How do you make your ideas more compelling? Even if your message is true and important, it’s hard to reach a general audience with facts alone. Telling awesome Mark Twin story lessons that are memorable and easy to learn can help.
Stories have the power to captivate and inspire people, from high school students, busy parents, or even members of Congress.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how to be an awesome story creator and teller.
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories do a good job of giving the meaning that can be remembered.
Like to hear a great story? How about telling stories? Great storytelling. A great way to spread ideas. Facts are meaningless without a contextual story. Don’t tell facts to influence, tell stories. The more you improve storytelling, the more your influence … it is as simple as that.
Stories make it easier for people to understand. They are the best way, by far, to spread your ideas.
I have been writing, creating ideas, and telling stories to spread ideas for many years.
Awesome stories surprise us. They have compelling characters. They make us think, make us feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that numbers and text on a slide with a bar graph don’t.
Stories make presentations better. Stories make ideas sticky. They help us persuade. Savvy leaders tell stories to inspire us, motivate us. (That’s why so many politicians tell stories in their speeches.)
They realize that “what you say” is often moot compared to “how you say it.”
We all love stories. We’re born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories.
It can cross the barriers of time, past, present, and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.
Here is how we recommend to create and tell an awesome story:
Mark Twain story lessons … engage your audience
Your audience needs something to do. They need a reason to be there, listening. Stories, when properly practiced, pull people into a dialogue.
It’s about engagement and interaction. The audience is just as an active a participant as the storyteller.
Ask the audience to think back to early passions and interests and bundle the story with specific experiences. Show them this is important, this is remarkable, and you are a part of it.
Mark Twain story lessons … make the audience care
And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is “Make me care” — please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, make me care. We all know what it’s like to not care.
You’ve gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you stop on one. It’s already halfway over, but something’s caught you, and you’re drawn in, and you care. That’s not by chance, that’s by design.
The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience.
Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It’s the invisible application that holds our attention to the story.
I don’t mean to make it sound like this is exact actual science, it’s not. That’s what’s so special about stories; they’re not a widget, they aren’t exact. Stories are inevitable if they’re good, but they’re not predictable.
And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: “Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.” It’s an incredibly insightful definition.
Whenever I am fortunate enough to see and listen to remarkable stories being told ‘life’ in action, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in, much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.
The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically. But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all.
There is no single answer. One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the audience in mind.
Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings, like it or not, and to make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke in them some emotion.
See our article on the Guinness storytelling strategy in this regard.
Make a promise
Very early on you need to get the audience to believe that this story is going to go somewhere, that it will be worth their time. The secret is a well-told promise about the upcoming story.
Mark Twain story lessons … construct anticipation
In a great story, the audience wants to know what happens next and most of all how it all concludes. In an explanatory narrative, a series of actions can establish a narrative flow and the sense of journey that is created is one form of anticipation of what comes next.
A good story has a beginning where a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation, a middle where the character confronts and attempts to resolve the situation, and an end where the outcome is revealed.
It does not interpret or explain the action in the story for the audience.
Instead, a good story allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action. This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that conveys facts and information boring.
Check out our article on the remarkable branding video design of this South African business. The story was created to market and build the brand. It is a very simple story.
It advocates learning to read no matter your age or status in society. To us, it creates pure magic with the story, the visuals, the music, and the emotion.
Telling awesome storytelling lessons … spark their curiosity
Your goal is to tell stories in an opening, an aperture of excitement. Ignite the fires of curiosity that will live within us all. It’s a celebration of human curiosity, and it matters to who and what we are.
You don’t have to beat people over the head with your message, nor do you need always to make your message painfully obvious.
This is not about being vague or unclear, but it is about letting the audience work on their own a little to figure things out … creating some curiosity.
That’s one of your jobs as a storyteller. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct because that’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.
Best Ads … Google Reunion Video and Its Value of Creative Story
Mark Twain story lessons … touch audiences with an emotional connection
The Google Reunion story is about as emotional as it gets. Stories like this provide a chance to experience a variety of emotions without the risk of those emotions themselves.
Emotions like wonder, fear, courage, or love can be tested out in the minds of those as they listen to a story.
You may remember the feelings of emotions which can trigger memories or create resolve as a result of hearing such stories. The experience of hearing stories can awaken portions of emotional lives that may have lain dormant or have not yet been explored.
Be dynamic with your stories like Google. Nothing is more important to narrative content than imagination, so give vivid descriptions and use emotional hooks and humor to get people fully engaged. This story engages us, doesn’t it?
Be creative, not only with words and images but also with the methods you use to convey them. Like the music as well as the messages.
Talk about memorable human interest
Storytelling is largely an act of curation. The greats detect stories as they move through life and then pull them together in ways that make us stop and think. (See our article on this cool Guinness story in a TV ad.)
Mark Twain story lessons … trigger a question
Good storytelling causes the audience to ask questions as your narrative progresses. As the storyteller, you can ask questions directly, but often a more interesting approach is to present the material in a way that triggers the audience to come up with the questions themselves.
And yet we must not be afraid to leave some (many?) questions unanswered.
When we think of a story, we may think of clear conclusions and neat, clear endings, but reality can be quite a bit more complicated than that.
There are an infinite amount of mysteries to ponder and puzzles to be solved. Many observations cannot (yet) be explained, but that is OK.
This is what keeps us going forward.
Telling awesome storytelling lessons … emphasize the visual
“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.” – Ernest Hemingway
Here visual does not mean only the use of graphics such as photography, video, animations, visualizations of data, and so on.
Visual also means helping the audience to clearly “see” your ideas through your use of descriptive language, through the use of concrete examples, and by the power and simplicity of metaphor.
Mark Twain story lessons … make the tough choices about inclusion and exclusion
Whether you have 5-minutes, 18-minutes, or an all-day seminar in which to tell your story, it is never enough time to tell all that you know or to share everything in as much detail as possible. Time can be a real obstacle, but it’s also a great enabler if you are willing and able.
Willing and able to put in the time to think long and hard about what’s the most important and what’s less important for reaching your audience in a way that is honest, informative, and engaging.
You can’t include all that you know or all that there is to say.
The secret is in knowing what to leave out. This is not easy. Balance is key.
