Storytelling: why it’s rational to be emotional

We are bewitched by reason. The spell it casts is so powerful it blinds us to the evidence. It means that – whether we’re trying, for example, to pitch for business, make a sale, inspire our team or educate our students – we place our faith in reason and facts. Whereas all the research shows us that we are influenced far more by emotion.

Stories increase value by 2706%

We’re told that to help us tap into our audience’s emotions we should tell stories. Let’s look at a couple of examples which put numbers on how powerful they can be. In a project called Significant Objects, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn bought things from charity shops, none of them costing more than $4. They commissioned writers to create stories about the objects and put them on eBay. In total the objects which they’d bought for $127.74 sold for $3,612.51: a staggering markup of 2706%.

Or take the 2004 research at Carnegie Mellon University; it looked at how people might contribute charitably to an abstract cause rather than to one person. The researchers discovered that people who read a story about a girl facing starvation in Africa gave more than double than those who just had the statistics. A simple story was more than twice as successful as the facts.

The creative myth of storytelling

The problem arrives when we are asked to develop a story. It all feels rather vague. And worse than vague, underminingly stressful. When you run story workshops, you constantly hear: “I’m an accountant/manager/lawyer/scientist. I’m not creative.” There’s a sense that creating stories belongs to mysteriously imaginative people; it’s not something that mortals should try. And yet, as the neuroscientist, Paul Brooks writes, story is fundamental to what it is to be human: “From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self – feelings, thoughts, memories – are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.”

How do we create great stories?

What makes a good story? Is there a way for all of us to shape one simply and reliably?Again, the science helps. Two principles are key. First, we’ve evolved to learn from our experiences so that we survive. How we learn is through the carrot and stick of emotions, pleasure and pain. A story is, simply put, a free way to learn as we, respond emotionally to what the characters in the story experience.

Second, we are faced with too much information to take everything in. So we’ve evolved to mainly pay attention to things that we find unusual, that surprise us, that we believe may threaten or reward us. Good stories use the same technique to hold our attention.

STORIES framework

We can create great stories using these two principles of emotion and surprise. They govern the seven elements that we can use to shape our stories. And we can remember them through a seven letter acronym: STORIES. This stands for:

• Surprising: we need to grab attention at the start;
• Touching: the character in our story needs to be affected emotionally by the story’s events;
• Obstacles: our character should never have an easy ride. The challenges they overcome is where we, as an audience, learn and get most value;
• Risk: or, what are the stakes for our character? The higher the stakes, the greater our audience’s emotion and their involvement;
• Individual details: including surprising, colourful details and descriptions helps keep our audience engaged by painting memorable pictures;
• Empathetic Character: our story’s main character needs to be someone our audience identifies and empathises with. Often this involves their being vulnerable in some way;
• Simple: ask yourself, “Could someone listening to my story, remember it well enough to retell it to a friend the next day?”

Four Quick Tips

From our storytelling workshops we’ve learned there are a few things that make life easier when you’re starting to create stories.

1. Work with someone else to develop your story

It really helps to bounce ideas off people. What works for successful TV shows where you have groups of writers works equally well in other organisations.

2. Focus on E O R to start

Great stories have all seven features of the STORIES framework. However, when you’re starting, keeping things really simple increases your chances of success. So try concentrating on having an empathetic character (E), who really wants something (R), but is faced with at least one obstacle (O) that gets in their way of achieving it.

3. Don’t underestimate the obstacles

We have a tendency to rosetint our memories and gloss over, forget the obstacles. If you’re re-creating a story that happened to you, remember carefully how things felt at the time. It’s easy to forget things like not having enough money, not having the right experience, needing to improvise, the unexpected accidents that blew you off course.

4. The power of now

What keeps our attention is not knowing the outcome. Make your audience ‘earn it to learn it’. When you’ve written your story, go over it and see if you anticipate the outcome. Two ways to help are, first, to use the present tense, and second, when you get to an obstacle to ask a rhetorical question. For example, “So she reaches the ravine and the bridge has disappeared. What does she do?”