Storytelling: Using Narrative to Improve Your Writing

©2008 The Editing Company, LLC

Effective storytelling is an essential skill to master to connect to your audience.

I. Why should you use stories?

All people love stories. From the very beginning of human organization, narrative storytelling has been a way of explaining how the world works. Myths, fables, legends, and oral histories precede reason in the human mind’s understanding of the world. Human brains are hardwired to think of life as a story, a narrative: everyone thinks of her or himself as the main character in “The Story of (fill in your name here)’s Life.”

That little voice inside your head? That’s your personal storyteller who narrates the story of your life. The single most power persuasive tool is not reasoning, but narrative logic. If you can tell a rich and convincing story, you’ve won your audience.

II. Inside your head:
When we read a story, an interesting process takes place: the little voice inside our heads is connecting to the words on the page, we find ourselves applying the words of the story to our own lives.

We connect to a story in two ways: through identification and through imagination.

Identification is when we recognize ourselves in the story: events, characters, settings or conflicts that we have had. The more details we can connect to, the closer the identification. When a reader is fully identified with a character or a conflict, the reader makes a deep alliance with the story, making her or him feel personally invested.

Also, we connect through our imaginations to sensations or descriptions if they’re appealingly told. The parts of the brain that see, hear, touch, smell, and taste can all be excited by words that describe such sensations if they’re convincing. When a reader is sensuously excited by a story, her or his excitement translates into active interest in the characters or ideas.

For these reasons, a good story can stimulate our minds, memories, and imaginations more powerfully than concepts, rules, codes, facts, or a logical argument.

III. Using Stories
If you are writing non-fiction---an essay, an analysis, a self-help book---you should use well written stories to assist your reader in understanding your thesis or theories. If you write an effective story that exercises your ideas, you will pre-set the reader’s mind to understand you better.
In addition, you can use a good story to illustrate examples, to demonstrate problems, or to show exceptions to general concepts.

In fact, it’s usually a good idea to begin your chapters, or your essays with a well designed, well told story.



IV. Every story has the same basic elements:
A point of view (the narrator)
Characters who have specific traits, as well as wants (conscious choice) and needs (psychological impulse)
A setting or settings that tell us exactly where the story is in time and space, including
The details of the physical world---tools, clothes, furniture, vehicles, vegetation, etc.
Events or a plot: usually focused on a single character who has a want or need that leads to conflict with other characters; sometimes the plot encompasses several characters.
A purpose or theme (usually suggested, not stated outright)

Every plot has the same structure that uses these elements; it works like this---
A character in a specific setting wants/needs something;
This desire creates a conflict, either with another character or with her/himself;
S/he overcomes the conflict or is defeated by it: this conflict changes the world of the story.

For example, here’s a joke that involves the bare bones of these elements:
A skeleton walks into a bar
“Gimme a pitcher of beer,” he demands,
“and a mop.”

The joke is funny because of its tight storytelling. You get a specific character in a setting, desire, conflict, and then the humor sneaks up in the implied conflicts and outcomes.

Because it’s a joke, it’s a simple story, entertaining in its cleverness. We don’t need to connect to the character or ideas; we just want a laugh. So, like most jokes, this is only the basics. However, to get your readers interested in---and identifying with---your story, you need to learn six easy techniques.

When writing a story, get the characters, setting, plot out first. Then use these six techniques when you revise (“Good writing is rewriting”).

V. What makes a good story more effective?
To better connect to your readers, here are six techniques you should use.

1. Begin your story either with a rich description of setting or, better, with your main character making a decision. (Avoid beginnings that explain: get your plot going.)

2. Be as specific as possible, and if you need description, write briefly using words that appeal to the senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting--- also called imagery¬.
Vivid, colorful images not only engage your reader, but they can underline character traits, intensify conflicts, and suggest outcomes.

3. Focus your narration on plot events---What’s happening? What’s the desire?
Where’s the conflict?---Then select sharp verbs to invigorate your action.


4. Narrative voice:
If you’re writing in the first person, make sure your voice is exactly specific to your character and not clichéd or generic. The first person voice is psychologically always a little odd because it reveals the character’s deeper psychological needs as the character thinks s/he is only reporting events “as they happened.”

If you’re working in the third person, use your narrator’s voice in a limited way. Try to suggest the character’s inner life (emotions, thoughts, desires, values, and confusions) by noticing details---how your characters appear or act; what they say--- or through sensations.
Avoid telling what your character is thinking or feeling.

5. Make sure your conflict is a result of your characters’ wants or needs. Once in conflict, your character must make choices.
As a result of the conflict, your character must be changed or shaped by the outcomes: change happens in terms of morals, ethics, physicality, relationships, wealth, or occupation. The reader may have the an insight.

6. Humans love symmetry and organization, so try to use repeat figures or details.
After you have a draft, design images, phrases, gestures, and colors to occur in patterns in the narrative.

These techniques make your story more lively and satisfying to your reader

VI. Example stories
Here are two examples of urban legends from Too Good to be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends by Jan Harold Brunvald. Notice how short but they are, but each is told using the six effective narrative techniques:

Miracle at Lourdes
After forty years of digestive acidity and flatulence, Maggie, 75 year-old Irish Catholic woman, dipped into her savings and made a pilgrimage to France to the Shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes. Maggie prayed that the holy spring water there would cure her painful and embarrassing afflictions.
However, Maggie was not alone. Once at Lourdes, the faithful have to wait in long lines to get to the sacred grotto. As she waited for her bath in the holy water, Maggie grew more and more weary and more and more nervous. After hours of swollen arches and stomach upset, she was finally getting close to the grotto. But she was feeling so weak she didn’t think she’d make it. Then she spotted an emergency wheelchair set into a nook by the hallway, and limped over, sitting down for just few minutes’ rest.
After twenty-five minutes, Maggie’s group started to move toward the priest to receive the healing blessing. She stood up from the wheelchair and started to walk to the priest in the grotto. Immediately, a shocked murmur went through the crowd of worshippers: the woman in the wheelchair was walking! It was a miracle!
Everyone wanted to see the amazing woman, and they started to push and shove. Some tried to touch this miraculous being. With all the pushing and shoving, Maggie became frightened; as she tried to get away, the crowd lurched forward more eagerly, snatching at her. Before the priests could intervene, someone grabbed her dress--- Maggie panicked and fell, fracturing her hip.
So, instead of losing her afflictions at Lourdes, Maggie came home on crutches, which seemed to make her irritating digestive problems even worse.

The Brain Drain

One scorching day in Phoenix, a busy young woman pulled into a parking spot at a Safeway Supermarket. As she hastened out of her car, she noticed that there was an older woman in the next car. This older woman was leaning rigidly forward over her steering wheel, holding one hand up to the back of her head.
The young woman felt concerned for her, but not seeing anything overtly wrong, she hurried on with her shopping. Fifteen minutes later, she returned to her car with a bag of groceries, the other woman was still frozen in the same position—hand up to the back of her head and bent over her steering wheel.
Alarmed, the first woman tapped on the window and asked if the other woman needed any help. Was she feeling all right?
The older woman moaned but stayed frozen in place. "Please call 911," she gasped. "I've been shot, and I can feel my brains coming out!" At that moment, the young woman noticed a gray substance oozing out between the fingers the other woman was holding to the back of her head; reaching for her cell, she dashed into the store and notified the store's manager.
The paramedics skidded into the parking lot within minutes. As anxious bystanders watched every move, they gently pried the slumped woman's fingers from the back of her head. Then they carefully examined the gray goo, and then they began to check the rest of the car.
Then they started laughing.
The paramedics explained that a canister of Pillsbury Poppin' Fresh Biscuit Dough had been on the top of the older woman’s grocery bag in the back seat. Direct sunlight beat down so intensely that the pressurized tube had exploded in the heat; the metal lid on the tube had banged the woman on the back of her head and along with it, the top biscuit shot out and stuck to her hair… warm, gooey, and gray.
The sales receipt in the woman's groceries showed that she had sat there for one and a half hours before anyone had stopped to offer help. To make her feel a little better, the Safeway manager gave her a new can of Poppin’ Fresh.

Each story has a theme, so although these are “urban legends,” their legendary appeal is in their power to instill a larger meaning: “Miracle at Lourdes” is an ironic illustration of the difference between superstition and faith, while “Brain Drain” shows that our expectations can determine our reality, or put in another way, that appearances can be deceiving.