.

• It’s long. Most of the words in Macdonald’s tweets are one — maybe two — syllables long. Other than Ontario, though, “unacceptable” is the only word in this Twitter tale that’s four syllables long.
• It’s abstract. As William Carlos Williams counseled, “Turn ideas into things.” Macdonald’s ending does the reverse: In a series of concrete words, this is the rare abstract one.

The true ending of this story is “Until now.”

When you finish your story, stop typing.

Resources on serializing your story

Here are more examples and techniques for breaking your narrative into successive — and successful — parts.

Roy Peter Clark’s serials

The editorial guru of The Poynter Institute is a serial master. Among his serial narratives

• “Three Little Words” appeared in the St. Petersburg Times for 29 consecutive days in 1996. It told the story of a woman, Jane Morse, whose husband died of AIDS.
• “Sadie’s Ring” was published in five newspapers in 1996 and 1997. This 11-part series tells Clark’s personal story of growing up Catholic with a Protestant father and a Jewish grandmother.
• “Ain’t Done Yet” appeared as a millennium special in 25 newspapers. This newspaper novel ran for 29 consecutive days.
• “Her Picture in My Wallet” is a two-part piece about a World War II veteran reunited with his first love after years of separation and regret. It’s told in the voice of the main character, 77-year-old Tommy Carden.

Creating the Serial Narrative: A Starter Kit

Clark helps the rest of us write successful serials in (I guess it should go without saying) this six-part piece:

• The Power of the Parts: Why serialize stories?
• A 12-Step Program for Writers: Is this the right story for a serial?
• A Story Form with Benefits: What’s the business case for serials?
• How Could You Ask Such a Thing? Readers ask; Roy answers
• Say the Secret Word: A glossary for serials. And for stories.

More serials

• Black Hawk Down: Yup, the movie and best-seller started life as a 29-part serial in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
• The Terrorist Within: A 17-part serial narrative about one man’s holy war against America, published by The Seattle Times.

More serial success secrets

• The Verdict Is in the 112th Paragraph: Tom French goes behind the scenes to explain how — and why — he crafted his serial narrative about the Valessa Robinson case.
• To Be Continued: A Serial Narrative Primer by Chip Scanlan for the Poynter Institute

Soap operas & sagas

• Telenovelas and Soap in Latin America: It’s just one short step from serials to soap operas
• The Holly Wreath Man: A fictional saga, published in The Seattle Times

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In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee shares this tiny tale:

In just 61 words, Mukherjee gives us:

• Motivation. The subject wants to live to see his daughter graduate from high school. The motivation is what gets the story started.
• Obstacle. The subject has multiple myeloma, a cancer that starts in the plasma cells in bone marrow. That’s what gives the story its tension: the conflict between the motivation and obstacle.
• Result. He lives to see her graduate, not only from high school, but from college! But, making this success bittersweet, he’s bound to a wheelchair.
• Punch line. Surprise! He’s in a wheelchair because he was in a baseball-coaching accident.

Master writers can engage raiders with emotional, compelling stories in just a few words. In fact, a short-form story may well be more effective than long-form storytelling in social media and other channels.

1. All the lonely people …

“I once wrote a 75,000-word series on local hospital politics, after which a wise friend said, ‘Walt, you cannot exhaust a subject but you can exhaust a reader.’”

— Walt Harrington, former staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine

The Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby” has only 179 words. Yet the song contains three stories — and a chorus.

Can you do as much with so little?

2. Snowball, Snowball

I still remember — more than a decade later — one of the thousand heartbreaking stories about Hurricane Katrina victims, an AP report about the Superdome evacuation:

Many people had dogs, and they could not take them on the bus. A police officer took one from a little boy, who cried until he vomited. “Snowball, Snowball,” he cried.

3. Portraits of grief

The New York Times Portraits of Grief series tells the stories of every single person who died in the 9/11 attacks. Here’s the life of Eddie D’Atri, stitched together from just 157 words:

How did reporters pull off these tiny profiles? Times editors write:

“The portraits were never meant to be obituaries in any traditional sense. They were brief, informal and impressionistic, often centered on a single story or idiosyncratic detail. They were not intended to recount a person’s résumé, but rather to give a snapshot of each victim’s personality, of a life lived.”

Not bad for mini portraits that weigh in at roughly 200 words each.

Cut a long story short.

Cutting a long story short is often a matter of selection, not compression. So start by focusing your story angle as tightly as possible.

Would your story be twice as good if it were half as long? Write short-form storytelling.

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How do you find awe-inspiring stories like these?

… and they flew us to Rome by helicopter.

I walked past all the other stranded passengers and used my Platinum Card.

She wanted, more than anything, to have an elephant to ride at the party!

Ask.

Here are three ways to report for story.

1. Request stories when you deliver the product.

My platinum AmEx card arrived yesterday, along with a hardbound book of stories. The stories were testimonials, meant to reassure me that I’m not an idiot for spending $550 a year on a credit card.

AmEx’s marketing technique is not just a great use of storytelling and dramatic callouts for marketing. It also illustrates a great way to get stories: The last page invites me to tell my AmEx story for inclusion in the next book.

2. Distribute ‘What’s your story?’ cards.

One simple way to get stories: Pass out cards people can fill out and send in to share their stories at events, points-of-purchase or kiosks.

• To generate stories for Weight Watchers magazine, for instance, the organization piles stacks of “Tell us your success story” cards near the check-in desks at meeting locations.
• One of my clients distributes “What’s your story?” cards to employees at the annual companywide picnic.
• After audience members view a multimedia presentation at The World of Coca-Cola in Las Vegas, a host tells visitors, “Your stories are the stories of Coca-Cola.” Then he invites audience members to write down their own stories on cards in kiosks outside the theater. In the first three weeks, 1,800 people shared their stories.

3. Get success stories.

VSP asks doctors for “Eyefinity Success Stories” and offers a $75 Visa gift card for stories it uses. It asks readers to describe two things:

• “Your practice before using Eyefinity. If possible, include specifics about how you were filing claims, buying optical products, completing lab orders or attracting new patients.
• “Your practice now that you are using Eyefinity. Why did you start using Eyefinity? How is it better? What features have benefited you most?”

That’s the information communicators need to create a classic case study:

• Problem (before Eyefinity)
• Solution (Eyefinity)
• Results (after Eyefinity)

What stories would you get — if you only asked?

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When Thomas Reardon, M.D., president of the American Medical Association, spoke to the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States, he used a personal story to make his key point:

1. Find the desk-pounding moment.

Want to write a great brand story that builds emotional connections with your potential customers while revealing the truth about your brand?

Whether you’re writing a piece of content marketing, a social media post or a vision statement, you can reveal your brand personality and engage people with a compelling brand story.

What’s the secret to brand storytelling that shows people your product or service in a new light? Find the desk-pounding moment: Ask your subject matter expert when she realized the importance of the point you’re making — or when she saw the problem in action. That will help her recall events, encounters and other occurrences that can help you make the point.

Sometimes the best stories come from executives’ own experiences with the problem or situation. So take creative agency and make personal stories part of your brand story. Your target audience will love them, and your brand strategy will flourish.

2. Ask, ‘What’s your story?’

Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, uses this personal story in one of his letters to shareholders to illustrate the problem with executive spending:

So how do you get these stories?

When presentation trainer Lynn Espinoza was helping a Fortune 100 executive prepare for a speech on the company’s environmental efforts, she asked, “What’s your story?”

“It turns out that she is personally committed to the environment in an unexpected way,” Espinoza writes. “So committed is she that she and her husband bought 60-acres in the Australian outback. They are restoring the downtrodden land with the hope of returning it to the adjacent Australian National Park. She takes international conference calls from inside her tent, hoping that the Kookaburras don’t make too much noise.”

What stories could your subject matter expert tell — if you’d only ask?

3. Move from situation to implication.

Executive speechwriter Les Bendtsen uses this approach:

“When I ghostwrite, I sit down and say, ‘Here’s a topic we’re thinking of writing about. When have you, your family or your ancestors confronted a problem like this before?’ I try to get away from the facts of the situation to the implication. Not, ‘How will our company weather this rough market?’ but ‘What did your dad do when he lost money in a venture or started his own business and failed?’”

As communicators, we concentrate a lot on focusing our lens to gather specific details. But sometimes zooming out to the broader theme can help you find the story.

____

Source: “Heed this ‘golden rule’: Tell a good story,” Speechwriter’s Newsletter, Sept. 1, 2000

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The other day, my wasband came home with a bottle of Kelt — not his usual cognac. When I asked why he’d switched brands, he pulled out the box and started reading:

My wasband takes his cognac seriously. Why did he change his brand? The story made him do it.

Whether you’re writing social media or blog posts, content marketing pieces, stories on your website or even your mission statement, you can connect with your target audience with a great brand story. Brand storytelling can help you sell products, services, programs and ideas.

The good news is, your brand story probably already exists. In fact, you may already be telling it. Here are four ways to spot a good story that might be right in front of your eyes:

1. Tell your inception story.

The trucking insurer Great West Casualty Company makes its inception story part of its brand:

From Nike to Warby Parker, inception stories can form the foundation of a brand’s storytelling. Show how your company solved a problem, challenged the status quo or turned an industry on its head.

Whether you’re working for a multinational or a nonprofit, helping small business owners or building your personal brand, ask, “What’s my inception story?”

2. Share your product’s history.

Want a little drama to go with your drink? I read this story off a bottle of Blenheim water:

Must be something in the water. Perrier also tells its interesting history, including these highlights:

We can’t all claim that Julius Caesar used our product. But most of us can reveal interesting stories from our product or services’ past.

3.Tell the stories behind the lists.

Too often, communicators cover employee awards by running lists of winners’ names. But that reduces the drama of human achievement to a series of bullet points and a few dry words.

Instead, take a tip from FedEx World Update, and run mini stories about award winners. In boxes throughout the magazine, the editors cover the company’s Humanitarian Awards with stories like these:

Now there’s a real story that connects with your audience. Substitute drama for lists … and give award winners the attention they deserve.

4. Tell your process story.

I first fell in love with St-Germain over a Poivre (St-Germain, pear vodka, champagne) at Luke in New Orleans. Had my wasband’s cooler head not prevailed, I would have retired on the spot and devoted the rest of my life to savoring these luscious cocktails.

My second meeting with my new best friend occurred over appetizers on our foodiest friends’ deck, where they topped the elderberry liqueur with Prosecco.

That’s where I read St-Germain’s process story, delivered in a gorgeous little booklet attached to a bottle right out of a 19th-century French perfumerie. Here’s the story:

No, you could not.

Since Coors differentiated its beer through a process story — it was the only major brand to use cold filtration rather than pasteurization — companies have been building their brands by telling the stories behind their processes.

Sometimes “how we make it” can make a great dramatic narrative. What’s your process story?

Learn how to tell a process story.

What’s your brand story?

Create a brand story that supports your brand personality and builds an emotional connection with potential customers.

Finding your brand story isn’t hard if you know where to look. From company history to employee achievements, from how we got started to how we make it now, your successful brand story is just waiting to be told.

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Have you ever been lost in a story?

Have you ever looked up and found that hours, not minutes, have passed since you turned on your Kindle and that you are in fact in your own bedroom and not at the palace, about to be crowned queen?

Have you ever rewritten the end of a story in your mind, so that, say, Nick and Daisy get together at the end of The Great Gatsby?

Have you ever thought to yourself, “C’mon, Khaleesi, let’s saddle up those dragons and go show the Baratheons how a real royal rules Westeros” — even though you know that dragons don’t exist, and neither, for that matter, do Westeros, the Baratheons or Khaleesi?

Researchers call that being “transported” through story. And when you transport readers through stories, you can help them see the world differently.

You can even make them change their minds.

Transporting stories are more credible.

Or so say researchers Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, two members of the Department of Psychology at Ohio State University. They posit that:

• The attitudes we form through direct experience are more powerful
  than those we form through intellectual enterprise (Fazio & Zanna, 1981).
• Stories give us the feeling of real experience without the suspicions that overtly promotional messages raise.
• The more a story transports us, the more likely we are to be persuaded by it — even if the story doesn’t explicitly state a position. (And when you’re absorbed in the story, you don’t want to stop and analyze the positions it takes.)

In fact, one study showed that transported readers were more likely to buy even ridiculous claims — “mental illness is contagious,” for instance — when they absorbed them through story (Gerrig and Prentice, 1991).

‘Murder at the mall’

To study their hypothesis, Green and Brock asked study participants to read “Murder at the Mall,” the true story of a little girl, Katie, who goes to the mall with her college-age sibling. While at the mall, Katie is brutally stabbed to death by a psychiatric patient.

The story, the researchers say, “is moving and shocking.”

Transportation test. First, Green and Brock determined how much the story transported readers via a true-or-false checklist that included statements like:

• While I was reading the narrative, I could easily picture the events in it taking place.
• I could picture myself in the scene of the events described in the narrative.
• I found myself thinking of ways the narrative could have turned out differently.

Attitude test. Then the researchers asked participants to share their attitudes about violence and mental illness with questions like this:

• “Someone is getting stabbed to death somewhere in the USA …” Responses ranged from every 10 minutes to every month.
• “The likelihood of a stabbing death at an Ohio mall is …” Responses ranged from once every 50 years to once every week.
• True or false: “Psychiatric patients who have passes to leave their institution should be supervised.”

Transporting stories are more credible.

Green and Brock learned some interesting things from the study: Women, for instance, are more likely to be transported by stories than men. And people are just as likely to adapt their positions to the story whether they believe it’s fact or fiction.

But the real bottom line is this: The more the story transported readers, the more likely they were to sync their attitudes with the story.

Are you trying to move your readers with facts and figures? Why not transport them — through story — instead?

___

Sources: Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives” (PDF), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, No. 79, 2000; pp. 701- 21

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House Publishing Group, 2007

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When you read this passage, can you feel your brain lighting up?

When you read these opening lines of The Tower Treasure, a Hardy Boys novel first published in 1927, different parts of your brain activate to supply different elements of the story:

Your brain lights up when reading stories.

• One group of neurons lights up to provide the story’s sense of space and movement (the careening car on a narrow road).
• Motor neurons flash when the characters clutch the grips or otherwise grasp objects.
• Neurons involved in eye movement activate when characters navigate their world.
• Yet another group of neurons ramps up when you read about the characters’ goals (climbing to safety).

Or so say Jeffrey Zacks and his team of psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis. They used a brain scanner to see which regions lit up as participants read different parts of a story.

“I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.”

— Mark Twain

“If you pick up a can of soda, your brain goes through a whole cascade of processes having to do with the motor commands to your arms,” Zacks says. “What it looks like to grab the soda can, what it feels like in your hand and arms. …

“And what we found is that as people are lying in the scanner reading about picking up a can of soda …, their brain processes differ in ways that are similar to the differences that we see in responses to real experiences.”

Why is storytelling important? Because stories:

1. Grab and keep audience attention.

Each day, Americans face the data equivalent of 174 newspapers, ads included.

In this environment, communicators must work hard to grab and keep our audience members’ attention. One way to do that is through storytelling.

Consider NPR’s “driveway moments” — stories that are so interesting, they compel their listeners’ rapt attention, no matter what else is competing for their time. The ice cream may be melting, the babysitter may be waiting … but NPR has your attention until the very end of the piece.

Plus, stories transport readers.

2. Make messages easier to understand.

Stories are concrete. They transform abstract concepts — such as the benefits of your products or services — into real-life, human examples that readers can wrap their minds around. That makes stories easier to understand than piles of facts.

When people are confused by information, they turn to stories. When readers face complicated financial data, for instance, they often make up scenarios to help them “see” the topic in action, according to a study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University. That helps readers understand the facts.

In another study, participants who were given a story got the highest scores ever recorded on the Wason Selection Test, one of the most famous tests of detective reasoning. Fewer than 10% of people pass the test. But when the researcher turned the test into a mystery story and transformed participants into amateur detectives, or characters within the story, 70% to 90% of participants passed the test.

3. Increase credibility.

It’s counterintuitive but true: People believe information more readily if it’s delivered in a story rather than through statistics, according to Peg C. Neuhauser’s Corporate Legends and Lore.

Why?

• Readers connect with the people in stories. Call it the Peer Principle of Persuasion: People believe that if something worked for someone else, it will work for them, too.
• Readers are cynical about numbers. Audience members know that organizations can twist numbers to say whatever the organization wants them to say.

But that doesn’t mean it never makes sense to use statistics. In fact, one very credible combination is to:

• Lead with an anecdote that illustrates your point.
• Follow up with a statistic that demonstrates the scope of the issue.

Stories told with statistics make both more powerful.

4. Engage readers.

Readers are far from passive consumers of stories. Indeed, when the story is vivid enough, our brains behave more like they’re acting than reading. That makes reading a dramatic narrative more like imagining a vivid event — or even remembering a real-life experience.

“When they’re reading the story, they’re building simulations in their head of events that are described by the story,” Zacks says. “And so, there’s an important sense that as they build that simulation that it’s significantly like being there.

“We’re used to thinking that virtual reality is something that involves fancy computers and helmets and gadgets. But what these kind of data suggest is that language itself is a powerful form of virtual reality, that there’s an important sense in which when we tell each other stories that we can control the perceptional processes that are happening in each other’s brains.”

No wonder readers understand vivid stories faster and remember them longer.

5. Makes messages more memorable.

Storytelling makes readers more likely to:

• Remember what they’ve read
• Act on the information
• Make good decisions based on the information

That’s according to research by University of Oregon professors Judith Hibbard and Ellen Peters. They found that narrative was more effective than:

• Charts
• Tables
• Graphs
• Simple assertions

And negative stories outperform positive ones, according to the study.

6. Goes viral.

Want readers to spread the word about your story? Awe-inspiring stories and narratives are more likely to get shared.

7. Move people to act.

Storytelling changes jurors’ minds, helps people decide and moves people to give to charity, according to the research.

Why storytelling?

Storytelling is “the most powerful form of human communication,” according to Neuhauser.

Are you crafting stories that get your audience members to pay attention, understand, remember and act on your messages?

___

Sources: “Reading Creates ‘Simulations’ In Minds,” NPR, Jan. 31, 2009

Roger Dooley, “Your Brain on Stories,” Neuromarketing, Jan. 21, 2010

Wray Herbert, “The Narrative in the Neurons,” We’re Only Human, Association for Psychological Science, July 14, 2009

Judith H. Hibbard and Ellen Peters, “Supporting Informed Consumer Health Care Decisions: Data Presentation Approaches that Facilitate the Use of Information in Choice,” Annual Review of Public Health, vol. 24, 2003

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“Funny Girl” starts with Barbara Streisand wishing to be a star.

“My Fair Lady” opens with Julie Andrews wishing for a room somewhere. “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” begins with Quasimodo wishing he could belong “Out There.” “Into the Woods” begins with six characters declaring their wishes.

Call it the “I wish” song.

“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, novelist

Every Disney musical — not to mention many other film and stage musicals — starts with an “I wish” song, reports Ira Glass in a recent episode of “This American Life.” It’s the first song the main character sings.

That motivation launches the story’s action. Overcoming the obstacles that get in the way of your character’s wish drives the action of a good story.

Whether you’re writing social media or content marketing or anything in between, great stories start with your protagonist’s wish.

I wish, I wish, I wish.

So what does your protagonist want?

• I wish I were human. In “The Little Mermaid,” Ariel sings, “When’s it my turn? Wouldn’t I love? Love to explore that shore up above, Out of the sea, wish I could be, Part of that world.”
• I wish I had the perfect husband. In “Fiddler on the Roof,” the daughters sing, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make me a match, Find me a find, catch me a catch. Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Look through your book, And make me a perfect match.”
• I wish I were somewhere more exciting than Kansas. In “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy sings, “Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly, Birds fly over the rainbow, Why then oh why can’t I?”

I wish, I wish, I wish.

The main character’s motivation drives every story:

• In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby wants Daisy to love him. This dream motivates him to overcome the obstacle of poverty to become fabulously wealthy by distributing illegal alcohol, trading in stolen securities and otherwise participating in organized crime.
• In “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy wants to get home — and to help her friends get a brain, a heart and some courage. This objective moves her to overcome the obstacles of talking trees, flying monkeys and wicked witches to visit the wizard and do away with the witch.
• In The Princess Bride, Westley wants to save Buttercup. Humperdinck wants to kill Westley. Vizzini wants money for kidnapping Buttercup. Inigo wants to kill the six-fingered man.

What do your characters wish?

The best corporate stories start with a wish, too:

• Nike’s story begins with founder Bill Bowerman wishing he could create a shoe sole that would give runners more traction.
• Hallmark Cards started with entrepreneur J.C. Hall wishing to get out of Nebraska and become a postcard salesman.
• Post-it Notes began with 3M scientist Art Fry wishing for a bookmark that would stay put in his church hymnal.

Hear Ira Glass sing his “I wish” song.

What’s your main character’s “I wish” song?

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Beginning, middle, end: A chronological approach is the best way to organize most nonfiction narratives.

That’s the formula Ira Glass uses for the popular National Public Radio program “This American Life.”

“Narrative is basically a sequence of events,” Glass says. “Something happens, then something else, then something else. Human instinct compels us to stick around to see what happens next.”

Avoid ‘and then, and then, and then.’

But chronological structure doesn’t mean that you’ll start at the beginning — say, in the maternity ward of a certain suburban Tulsa hospital in 1959 — then hash out every grunt and groan that follows. (Ever sit through a chronological recitation of someone’s vacation? “Then we had breakfast. …” Hard pass!)

“On the most basic level, readers read to find out what will happen next. It’s like making a person scratch long and hard; before she’ll do that, she needs to feel an itch. Uncertainty is the itch.”

— Nancy Kress, novelist and short story writer

“You can make an interesting story less interesting by putting it all into one strand: ‘and then, and then, and then,’” says author and journalist Adam Hochschild.

Instead, he suggests, look for suspense points, where the reader is wondering what will come next. Then instead of simply listing a series of events in chronological order, find the narrative arc. Move the reader from the inciting incident to rising action to the resolution and, finally, the denouement.

“When you get lost, focus on the chronology. There’s a sign above my computer that says, ‘It’s the chronology, stupid.’”

— Sonia Nazario, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, on storytelling

Author and writer Steven James agrees.

“The beginning isn’t simply the first in a series of events, but the originating event of all that follows,” he says. “The middle isn’t just the next event, but the story’s central struggle. And the ending isn’t just the last event, but the culminating event.”

Sound complicated? It’s not.

Suddenly, luckily …

“In the first act you get your hero up a tree. The second act, you throw rocks at him. For the third act you let him down.”

— George Abbott, American theater producer and director

In fact, Roz Chast summarizes the narrative arc beautifully in a New Yorker cartoon. Called “Story Template,” it includes four panels:

• Once upon a time
• Suddenly
• Luckily
• Happily ever after

In a business context, you might translate Chast’s template to:

• Introduction (“Once upon a time”)
• Problem (“Suddenly”)
• Solution (“Luckily”)
• Results (“Happily ever after”)

Using this story structure, you can develop a narrative lead, a case study or testimonial, or a short story to illustrate your point.

Move the problem to the top.

Only I’d change one element: Start with the problem.

“When I speak to children about writing, I tell them, ‘You don’t have a story until something goes wrong.’”

— Steven James, author of Never the Same

The conflict or inciting incident is the essence of a story. So start in the middle of things, at the most dramatic part of the story.

Because you don’t have a story until you have a problem. So start with the turning point: The day the tax bill came. The day the bank called your loan. The day you learned the company had shipped its $60,000 circuit board with a fatal flaw.

But if you start with the Suddenly, where do you put the Once upon a time?

You have two options:

1. Sandwich the introduction. That gives us:

• Problem (“Suddenly”)
• Introduction (“Once upon a time”)
• Solution (“Luckily”)
• Results (“Happily ever after”)

2. Blow up the introduction. You can also explode the introduction, weaving the information parenthetically throughout the piece, for this structure:

• Problem (“Suddenly”)
• Solution (“Luckily”)
• Results (“Happily ever after”)

The story template in action

“Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”

— Jean Luc Godard, film director, screenwriter and film critic

That’s the structure PR Manager Robert Kelley used in this piece for Verizon’s employee e-zine:

• Problem: A Montana motorist found himself at the front sales counter at the Verizon Wireless store in Missoula. Big problem: The store does not have drive-up service.
• Background (if necessary): Store Manager Heather Barnhart reported that the wayward driver fell asleep at the wheel in the wee hours of the morning and crashed through the front of her store. Fortunately, there were no injuries.
• Solution: Barnhart’s team along with Senior Analyst-Facilities Jeff Sams worked ’round-the-clock …
• Results: … to have the store open for business by the following morning.

Keep it short.

Your piece doesn’t have to be long to be good.

“I like a good story well told. That’s the reason I’m sometimes forced to tell them myself.”

— Mark Twain, American writer and wit

Chast’s simple structure is a good reminder that a great narrative can also be as short as three sentences. Give one sentence each to the problem, the solution and the result, and you have a mini parable that can help you make your point.

Anecdotes can be as long as your market, message and medium demand.

Luckily.

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Facts tell, stories sell.

But it’s not enough just to have a great story. To make the most of your best business stories, you also need great storytelling.

Fortunately, great storytelling is as easy as 1-2-3.

Here’s how to turn facts that tell into stories that sell, in this rewrite of one of my favorite corporate stories, a piece about FedEx helping rescue a bear named Ben.

1. Problem

“If you’re advertising fire extinguishers,” wrote David Ogilvy, “open with the flames.”

So don’t start your story with a pat on your own back. (It gets in the way of the story, and unless you’re really flexible, it’s hard.) Instead, jump right into the most provocative details of the story at hand:

2. Solution

I know, I know. This is the part you care about most: the part where your organization helped solve the problem. Your readers, however, are more interested in your subject. So make this the quickest part of the piece:

3. Results

Paint a picture of how great Ben’s life is now:

How can you craft a story to make your messages more engaging?

The post A bear’s tale: Storytelling structure in action appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..