Rapid Storybuilding: How to think fast and develop ideas your clients love

It’s probably happened to you before – in five seconds you go from being perfectly prepared, to flailing around like an idiot in front of your client.

You just spent a week researching and coming up with the perfect concept for a new ad campaign, it’s fun, it’s compelling, and it perfectly matches the client’s brand.?

But the meeting doesn’t go as planned.?

The client looks at a week’s worth of your work, shrugs, and asks if you have anything else.? They don’t doubt your research or your expertise.? They are just bored by your idea.

And in spite of your diligent efforts, you are now back at square zero.

At this stage, the default response is to either say “Let me circle back” on the topic, or to start grasping at straws and throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if your client likes something else – you’ll be tempted to start pitching half-baked ideas that you yourself rejected during your research process.

But circling back and throwing spaghetti are both bad ideas.??

Circling back (i.e. running away to cry and work on a new concept) is a waste of time, and also a waste of one of your most valuable creative resources – the client – who is sitting right there in front of you.

Throwing spaghetti is even dumber for a number of reasons I’ll explain later – primarily because you are giving your client a lot of bad ideas to potentially latch onto.?

So how do you come up with attractive and useful story ideas fast??

Millions of creative directors, freelancers and marketers are forced to face this problem every day, and yet there’s remarkably little written on the topic.? How are you supposed to think on your feet, present good ideas, brainstorm with your client, guide them to good solutions and make the whole process fun and seamless, all over the course of a 15-minute conversation??

Your ability to deliver good ideas fast is what separates you from the competition and pays your mortgage.?

There are a ton of good resources for how to tell a story, but storytelling is only half the battle.? If you work in marketing, advertising, or almost any commercial creative field you must also be a story builder.? You must learn to develop visual and emotional journeys from scratch, stories that will delight your customer and make them excited to work with you, and if possible, you must make it all seem easy and collaborative and fun.?

And speed is always going to be important.? Whether or not you think it’s blasphemy to rush the creative process, it’s going to happen anyway.? Any client willing to pay you will almost certainly be in a hurry to get their product, and also expect it to be good.? Your ability to deliver good ideas fast is what separates you from the competition and pays your mortgage.?

So to be good at rapid storybuilding you need an actual plan - a reliable framework for doing it right every time, and eliminating as much guesswork as possible.

Here are the four basic tools I like to use, to make this process substantially easier. more effective and repeatable.?

1. Start with tropes.

2. Find wormholes to explore the multiverse of related ideas, and improve your tropes.

3. Add bridges to turn your tropes into a story.

4. Tell a meta story about the stories you’re building as you are building them to engage your audience, create buy-in and spur useful collaboration.?

Tropes

The first thing you need is a stock collection of tropes in your head.? A trope is a tried-and-true story element that people like and will generally gravitate towards.? Tropes are like the top 100 greatest movie moments of all time.? The ones everyone loves.? It’s easy to mistake these for cliches, but the important difference is that cliches tend to be the product of laziness, whereas tropes are the product of paying attention to what your audience likes.? Here’s a good article highlighting the basic difference.?

A billboard can contain a trope, as can a song.

Most people in the 21st century have passively collected a library of good tropes in their head, although maybe they don’t see it as important.? So the only thing you likely need to do here is to start taking this library seriously moving forward - perhaps set aside more intentional time to consume and read good content, to improve the contents of your imagination.?

Although people mostly talk about tropes in fiction or movies, tropes exist everywhere in the creative and digital marketing world, because storytelling exists everywhere in this world, although it can be subtle.? A billboard can contain a trope, as can a song.??

A software company might want a video advertisement featuring a rocket ship taking off, because it represents the cutting edge of exploration and technology.? A premium liquor company might want to use a lot of black and gold on their signage, whereas a local brewery might prefer hand-drawn animals done by a local artist.? These are all tropes that have been done a million times, but they’re still good.? Rocket ships are cool, black and gold looks fancy, and local beer tastes better with an intricately drawn moose printed on the side.?

The creative rebel in you might be recoiling in disgust … “Caving to conformity is the opposite of creativity!”?

But it’s not.? It’s the jumping-off place.? And tropes are the absolute best jumping off place, because people already love them.? You are warming up the crowd to make your job easier as you go.??

It also matters how you present them.? When you deploy a trope, you’re going to bring it up ever-so-briefly as you are ping-ponging stuff back and forth with your client.? And then you’re going to get their reaction as fast as possible and immediately improve your trope, so it starts to become an actual solution tailored to their story and their problem.? The point of starting with tropes is not to be brilliant, the point is to move fast and keep your client invested in the creative process.?

“So are we just randomly making shit up?”?

Nope!? We are using tools and building blocks to get to an objective.? Sometimes, we must re-arrange the blocks, but nothing about this is random.?

Keeping that linear process in mind, let’s talk about the tools in a bit more detail.?

Wormholes

Once you’ve landed on a trope that feels good, the next step in storybuilding is to locate wormholes within your trope that will act as portals to other ideas, helping you iterate and improve on your starting point.??

Wormholes are not built – they already exist inside the trope.? They are discovered by carefully examining the elements of the original idea and asking questions.??

"Why does that idea work?"?

What does it communicate to an audience???

Where does it come from and lead to??

A wormhole could be anything … a theme, a word, a place.?

Let’s go back to the rocket ship theme for a software company, to illustrate what a wormhole is, and how to use it.??

By simplifying down to a single nexus, you’ll be immediately flooded with ideas.

Your client likes the rocket ship idea, but they wonder how to make it more unique.? If you start to think about places to take the rocket ship story, you might get initially stuck – sure, you could make the rocket land on the moon and meet little green aliens, but you’re getting into cliché territory there.? Extending the duration of the trope may not be interesting in this case, so maybe we pick out an important element of the story – the concept of “exploration” for instance.? Where else in the multiverse does this theme pop up?? What are other examples of exploration?? By simplifying down to a single nexus, you’ll be immediately flooded with ideas:? Pirates, Vikings, Deep-sea divers, Archaeologists.? These are all explorers in their own right!

As a visual thinker, I like to imagine these options existing next to each other like books on a cosmic bookshelf.? Looking through my wormhole, I am scanning the shelf, getting a sneak peek at parallel ideas, all organized together in the “explorer” section.??

Once I've selected an idea that looks interesting, and used my wormhole to travel there, I can calibrate it further by asking more granular questions. For instance, if an idea is attention-grabbing but too far-fetched. I would adjust the stakes of the story.? What’s a higher stakes version of a deep-sea diver?? Maybe a Navy Diver defusing explosive mines in WWII.? What’s a lower-stakes version?? Maybe a snorkeler looking for shells.? Even lower?? A kid playing in her swimming pool imagining she is a deep-sea diver.?

Now there’s a software advertisement you haven’t seen before!?

As you uncover and exploit wormholes it is critically important to remember that this is not the same thing as throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.? The power of wormholes is that you are building an unbroken chain of good ideas.? At every step of the way, you ensure that you and your client both love the idea as it takes shape.? This provides quality control and reduces backtracking.?

Spaghetti-throwing, in contrast, provides no such control.? It feels creative, but it’s lazy.? You are abdicating your creative responsibilities by just dredging up random shit from your head and then forcing your client to determine what is the correct solution for their problem.

Spaghetti-throwing also violates a sacred commandment I once received from a wise mentor.

Long ago, believing myself to be a social engineering genius, I tried to manipulate a client by submitting one option I preferred, along with two options that I thought were so obviously bad, they would pick the good option without thinking.

The client chose poorly.? Instead of picking the glossy, high-tech synth music track I thought was the obvious choice, he selected a piece of groggy jam-band funk music to play over the intro for a podcast about wireless technology.

The podcast was ruined.? Chaos ensued.? And after my boss had wasted an hour fixing my mistake by convincing the bewildered client to backtrack, I received the following sacred commandment in email form:

“Never ever ever fucking put an option in front of a client that you don’t want them to pick.” - Upset Wise Guru Boss

Turns out that kind of devious car salesmen BS does not work in the creative space, and tends to backfire exactly the way you think.? So before you try playing 4D chess with the universe, take a moment to consider that you probably aren’t even that good at regular chess.?

Focus on what you are good at, and do your best to make every idea a good idea.?

Bridges

Once you have used tropes and wormholes to decide the basic components of your story, you are going to build bridges to tie everything together.?

A bridge is different from a wormhole because wormholes are discovered and bridges are built.? A wormhole is a flexible portal for exploring new worlds, like a curious elephant trunk browsing the cosmic library shelves of your own mind.? A bridge, on the other hand, is the straightest narrative path for connecting two tropes you’ve already explored and decided you like. It has fixed endpoints and an obvious purpose.? You could have picked your tropes for any reason - maybe because of their thematic suitability, or just because they connect with your audience well.? You build bridges to make those thematically suitable ideas narratively suitable.??

It doesn’t matter how Tom Hanks becomes the lone survivor.? The plane crash is a necessity, and therefore a bridge.

Because of their rigid parameters, bridges are often in short supply and more difficult to implement.? You might be stuck with only one or two plausible bridge options, and they might both be imperfect.? In many cases they must be contrived or forced a bit to make them work.? This usually means a small but necessary sacrifice in believability to set up the rest of your story.

Let’s take the movie Cast Away for example.? The one-in-a-million scenario where Tom Hanks is the only person to survive his plane crash is the bridge that allows a 20th century working stiff to be stranded alone on a desert island.? Fiction buffs will be quick to point out that what I am claiming is a bridge is actually just another trope – namely the Sole Survivor trope.? I like the term ‘bridge’ because it helps identify which tropes are utilitarian rather than essential to the spirit of the story.? They tend to appear later in the storybuilding process to help fill in the gaps.? It doesn’t affect the movie how he becomes the lone survivor.? The plane crash is a necessity, and therefore a bridge.? It’s also a bridge because of the limited number of options … To get Tom Hanks to a desert Island, it pretty much had to be a plane or a ship.? A FedEx truck driving off a pier into the ocean doesn’t work.

Let’s return to the software video for another example of bridge-building.? Our story now features a little girl playing in her swimming pool and pretending that she is a deep sea diver on a dangerous mission.? Remember that we are trying to convey the concept of “exploration”.? However, we’ve moved pretty far away from the initial concept, and the scene we are setting doesn’t clearly connect with exploration at all … it may just look silly or convey the idea that we are selling pool noodles instead of software.

In this case we are looking for a bridge that connects the innocent and low-stakes idea of a girl playing in a swimming pool, with the serious and exciting? idea of exploration and cutting-edge technology.?

Bridge example 1:?Straddling two worlds.? We can cut back and forth between scenes from a serious and dramatic oceanic expedition, to the kid playing in her pool.? Maybe it’s a time-jump thing, where the diver who emerges from the ocean and takes off her diving helmet is actually the same kid, all grown up.? This is functional, but a little cliched.

Bridge example 2: Two worlds combined.? Visuals can be wholly devoted to the pool and submarine toys, but maybe there’s a bit of Michael Bay visual flair that makes the whole thing seem more dramatic.? We might also consider adding grown-up radio chatter, engine noises and sonar pings to the audio track.? Even though we never see the high-stakes world, we get to share in the kid’s excitement about her own adventure.? This is less cliched, but also shakier - it runs a greater risk of feeling contrived, or failing to connect the concepts.

I’m sure there are better bridges for this problem, but these examples should help define what we are trying to do with bridges, and highlight where we might run into issues with contrivance.?

The best way to make an implausible bridge as convincing as possible is to keep it quick and play it straight.?

Incidentally, the airplane crash scene from Castaway is a perfect example of this, because it relies on brief duration and hyper-realism.? The crash in the movie takes only about 2 minutes to unfold, without any theatrics from the main character, just hushed, clenched fear.? And as poor Tom thrashes in the ocean, he is engulfed in realistic pitch darkness, punctuated only by lightning strikes.? Speed and realism redeem what could otherwise have been a melodramatic and predictable scene, making it suitably scary.?

This also highlights the importance of not worrying about the bridges too much - find the best ones you can, and then focus on good execution.? Don’t let shaky bridges dissuade you from connecting interesting worlds.??

The Meta Story

When you are building a story with your customer, you are telling several stories at the same time.? There’s one story meant for the audience to connect with, then there’s another, possibly metaphorical story layered in, which is meant to convey brand or product value, and finally there’s the meta story - you and your client, in a conference room or on a zoom call, building a story together.?

A really good brainstorming session with your client should feel like you are both behind-the-scenes making Lord of the Rings.

A simple example of meta storytelling is a knock-knock joke.? Before assaulting the audience with an awful pun, the storyteller must first seek their participation, and participation is actually the main thing that makes the joke fun.??

A more sophisticated example is in the game Dungeons & Dragons, where the Dungeon Master is playing the game, and planning the story at the same time, for the benefit of everyone else’s immersion.?

When you build a meta story around yourself and your audience (the client), the involvement of your audience heightens their experience and their commitment to the process.? Your investment in the role of storybuilder improves the quality of your work because it helps you get out of your own head and trust your instincts.? A really good brainstorming session with your client should feel like you are both behind-the-scenes making Lord of the Rings, and angling for an Oscar together.? And as the director, you are responsible for channeling that vibe because you’re the one who realizes - that’s a story, too.??

Once established, and if carefully maintained, that hyper-real collaborative vibe will carry your project aloft on majestic and fluffy angel wings, allowing you to sail over chasms and pitfalls that would have wrecked you otherwise, due to a lack of faith and risk avoidance coming from all parties.? No amount of professional competence can replace the power and elasticity of having fun.??

To allow yourself to play is the bedrock of creativity, but to build and deploy a mental space where others can play is a fucking superpower.?

Final Thoughts

So to come up with good story ideas fast, you should start with tropes everyone already loves, then find wormholes within those tropes to connect parallel worlds that will delight your audience, then patch everything together with fast and functional bridges.? Throughout this process, you should invite your audience to participate, supercharging your brainstorming sessions by treating them as a guided adventure and paying close attention to what parts the audience enjoys.?

This may still seem easier said than done, so to round this out, here are some additional resources that I have found true and useful, to help with each component part of this strategy.

Good luck storybuilding!

Additional Resources

1. On storytelling theory, which will help you organize your trope library:

www.tvtropes.org an exhaustive website of tropes worth browsing.

Story by Robert McKee

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker

2. On ideation, and alternate ways to think about wormholes:

How to Get Ideas by Larry Corby

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger

3. On storytelling style, which will make your bridges stronger:

Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass (Available with 30-Day Free Trial)

On Writing by Stephen King

Put the Cat in the Oven before You Describe the Kitchen by Jake Vander Ark

Nobody Wants to Read your Shit by Steven Pressfield

4. On persuasion, and alternate ways to think about meta storytelling:

The Catalyst by Jonah Berger

Tribes by Seth Godin

Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller