Photo by Patti Digh. I'll let her tell the story.
Recently, the best presentations I've heard, and the most compelling business proposals, the most persuasive books, and the most effective blogs and blog posts I've read, have all featured very powerful stories.
The word story (and the word history) come from the Greek root meaning "learning by enquiry". Stories were, at one time, interactive events, interrupted with questions from the audience. When we tell bedtime stories to our children they still adhere to that tradition. When we read a story we are engaged in an unspoken conversation with the author, asking her/him questions, filling in the blanks.
I've been thinking about the best (and worst) stories I have heard, the cleverest jokes (a form of story), the most engrossing short stories and novels I've read, the (disturbingly few) good films I've seen this past year, to try to discern the qualities that make great stories so powerful. I've come up with these ten qualities:
- Personal, relating direct observation: A story can be in the third person, but it must still be from the personal perspective of the narrator, someone who was there, describing what happened as it happened. In that sense, every good story is really told in the first person.
- Conveyed naturally through dialogue and description: A great story does not need sentences that contain phrases like "he thought" or "she wondered" or "they believed". The audience needs to be there, a witness to what is said and heard and done, not told what is in someone's head.
- Tight, sequential, graceful: No words wasted, every word counting. And no flashbacks please; it's hard enough focusing on things in the right order. The essence of grace in storytelling, I think, is to let the story be told through you, to flow through you. You are just the medium.
- Credible, transporting and real: Great stories have details, things that force you to take notice. Lots of sensory information, at least some of which should be subtle, specific. The clothing people wore, the way their faces looked, the sounds and smells and how things felt to the touch. So the audience gets transported there, they are there.
- Momentum and flow: Drama or conflict can give the story momentum (you want to know what happens next), but there are other devices to achieve it. many jokes (and fables) use repetition in threes, for example, where there is a pattern that leads you to anticipate what comes next. Surprise and serendipity are great, but there must be a flow to interrupt before the interruption has meaning.
- Characters you care about: This is especially hard in a short story. This is perhaps why sequels are so popular -- you already care about the character, so that work is already done. You can make characters charismatic and amusing, or have them face a struggle that is undeserved. But somehow you need to have the audience care about what happens to them. They must be sympathetic. Successful or famous or beautiful is not enough.
- Entertaining, funny, and/or imaginative: The story needs an imaginative spark even if it is a factual retelling. The imagination can be in your perspective, in what you as narrator notice and focus on that others miss, in your inference about what's important or what it means, in how you tell it or embellish it credibly to make it amusing.
- Space for the listener to personalize: Great stories leave enough untold that the audience can fill in the details and make the story their own, really feel themselves as part of the story.
- Metaphoric and educational or informative: Great stories not only amuse, they teach. They can teach directly by showing the audience what they missed not being there, or they can, more powerfully and subtly, teach them something about themselves by metaphor, by how the audience remembers or can imagine themselves in a similar, analogous situation, with sudden new insight about what it meant, or what they could or should have done.
- Told with passion and joy: For the audience the care about the story, the narrator has to show that s/he cares about it. Tone is important.
What else? What other qualities do you think are essential to a great story?
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