Story time

Why no child has ever said at bedtime, “Dad, tell me some information.”

I’M JUST BACK home from Whistler, B.C., where I did a storytelling workshop for a company in the brain-health field. In recent years, corporate storytelling has become a thing, its potential now widely understood. The idea is that a company’s mission and values are best expressed and illustrated through storytelling. Don’t just tell people you’re patient-driven (lots of medical and pharmaceutical companies claim to be). Instead, tell them a story that shows that you are.

We come into this world hardwired for stories. I’ve yet to hear of a child, tucked into bed, saying, “Dad, tell me some more information.” What the child wants to hear before falling asleep is, of course, another story. Before writing was invented, stories were the way wisdom and history were passed down orally through the generations. Today, stories are how we file our memories, plan our futures, connect to other people, and make sense of the world.

At storytelling workshops, I sometimes find that people have only a vague idea of what a story actually is and how it affects the listener, or reader, or viewer. So let’s start with first principles. What, exactly, is a story?

ACTUALLY, LET’S start with what it isn’t. It isn’t an anecdote. It isn’t boosterism. It’s not a resort owner telling you about the beautiful California coast. It’s not a detailed explanation of how an EV battery works, or a description of a weird play in a baseball game. It’s not a rambling account of a vacation in Croatia or a chance encounter with an old friend. 

As for what a story is, I’m not exactly breaking news here. Aristotle identified the key elements in his Golden Rules of Storytelling more than 300 years before Christ. Joseph Campbell popularized the notion of the hero’s journey in his books and 1980s interviews on PBS with Bill Moyers. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru whose workshop I attended many years ago, put it this way:

“The classical story is built around an active protagonist who struggles against primarily external forces of antagonism to pursue his or her desire, through continuous time, within a consistent and causally connected fictional reality, to a closed ending of absolute, irreversible change.”

OK, then. The archetypal story has a hero, a protagonist. The hero has a goal—to make his way back home after the Civil War, for example, or to find the killer of her brother, or to open a Michelin-starred restaurant. The hero embarks on a journey to achieve the goal, and encounters obstacles and setbacks on the way to doing so.

A STORY HAS a beginning, a middle, and an end. Think of the beginning as the challenge, the middle as the choice (or succession of choices) the hero makes in confronting the challenge, and the ending as the resulting change. That simple prototype—challenge, choice, change—shows the structural essence of a story.

Homer’s Odyssey is an ancient story. Odysseus spends many years trying to get back to Ithaca and his beloved Penelope after the Trojan War. He must overcome everything from lotus-eating layabouts to sea monsters, from the Cyclops's cave to the beckoning sirens who lure sailors to their destruction.

A mystery novel is a story. Our hero, a detective, has to figure out who hijacked the Brinks truck. To solve the crime he must triumph over dead ends and bad guys in rising degrees of difficulty. Once he thinks he knows who did it, he goes to his superiors, only to realize they’re in on the crime. So he goes to the DA, and figures out that the DA is dirty as well. Now the people he thought would help him are trying to kill him. Despite these tribulations, our hero prevails in the end.

Once you start looking through a story lens, you see stories everywhere. Politicians tell stories about what they plan to do. Elect me: I’m the hero. I’m going to confront the challenges of the day (housing, inflation, addiction, immigration), choose more efficient ways of spending your tax dollars, and so change your life for the better.

Even brief TV ads get framed as mini stories. Homeowner Bill’s challenge is to avoid the stigma of having the ugliest lawn on the block. Surveying the weeds and brown patches in his yard, he notices the lush green grass next door. Bill chooses to ask the neighbour for advice, and the neighbour tells him about new, improved SuperGrow. Bill tries it, and presto! Brown scruff becomes beautiful lawn. Challenge confronted, choice made, change achieved. 

WHY DO STORIES engage people? Simply put, they activate parts of the brain that information alone does not. They create an emotional connection, not just an intellectual one. Listening to a story, you empathize. You relate to Odysseus, to the detective, to the homeowner, because you, too, have faced challenges, made choices, and brought about change in your own life. We all have, for better and worse.

Listening to a story, you may start speculating about the characters' motivations, thoughts, and feelings. Stories stimulate the imagination in ways that information never will. When you listen to a story, you visualize scenes, characters, and events. Your imagination transports you into the world of the story.

The amygdala, an emotional processing centre in the brain, gets triggered by emotional cues in the story. That’s why people cry at the movies, or say things like, “I didn’t want the book to end.” Unexpected twists or emotional peaks can prompt the release of dopamine, making the experience deeply pleasurable and satisfying. You feel real joy, or sadness, or dread. “Oh no,” you think, reading words on a page. “Don’t open that basement door!”

CORPORATIONS HAVE embraced storytelling because such emotional connections are precious, and not something you encourage with graphs or data or sales projections. Simply put, the power of stories is that they inspire and engage people in ways that conventional marketing and advertising do not.

Many of the pharma people at the Whistler session caught on to the principles of storytelling right away. As one of them said, “Our industry is ultimately about being given a brain-health problem, such as migraine or depression, and asked to develop a solution.” Beginning, middle, end. Challenge, choice, change.

The group quickly landed on a story about sourcing a drug after the pandemic caused supply-chain issues. The drug helped a group of afflicted children, and the company found a way to keep supplying it to them even though it involved considerable financial loss. That’s not claiming to be patient-driven. It’s demonstrating the corporate commitment by telling a story.

Whatever you’re writing—fiction or nonfiction, marketing campaign or grant application, a memoir for grandkids or a personal essay in a college application—there may well be a better approach than trying to persuade people with facts and figures and logical arguments. Try telling them a story.