To narrate is to create
"Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination. To narrate is to create, while to live is merely to be lived"
Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet was first published 50 years after his death and is regarded as one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. He uses these lines to describe the power of narration in comparison with simply existing and experiencing life. I mean, there are stats based on actual research that show how powerful and memorable stories can be, but I found this quote to be the most profound argument. Storytelling and the ability to craft a narrative can come in very handy when you want to create a sense of urgency for working towards activities whose benefits are only obvious in the long term. This is nice, but narrating and creating aren't as easy as we would wish they were. Ever had that doubt creep in when you're in front of an empty sheet of paper? Doubt that you'll ever finish your work, doubt that anyone would care, doubt that your creation would hold any value at all. It is in these times that we can turn towards some simple tools and frameworks to enhance our narrative. Here are some of my favourite ideas that neatly tie up into a usable format with little practice.
Some good starting points
When Pixar started its journey with Toy Story, the writers had a few simple rules. There won't be any princess / prince in the movie, no musical, no happy fairy tale village and no 'I want' song. A pretty risky move for animated movies at the time, but what really worked for them was the story. Pixar story teller Mathew Luhn outlines how to create an inspiring story with these 3 steps:
Have a great hook – create something unusual, unexpected or set up an action / conflict at the very beginning. For example, what if a rat wanted to become a French chef?
Create change – people might not like to change themselves but love to go on a journey of transformation with the characters (I think about this sentence a lot)
Connect with the audience – You can have a great hook / create a journey of transformation but you must also ensure you speak to the audience at their level and be relatable
If you've been watching every Pixar movie so far, you should definitely check out this video where Mathew breaks down this process and leaves us with the question 'what do you want the audience to feel?'
Dan Harmon, the co-creator of Rick & Morty has a more practical framework with similar ideas about what constitutes a good story. He calls it the story circle and it looks like this:
A character is in a zone of comfort.
But they want something.
They enter an unusual situation.
Adapt to it.
Get what they wanted.
Pay a heavy price for it.
Return to their familiar situation.
Having changed.
You start off with a relatable character, who has some kind of a need which causes them to cross a certain threshold, they now have to go down a road of trials / adapt, find what they wanted whether they like it or not, pay a price for that and return to their original state having changed. Understanding this story circle makes some of the hard and repetitive tasks of storytelling simpler.
"You don’t have an idea until you can use the words ‘but,’ ‘except,’ ‘and then...' "
—Aaron Sorkin
Legendary screenwriter Aaron Sorkin echoes the same ideas when he talks about 'intention and obstacle' in his phenomenal screenwriting masterclass. The protagonist must have a compelling intention and a formidable obstacle. Getting the intention and obstacle figured out at the very beginning of your writing process can come in really handy when you try to position various other plot points or anecdotes. Anybody seeing a pattern here? The more you try to analyse world class story tellers to deconstruct their methods, the more you realise they are all connected and rooted to the same principles. Principles that one man single handedly laid out 2000 years ago.
I lied when I told you that this article was the definitive guide to telling stories. That definitive guide would actually be Aristotle's Poetics. Poetics is the earliest surviving work on dramatic theory and is the bible of storytelling. You can find the original text here as provided by MIT. It talks about everything from structure to flow to character development. In fact the next time you watch a movie or a TV show and when something doesn't work, chances are it broke one of Aristotle's rules. I would strongly urge you to check them out and build a framework of your own as per the context in which you want to tell your story. Spoiler alert: Poetics gets into the finer details of having a unified sequential plot, building a cause-effect relationship between the characters and their actions, having a 'beginning-middle-end' structure and building characters who undergo a major change of fortune. Pretty fresh stuff.
Putting it all together
Consultants have a neat trick to put this all together so that it is usable on a day to day basis. The average decision maker is not very keen on paying attention to you unlike the audience of a Pixar movie. So here is when you use what's called the SCQA framework (introduced by Barbara Minto in her book The Pyramid Principle) to structure your story. It stands for Situation-Complication-Question-Answer.
Situation – We start with the situation, a statement that we know the audience will agree with. It is a good idea to start this way before discussing other things they may disagree with. The easy start also renders the listener more receptive to the rest of the discussion.
Complication – This is a complication to the story. The complication outlines the instability of the situation and disturbs the continuity of the present state.
Question – The question follows straight from the complication and opens a window to address the problem. It further opens the discussion to understand what the problem would cost if left unchecked and how we would benefit from solving it.
It is usually a good idea to align the S-C-Q of the 'story' (problem) at hand with your teams internally before you pitch the same to the target audience or someone outside the organisation. In some cases, you will be surprised to find out all the different possibilities for the S-C-Q's you would be able to come up with for the same problem. This is a call for a better understanding of the audience and their context. Using this structure is also a good way to ensure alignment within the team.
So that's how you borrow from master screenwriters and storytellers. Understanding Aristotle's Poetics or Dan Harmon's story circle really puts into perspective why the intention (situation), obstacle (complication) and the case for change are invaluable to a good narrative. At the end of the day, we tell stories not to explain ourselves but to change people's minds.