Stories are powerful tools for communicating ideas, inspiring action, and influencing decisions. But how do you craft a story that resonates with your audience and achieves your goals? In this article, you'll learn how to structure and sequence your stories to create a coherent and persuasive narrative.
A story is composed of three basic elements: a character, a conflict, and a resolution. The character is the protagonist or the main person who the story revolves around. The conflict is the problem or challenge that the character faces. The resolution is the outcome or the lesson that the character learns. These elements form the backbone of your story and help you establish the context, the stakes, and the message.
It's useful to understand that this is the basic structure of full stories, but also the ideal structure for individual scenes in the story. Scenes that don't have these elements usually don't push the story forward and could be removed to improve the story pacing. Of course, each medium has its own desired pace, so take it with a grain of salt. But in general, it is a good rule of thumb to make sure that every scene in a story is revealing details about a character or pushing the story forward.
A story is basically like a song. You introduce the main character, be it animal, person or weather. Next is a conflict. A lost dog, an old love or a rainstorm. Lastly most people like resolution whether happy or sad,expected or unexpected or left up to the reader to solve.
We have to tread lightly using the word ‘conflict’ when describing elements of a story. Conflict is a grand assumption that the story is always negative in nature, when it may not be. Yes, there are conflict negative, sad stories. But there are also conflict positive stories. I teach my students the difference by relating it to the ‘conflict of what to eat for dessert?’ “Do I choose ice cream, or the pie?” Nothing negative there, in general. I know they will both be a win-win.
Más allá del inicio, nudo, desenlace, hay un mundo de posibilidades. Explora y atrévete con microcuentos, peque?os relatos que impactan y transforman. Dale rienda suelta a tu imaginación y rompe con sutileza alguna regla. Tus lectores lo agradecerán.
A story arc is the shape or the pattern that your story follows, showing how the character changes and grows as a result of the conflict and the resolution. One of the most common and effective story arcs is the classic three-act structure. The setup introduces the character, setting, and status quo, while hinting at the conflict or inciting incident that will disrupt it. The confrontation develops the conflict and shows how the character struggles to overcome it, raising stakes with complications, obstacles, and twists. Finally, in the resolution, the conflict is resolved and the character has changed or learned something. Loose ends are tied up and a final message or moral is delivered.
In my experience, introducing a few different side conflicts can also keep the story interesting. Using the set-up structure previously stated on 2-3 significant characters allows you to bounce back and forth between different storylines throughout the plot. It gives the audience more than one character to connect with, and that way your story isn’t hyper-focused on the protagonist the entire time. Having a few different sources of conflict (especially with different characters) gives the reader more to invest in.
A story arc is not enough to keep your audience engaged and interested in your story. To capture and maintain their attention, you need to use techniques that reward their investment. The hook should be the opening sentence or paragraph that grabs the audience's attention and makes them want more. The hold is the middle part of your story that keeps them hooked and builds up to the climax. You can use a clear sequence, a consistent voice, a balance of emotions and facts, and a variety of scenes to create this. The payoff should be the ending that delivers on your promise and satisfies expectations. You can use a twist, surprise, revelation, call to action, or memorable takeaway to create this.
A story's narrative rhythm comprises its hook, hold (or build), and payoff. View them through the lens of emotion to understand how they function in compelling storytelling (and correspond with the 3-act structure): 1) Emotional Hook (Act 1: first 25%) 2) Emotional Build (Act 2: middle 50%) 3) Emotional Payoff (Act 3: final 25%) The hook is a covenant between storyteller and audience. One promises a cumulative emotional payoff in exchange for the other's investment in the story. The middle build then employs progressive narrative and character complications that lead to the concluding payoff. PRO TIP: The hook-build-payoff framework isn't exclusively seen at the story level but can also be observed more granularly in each scene.
A story is more than a sequence of events; it is also a way to convey emotions and feelings that resonate with your audience and influence their behavior. Knowing your audience and understanding what they care about, fear, desire, and value will help you tailor your story to their needs and emotions. Instead of telling your audience how a character feels or reacts to the conflict and resolution, use dialogue, actions, gestures, expressions, metaphors, and sensory details to show emotions. Additionally, create contrast and balance between different emotions in your story such as joy and sadness, fear and hope, anger and compassion to create drama, tension, and empathy.
One of the most underrated ways to convey powerful emotions is through silence and negative space. When your goal is to create emotional resonance, it's important to focus on what to leave *out* of your narrative. When does a silence or pause speak louder than words, and where can you lean into that?
Si no emocionas no existes. No hay mejor historia que aquella que cuida y sostiene la emoción. Que se responsabiliza del viaje del lector acompa?ando el relato con subidas y bajadas. Lo lineal está obsoleto. Las personas necesitan sentir, sentir todo el rato.
Let’s not forget the use a photograph to tell a story. Often I’ve seen due to a lack of content, one image is used for the entire story. It’s presented and for the entire duration the camera is slowly zooming in on a detail (Ken burns effect.) it accomplishes everything listed above.
Design thinking is a creative and human-centered approach to solving problems and innovating solutions, which involves empathizing with users, defining their needs, ideating possible solutions, prototyping and testing them, and implementing them. Additionally, it can help you improve your storytelling skills by empathizing with your audience to understand their needs, defining your purpose with problem statements and value propositions, ideating your story with brainstorming and mind mapping, and prototyping and testing it to see how it resonates with them. This will help you create stories that are clear, relevant, impactful, original, creative, diverse, effective, engaging, and refined.
A story must not only be about well-told, it must be well-constructed. Dig into the radical power of personal narrative, however, when you combine it with special attention to the rigor of plot, great writing has the potential to be revolutionary. For outlining and plotting my fiction, I like to use the three-act structure which is a popular screenwriting technique that revolves around constantly creating set-ups, conflicts and resolutions.
Yes, this statement is true from a product, service or person sales perspective. But, storytelling? It depends on the genre. Are you selling something for a profit? Or are you attempting to get the audience to donate to cause? Two very different uses of storytelling.
In my experience, brevity makes a story more impactful. If the writer can convey the emotion in just enough words and breathing space, a story resonates better with the reader. Some of the most memorable stories that I’ve read were always crisp, lucid and brave.