The Ingredients Of A Story

The ingredients of powerful stories are:

1. a character who faces a challenge,
2. a character with something to hope for, cheer for and ultimately to fight for.?

In a business world, powerful storytelling can be as simple as sharing case studies and anecdotes of successful clients who navigated from impending failure, to flying success.?

However engaging stories are not always victorious, oftentimes they are simply nostalgic or whimsical meditations on life.

Hemingway once gave the example of what he believed to be the shortest story possible:?

Baby Shoes. For Sale. Never Worn.?

With only 6 words, Hemingway effectively constructs a scenario with a desire “to sell baby shoes” and stakes or a challenge, “never worn” which introduces the note of tragedy to close the tale.?

Obviously the longer the story and the greater the stakes, the more emotion the audience feels particularly if the protagonist can come back from tragedy and achieve even heights of greater success.?

Another way to share a powerful business story is to speak to the audience in a way that evokes their future success as a present reality.?

The iPod was not marketed as

A device with 1GB of storage

but instead Apple cleverly marketed it as

?Have 1000 songs in your pocket.

The messaging around this product went from data, to illustration, even a story of a character with a desire fulfilled, with no loss of word count.?

In brief, infuse your character with a desire, connect the character's desire to your audience’s desires, and give the character something to fight for.

This is the receipe for a great brand story.