Finding engaging stories for content and delivery
Yesterday I was talking with a guy who’s building a ‘suite’ of offers in the breath work-personal development space. In particular he’s working with A-players… High performers who are also biz-ness minded. Anyway, he’s doing a workshop in the next two months.
He brought up the age old problem of what to talk about at the start?
Turns out, a previous mentor had told him to start each workshop with a personal story, to build trust. Something about yourself. So that people get to know your struggles, or why you do what you do.
Makes sense.
We all know that telling stories at the front of a workshop, class, or even email can be helpful. But the problem he touched on, is that you run out of backstory, and, it ain’t that exciting to get up and talk about yourself directly.
In a lot of the articles, podcasts, et cetera, one thing I’ve yapped on about is how the character in a story is defined not by what they say, but how they do what they do. How they overcome struggles. Or their point of view on things. Or even what they stand for. Ideally, demonstrated through action.
One example I give a lot is how Tarantino will write twenty plus pages of ‘scrap’ dialogue between characters, just to get to ‘know’ them. To learn how they speak. To understand how they do what they do. Then he throws that out. It’s purely to define the characters for his own sake with the rest of the film.
Anyway, all of this is to say that when you relay any story, about something you saw, or something that happened, you are further defining your character. It doesn’t need to be backstory.
How do you find the stories?
Yesterday I was at the track - I’ve hired a coach for sprinting - and the coach brought her son along. I’d say he’s seven or eight. And he asked me what I do for work. I told him we help businesses grow and make more money. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He was skateboarding, so I thought he might say an athlete, or something.
“Well, I’m already in business…”
I asked him what was the nature of his biz-ness?
“I find valuable things - I sharpen sticks for adventure games. I find balls and repair them… I fix up skateboards. I store them all in my locker at school. Then I rent them out to kids at $2 per day. There are other kids who have tried to open up businesses. One kid tries to rent out bicycles to the younger kids who are like, in preschool almost. But they can’t ride. It’s not a good business. And the teachers try to shut all of us down… They’re like the government (his words, lol). But we just tell them that it’s a game. And they can’t stop us from playing. I make around $39 dollars per day. It’s a lot of money.”
I was blown away. The kid was a hustling better than a lot of adults I know.
Anyway, I shared this story with the breathwork guy. And pointed out that the only reason I remembered it, was because it made me pay attention.
And the thing that made me pay attention?
Change, and conflict.
Sure, it was interesting that he was renting out sharpened sticks. But as soon as he said that there were other kids trying to hustle as well, and that the teachers were trying to shut the whole thing down, I was much more engaged. And couldn’t help but pay attention.
All I had to do then, is remember the story.
The Law of Conflict
We’ve covered before that the driver for almost all attention is not a ‘problem’, but ‘change.’ And specifically, the conflict, or potential conflict that ‘change’ creates. Conflict within ourselves. Conflict with others. The change and conflict cycle runs the entire news and media show.
When the kid talked about how they are going against the teachers to keep their enterprises running, that’s when the heart of the story and engagement appeared.
McKee teaches us about this in his book ’Story’.
“When the protagonist steps out of the inciting incident, he enters a world governed by the Law of Conflict. To wit: Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.”
“Put another way, conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music. Both story and music are temporal arts, and the single most difficult task of the temporal artist is to hook our interest, hold our uninterrupted concentration, then carry us through time without an awareness of the passage of time.”
Easier said than done.
And, if it was only about overt conflict, all we would have is one giant fight or war in a movie.
It’s much more subtle.
Conflict can be about status shifts, implied conflict, arguments, and suspense, which is really looming conflict on the horizon, such as a ticking clock, or an enemy moving closer to the protagonist.
Anyway, all of this is to say the thing we are looking for, is moments of change, tension, surprise, or conflict.
Once we can see the drivers for a story, we can start to collect them
It’s easy to look at great speakers or storytellers and think that somehow they just get this stuff. It just kind of pours out of them. And the better they are, the more natural it is, and the more gifted they must be.
Truth is, one of the key jobs of the compelling orator, or business person, is to build an arsenal of stories or parables.
This ain’t accidental. It’s something that we do on purpose, and work at daily.
People talk about ‘emptying the mind’. Well, if you want to have more compelling stories in delivery and content, it’s much more about expanding the mind. Adding more to it. Find things you’re interested in. Go out and create new experiences outside of social media, and bank stories from those experiences. ‘Filling the mind’ with experiences and stories is part of the job.
In saying that, there are three steps we can do to find more stories.
And I’ll get through this quickly. But basically, the more we practice these three, the better we get.
Step 1: ‘See’ a story, noticing conflict, change or curiosity.
Step 2: Log the story into a notebook or file
Step 3: Dress up the story
Step One - ‘See’ the Stories
A lot of people have written about this stuff at a much deeper level. Austin Kleon’s ‘Steal like an Artist’ is a helpful book. Draw on other people’s work, et cetera.
But this isn’t new.
Eugene Schwartz famously said, “You are not God, you don’t create anything from scratch. Instead, you ‘connect’ existing ideas in new ways” - I paraphrased the crap out of that.
John Cleese: “We don’t know where good ideas come from, but we know that it’s not from our laptop screen”.
It’s all the same message.
Get out there, consume the work of others. Interact with the world, and, you’ll have a constant source for your stories.
For me, I like to spearfish, train et cetera. So I regularly have stories about diving, sharks, whales. Whatever. So I’m constantly pounding out stories around that stuff. Then I have a dog who happens to have a lot of character. So I have stories about her. Then of course I’m working with a lot of unique business owners at any time, and I found early on that the stories that come from within your work are naturally going to be more valuable for your work because there’s already a lot of resonance there.
And in each case, first thing we’re doing is looking for things that make us pay attention.
And this is the great ‘gift’ (actually just a skillset that we develop) of the storyteller. It ain’t just the ‘telling’ of the story. It’s the ability to notice the event, and not just engage with it in real time. But ‘see’ it as fodder for the next email.
Soon you start to ‘see’ the stories more easily in the world around you. Just by practicing.
In short. If something makes you pay attention, or takes you by surprise. It’s probably going to take someone else by surprise as well, and is likely a good starting point for a story.
Step Two - Collect the Stories
One author I’m not a fan of, is Stephen King. I have yapped on about his book ‘On Writing’ a fair bit. But I don’t like his books. And I’ve tried. It might be the genre. The darkness. Whatever. I just don’t find them engaging. But either way, he’s prolific. And the way he comes up with stories is interesting. He just ‘starts’ with a scene, and then apparently, ‘sees where it’s going to go’.
So for example, I’m sitting at a desk right now. So you start with that. “He was sitting at the desk…” then you make something happen… “BANG, there was a loud noise down the street.” Maybe the guy ignores it, and keeps working…. “Then a soft knocking on the door….” And you just kind of evolve the story.
But if you think about it, that’s only really going to work in the world of fiction.
For us, we straddle business (non fiction) and entertainment. So instead of creating stories, we ‘collect’ stories.
And personally I don’t think this part gets enough attention. But how are you going to remember all the stories? You aren’t. So you create some kind of swipe file.
I heard - and I think it was from Dan Kennedy - about the idea of a ‘potato box’. It was either Kennedy, or one of his mentors, they had a big cardboard box for potatoes, and used this to throw newspaper clippings, articles, anything that was fodder for stories.
You need your potato box.
For me, my potato box is really just the ‘notes’ program on my computer. Sometimes I’ll even email the ideas to myself.
Plus a bunch of diaries. I’ve probably gone through ten or fifteen diaries. This ain’t any thing special. There’s no dumping stream of consciousness, or deep journal entries. Nothing wrong with that. But these diaries are really just for collecting the kernels of what happened. A few notes that help to remember the story: Who was involved, what happened, what were some specific points that stood out?
Once we have the stories, we get to dress them up…
Step Three - Dressing Up the Story
Before I sat down to write this, I saw a short video.
A yellow Nissan parked in a carpark next to a blue Toyota. The lady in the Nissan opened her door and it bumped the Toyota. The other woman saw it, and to retaliate, she opened her door into the Nissan, and put a bigger dent in it. Well, the whole thing escalated into a raging door slamming match. Soon, they were running their cars into each other in the carpark. Ramming each other. All the while, people in the carpark were just watching, holding onto their groceries. And the line under the video was “When you meet someone who matches your energy.”
It was a skit, but likely based on a true story at some point.
In the video, not only was there some conflict, but the story was ‘dressed up.’ The women were a little too enraged. The cars swiping at each other were a little too violent. It was ridiculous, but, still tied close enough to something we can imagine happening.
That story of the cars has no relevance to what we’re covering, but the message is in the medium.
I’ve long believed that, because we work with mediums that are ‘limited’, we have a creative license to dress up the stories.
What does that mean?
We need to add drama, to counterbalance the ‘flat-ness’ of media platforms.
If you and go through an actual experience together, maybe we’re out diving and something exciting happens. Then we both experience that ‘story’ at full definition. Then later, we ‘tell’ the story to someone else. Well, now it’s second hand. We ‘lose’ some of the experiential side of it. No matter how hard we try to be specific. From there, it just gets worse. Print media, videos, audio… Each time, we lose fidelity and depth.
This ain’t a bad thing.
And, it allows us to tell the stories en masse. But it means we need to practice the ‘telling’ of the story. And in that process, we can dress it up a little bit. Especially elements that create more conflict.
Point out the details. Make the character a little taller. Create tension with some pauses.
If you need some help with this idea, one place to look at is the news. The news ‘story formula’ is to point out a change, and then highlight the problem this may create, and in the process, either elevate, or just plain ‘create’ conflict.
Why? Because it sells.
So in ever story, we can bring out, dress up, or ‘highlight’ internal conflict for the character, or external conflict.
Summary
I asked the guy if he had any interesting things happen that week at work. He said something came up with his admin staff, and that they needed to re-jig a bunch of systems to make the business run smoothly, because he could have lost this staff member.
And I pointed out that in his little story, there were two or three points of conflict.
It was engaging. Even entertaining.
He realised he had what he was looking for all along. Or as I like to say with this stuff, the diamonds are under your feet. We just need to practice finding them.
There’s a famous line by Tony Robbins, and this won’t be exactly right, but close:
“80% of my work is in entertainment. If I can do that well, then I might have a chance to deliver the 20% in education”.
And so it is with all of use in service businesses (and even some hospitality) when we work more directly with a client or customer. Only a small part of what we do is actually educating or giving direct value.
A lot of the other stuff is entertainment.
How we welcome someone in. The stories we tell from a stage or at the start of a class. The humour we can infuse into the end of the consultation. Or even how we can connect with small stories in emails or articles.
All of this is a key part of becoming a more engaging service provider, and building deeper relationships that help build a business well into the future.
Start creating more story driven content today
Click the link below to grab your free guide.