3 Techniques to Improve Your Storytelling

Mes amis,

Please have a seat and welcome to the house 🏠

Can I get you something? A smooth hot drink? Refreshing cold beverage?

In the meantime, help yourself to this week's (and next week's) issue.

In this week’s issue, we’re continuing our theme of storytelling.

So far, we’ve covered:

• How to use storytelling to stand out

• How to remove the snooze from your story

• The 3 things you must absolutely not do when you’re telling a story

This week, I want to give you 3 more techniques to help you improve your storytelling.

Let’s jump into it.

Crystal Ball  🔮

When crafting your story, you want it to captivate your audience and make them feel one emotion at a time.

The “crystal ball moment” gives your audience a glimpse into what the future may hold for you or your situation.

For example,

“Walking down that alleyway was a mistake. I should’ve stuck to the main road and now, step by step, I moved closer to these 3 hooded men. Their hands were in their pockets and they looked anything but friendly...”.

This paragraph illustrates the character's inner turmoil, hinting at the potential consequence of their action.

Equally, it could go another way and the 3 hooded men could make way for the character and they could continue on their journey.

But by adding a crystal ball moment, you increase the stakes of your story. (Or add stakes to your story if you didn’t have any, to begin with.)

Remember: your story needs stakes.

The use of crystal ball moments can help to elevate the stakes of any narrative, giving the audience a glimpse of the unknown and an incentive to keep reading/listening.

It's a great way to make a story more captivating and engaging.

(Ethically) Lie ↩

Calling back to Matthew Dick's story (which you can find here), his horrific car accident isn’t about him dying and coming back to life. The same is true of many stories, such as Jurassic Park and Spider-Man.

While these stories may appear to be about one thing on the surface, the deeper plot is often something different.

And that’s what makes them unforgettable.

All adverts tell us the same thing.

Eat this, drink this, shop with us, don’t shop with them and so on and so forth, so why do we still watch them?

Because great adverts like John Lewis’ annual Christmas advert deliver us a new story every single year.

This happens with every story too.

The teaching points are lessons we’ve heard throughout our life, but a new premise excites us. It intrigues us and curiosity compels us to know more.

By ethically misleading your audience, you can create a unique and compelling experience.

You will surprise, engage and move your audience like you wouldn’t have thought possible.

Hourglass ⏳

The hourglass technique can be used to control the pace of your story. Make sure you slow things right down before the climax.

You may be thinking you can use rhetorical questions, don’t.

By using rhetorical questions you bring your audience out of the story and bring them back to reality.

Your story needs to flow too.

So it's important to use connectors better than ‘and then, and then’, instead use:

• Yet

• But

• Therefore

This keeps the story as direct as possible to your 5-second moment (the transformation).

And there you are.

3 more techniques you can use to improve your storytelling. 

Go slow though.

To incorporate them all is powerful but by drip feeding yourself one at a time, your storytelling skills will go leaps and bounds.

Until next time.

A bientot 👋🏿

Like what you read? 👀

If you did then there's more to come next week 👇🏿

If you didn't then reply and tell me why. (I promise not to be upset 🙂)

Podcast of the week

Things with my business haven't hit gold as I would have hoped. I had the product and the market but I just couldn't marry the two.

There was something missing...

I had just journaled about my experience before filming this podcast which helped me develop clarity.

This should be useful to you if you're thinking about entrepreneurship or you're already in the thick of it

Wall of Inspiration

I took this photo a month ago yesterday.

You can see the frosted greenery, frozen paths and trust it was freezing!

But now, as I write, the weather is 14 degrees Celsius.

This a great reminder of impermanence - nothing lasts forever.