Storytelling Method Benefits: How to Use Storytelling Techniques

A storytelling method is a basic set of guidelines you can rely on to provide your story with basic structure and draw in your audience. By utilizing a workable and useful method, you fully unlock the power of storytelling—following the rules that have made the art form work for centuries while bending them just enough to give your own story its unique flavor.

This sort of method applies as much to business storytelling—like crafting engaging presentations and infographics—as it does to writing novels, screenplays, and the like.

Storytelling might feel completely organic when you hear someone else spin a yarn, but the person telling their tale is likely relying on a classic storytelling method (whether intentionally or unintentionally) to hold your attention. Here are three reasons using a method of this ilk can help you become a better storyteller:

1. 1. A storytelling method gives you structure. Certain rules are liberating rather than constraining. A storytelling method helps you draw on what makes all stories work in general by giving you a basic structure to apply to your personal story. This combination of factors—classic structure and personal originality—allows you to connect with your audience in a powerful way.
2. 2. A storytelling method helps draw in the audience. When telling your own story, relying on a basic storytelling method gives you the tools to hold an audience’s attention. For example, suppose you want to tell the story of your entire personal life but have no idea how to frame it. A storytelling method gives you guidance on shaping a narrative out of disparate events logically, coherently, and suspensefully.
3. 3. A storytelling method has multiple applications. Once you learn the ropes of a basic storytelling method, you can begin to apply what you’ve learned in a host of different scenarios. Besides writing fiction or memoirs, you could come to have greater success in the business world by framing case studies, presentations, and marketing materials in a manner consistent with history’s greatest storytellers.

While every writer has their own storytelling method, there are some similarities from each one to the next. Here are just seven tips you can draw on to start building your own unique storytelling method:

• Build suspense gradually. You need to allow action to rise gradually to tell a story in a compelling way. If each scene feels as climactic as the last, the audience will eventually lose interest because there’s too much happening all at once. Instead, start small and incrementally build your story up to a fever pitch of tension. After the climax, slowly end the conflict as you resolve all the loose ends.
• Create conflict constantly. Great stories put their main character through conflict in every single scene. While you’ll want to vary the degree and style of this conflict from one scene to the next, try to give each character something they want to achieve as well as an obstacle standing in their way in each new situation. All of these should relate somehow to the overarching desire and conflict of the entire story. In a business setting, the customer themselves might be the main character—and your job is to show how your product or service can help them achieve their desires in their own lives.
• Draw inspiration from something meaningful. Use storytelling to channel what you’ve learned from real-life experiences into an engaging narrative. This can be a simple moral message or an abstract idea about how best to navigate life’s complexities. Think about the stories and experiences that have had the greatest impact on you and use them as a source of inspiration.
• Keep the tone consistent. As you tell your story, keep in mind specifically what type of story you’re telling. For example, a happy ending would feel out of place at the end of a tragedy just as a sad ending wouldn’t feel right at the end of a comedy. While great storytelling often puts the audience through various emotional experiences, remember to still craft a coherent narrative structure from start to finish.
• Rely on classic structure. There is a reason so many fairy tales, myths, classic novels, and hit movies feel somewhat familiar. These stories rely on the hero’s journey, a classic form of story structure. According to mythologist Joseph Campbell, creator of the archetype, this template outlines steps the main character must go through to check all the right boxes for a good story. Try applying the hero’s journey to your own story to learn where you might improve your narrative.
• Start the action right away. One classic storytelling technique is to begin the action in medias res (Latin for “in the middle”). Drop your audience into the conflict rather than spend too much time setting the scene. Find ways to convey necessary information about the past through the present action you’re depicting.
• Utilize the element of surprise. Put your storytelling skills to the test by taking some twists and turns throughout your narrative. Make things seem a certain way from the audience’s point of view only to shock them with the truth later. Surprises like these help make storytelling an engaging and exciting art form.

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