What Is a Story? | My 5-step brand story framework - Part 1
What makes a story a story? What exactly is it? How would you define it?
And why is it that some stories succeed and others just flop?
As I continue to get back into the swing of things, focusing on first principles of brand storytelling, it just seemed appropriate to cover storytelling and give you my 5-step story framework. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) we actually don't make it to the 5-step framework in this episode (but you can download it here), and we'll cover that next time in part two.
In this episode, we look at what a story is, and why it is the way it is. Basically, we define stories and begin to look at story structure and how they're shaped.
You’ll Learn:
Stories have a structure and why
The basic model of a story
The underlying moral equation to life
An accurate, comprehensive definition of a story
The 3 C’s of stories: Character, Conflict, Change
Key Terms:
Story
1. A character who wants something and endures a series of obstacles in order to get what they want.
2. Makes a promise to the audience that it will take them on a journey in order to fulfill that promise.
3. A logical argument that leverages emotion to make it’s points stick.3Circular logic - A logical fallacy based on circular reasoning where the argument is explained by itself, and isn’t anchored to an actual truth and has no valid substance. The assumptions you make, and the point you conclude with, are interdependent and can’t exist, or stand up on their own. In order to believe in the premises, you must first accept the point as valid, or vice-versa.
Episode Transcript
Hey, what's going on? Brand storytellers. Okay, so before we get into the episode, this episode on storytelling and story structure, I got a little bit too excited. So since this, you know, tends to be my topic of expertise, I accidentally threw the entire kitchen sink into this episode, ended up being 50 minutes long. So I'm breaking this episode into two parts to make it a bit more manageable.
As you watch or listen to it. So without further ado, here is part one.
Welcome back. Brand storyteller. In this episode, I'm building off of the groundwork that I laid in our last episode, Episode 32. We're continuing on with first principles here. In episode 32, we talked about our mindset, what our ultimate goal is with brand storytelling, strategic storytelling through our marketing communications.
And the ultimate goal is to establish and build a genuine, real relationship with our audience.
building off of that. The next obvious first principle of what we're talking about here is storytelling and story structure. So I thought it might be fitting if we just devote an entire episode to walking you through my six step framework that I include in my guidebook Turn strangers into Advocates
So I highly recommend that you go and you download that guidebook because it would be a really great future reference. But this episode itself, we're just going to walk through that.
first off, I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself. You realize that stories have a structure, right like that.
We have to cover that first, that stories aren't just a surprise. They're not just, like, thrown together accidentally. They don't just grow up at random. Great stories follow a specific structure. And if you really start to study this and dig deep into it, you'll know you'll come across Joseph Campbell's work. Joseph Campbell studied mythology and he started to notice that there were specific trends and common characteristics across cultural myths.
And and he identified these characteristics, created a 12 step framework that is so commonly known as the Hero's Journey and is a cyclical story framework where a hero sets out on a journey. You know, the whole story of he meets a guy, goes into a cave, finds an elixir, meets a goddess that's somewhere around this path. But then he ends up kind of like back where he started, but now changed and different.
That's the hero's journey. That why it's interesting that you would identify so many commonalities is
very similar to the archetype. Actual commonalities that Carl Jung identified is that there is a link amongst the our psychology that our minds are kind of connected. They're designed in the same way we see the same metaphors, respond to the same symbols, structure stories according to very common principles.
Even cross-culturally, storytelling is in essence a sort of framework for how we process and experience life.
Okay. It is a it is a framework for communicating experience between ourselves, and it's a framework for us to understand experience. Storyteller stories have this amazing ability for us to empathize and learn. So through a story, we can learn a lesson, learn information, learn a skill, right?
Gain knowledge, but then also maybe not a skill, but gain knowledge about something. Skill requires practice, but then also empathize. We can learn, so it's like we can learn intellectually, but we also come to an emotional, psychological, almost a soul understanding. All right. So with each story, there's there's a a plot. It's there's those external all actions that take place.
So there are the obvious actions that take place. It's the drama that unfolds on the page, the drama that unfolds on screen, the direct drama that we're witnessing. But then there is an underlying thematic arc, a character arc, a internal journey that the character goes on or an internal theme that is being communicated that underlies that external thing.
So stories have this external quality where where you you are learning through understanding, but they also have this internal quality, this internal arc where you're also learning through empathy.
you can kind of like start to see how we've developed our story structure by you look at how we actually live life. As I said, stories are a model for life.
They're a model for how we communicate and come to understand the human experience. So I learned this model from one of Jordan Peterson's lectures. It was very interesting. He was talking about how we create meaning, and it applied 1 to 1 to storytelling because we tell stories in order to understand, to create meaning. And so what happens as we go about our life is we are we are passing through life driven to to accomplish some sort of a goal.
All right. Now, I don't mean it necessarily needs to be like a big, hairy, audacious goal or that your particular are particularly ambitious. Right? Of course, if you're a listener to this podcast, you're most likely on the ambitious aspect, because why else would you be learning to improve your situation? That's besides the point.
But not everybody is ambitious.
So the goal that you're striving out to achieve doesn't have to be this like life changing goal or this career advancement goal. It could be as simple as I got to get to the grocery store. Okay. That it's a it's something that gets you got to get somewhere. We're moving throughout life from point A to some sort of point B, whether that be a monumental goal or just a simple.
We got to get grocery goal. Okay. As we move from point A to point B, we're going to encounter one of three types of situations. So one of three types of situations are going to happen as we're moving from point A to point B, that situation is going to be a neutral event, a positive event or a negative event.
Neutral events have absolutely no bearing on our progress. If we use an example of just a simple example of I'm going to get groceries. Neutral events would be the colors of the cars that are on the road as I'm going to get groceries, the traffic that's going in the opposite direction, right? Like whether or not it's cloudy outside.
Okay. Like, these are all very neutral events that I'm probably not paying attention to that have zero bearing on my progress from me getting to the grocery store. A negative event is something that negatively disrupts my progress. It's something that causes a hindrance, causes a frustrate it, or forces me to not even make it to my destination. Or I have to adjust my plan and go a different route.
So say I get in a car accident. Well, that would prevent me from ultimately going to the grocery store. Or delay significantly delay me getting to the grocery store or say there was an accident along my route which forces me to adjust my route and go in a different way. Okay. Or if there is a cyclist in the in a narrow road, which happens all the damn time around my neighborhood, it's really frustrating.
I don't understand cyclists. I really feel like there there's a type of confrontational personality that just loves to cycle. I don't understand it. Maybe they do. Anyways, that causes a frustration, obviously, as you can hear. Okay, I'll get help eventually. Although I can't even.
that would frustrate and delay. Okay. Then you have positive events. Positive events might be things that are surprises, but end up positively impacting my progress. It could be something as simple as, let's just say I hit all green lights on the way or something a bit more exciting. Of I find money on the ground when I arrive.
Like $100 bill. That's pretty exciting. I get a phone call on the way there, letting me know some positive news. Right. Like, that would also be kind of exciting. Okay, so there are things that like, excite you along the way. According to Jordan Peterson's model, in normal life, what you want to happen is only have neutral events happen to you.
And that's a bit surprising, right? You would think, oh, I would want to have positive events to happen along my way. Well, not necessarily, because positive events, while they are nice and enjoyable, they provide a distraction and they they drain us of emotional energy. So if you had a a super positive day, you're going to be like exhausted before the end of that day because you're so emotionally drained.
Does that make sense? So really, you just kind of don't want anything to happen. You would much rather just get to your goal and then be done with it. However, when you tell a story, it is the negative events that make that story interesting that provide the drama and the conflict and the tension that keep people's interest and get them engaged.
Stories require shifts, they require turns. They require twists that surprise us and and build conflict.
we are bonded by our our challenges and our struggles. I'm not. I remember I was taking this like going through this series of like online online videos. And and one of them was is like for an entrepreneurial kind of I guess you could call it like a course.
I was watching it with a group of friends. And so one of the videos, this person gets up there and their whole entrepreneurial journey was just a series of wins. And it it was really annoying. It was it sounded as if this person was just like, handed everything on a silver platter, born with a silver spoon in their mouth and does everything was just like win, win, win.
Magical gift. Magical gift. Just chance. Success is what you walked away from.
And after listening to her story, I was just. I wasn't just bored. I was mad. I was super mad because it felt like it not only was like envy and jealousy, kind of like growing up inside of me, because that was.
It's unrealistic. That's not how life works. Life just doesn't work with all of these positive things happening to you. One after the other, after the other after the other. Eventually you're kind of sitting back and you're waiting for when is the negative thing going to happen? Because deep down, we all believe in a a moral a moral code, not necessarily a moral code.
It's a moral equation to life that there's this deep belief within us that eventually the events of our lives will will add up to neutral, that if someone starts telling you that, oh, they, they just had this awesome, like they just got promoted and then they just got a check in the mail for like $4,000, You're you're now starting to get a little nervous because you're thinking that man, the next thing they they might find out is someone died.
Right? Like, it's that that common phrase in in our culture of like, you know, the now I can't even say the phrase right. But it's like you're waiting for the next shoe to drop. But it's essentially it means like, we don't believe that positive things can continue to happen ad infinitum, much in the same way that we also do not believe that negative things can continue to happen ad infinitum.
If you hear somebody's story where it's just negative thing, negative thinking, negative thing, negative thing, your heart kind of starts to go out for them because you want something positive to happen to them, because by this point you believe they deserve it. Okay, so your your heart is drawn towards people who are suffering because you want something positive to happen and your heart usually becomes hardened towards people who just win all the time or have all these things just magically are happening to them because you now want it to be taken away.
You want something bad to happen to them. It's a natural response. It's a natural reaction. So struggle,
struggle kind of draws us in and connects us and and causes us to empathize with each other. All right. And that is why stories emphasize struggle and they don't just emphasize positive things to happen because the positive thing shuts us out of that connection.
Whereas struggle and pain opens our heart a little and draws us in. And then we want to see something good happen at the end.
So we want to see people succeed. We want something good to have them happen to them at the end. We don't just want bad things to happen to bad, bad things to happen to people.
It's not like we're sadists, right? But it's usually in the response to that moral equation that all of us believe in. And so stories inherently follow this moral equation. The simplest story structure can be found in copywriting. It's problem, agitation, solution. Your customer, you you dig into your customers problem, you identify your customers problem, you dig into it, you agitated a bit to make them feel it and it and sit in how frustrating that issue is.
So then you provide them your solution and now your solution looks amazing because you've just met them at this point of frustration.
what exactly is a story been going on and on about like these characteristics? Let's go ahead and just like clear out the mist, because when you talk to people about what a story is, I have found and I have noticed that there often does not exist a very immediate, clear understanding of what a story is, which is interesting because of how saturated our life is with stories.
The lack of a definition is puzzling to me. It's it's kind of like yet at the same time, one of my colleagues, Esther Choi, has has referenced this as being we're fish surrounded by water and fish don't see water. It's so ubiquitous that we often just don't point at it and explain what it is. Unlike, say, like a bridge, right?
Like like a bridge is a path between two disconnected points. It's a platform that that connects you from point B to point A because there's some sort of void between those points where a normal road or a normal path would be unable to connect those points. So therefore you need a bridge, you need some sort of thing that is suspended above a void that connects two paths together.
I didn't even read that ahead of time. That's just off of my like, pull that out of thin air. Right. Can you do the same thing for a story? Now, very often you hear the common definition where people will tell you that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. And I hate this definition because I think it's stupid, right?
It doesn't get us closer to understanding what the thing is. A definition should should provide understanding, right? It should not continue to mystify and anything time bound has a beginning, a middle and an end, a car siren, a car horn and an emergency siren. Those have a beginning, middle and end. They start, they run, they stop, but they're not stories.
Okay, So we need a better definition. And this isn't really to blame us specifically. It's a it's a cultural thing. This lack of understanding of what storytelling is. Because if you go to definition, you try to define if you go to the dictionary, rather you try to define what a story is you're going to, you're going to find probably like one of the one of these definitions that a a story is a chronicle of events.
Okay, well, that kind of makes sense, but it still doesn't totally make sense because you can sit down and listen to your friend, struggle to tell you a story. But what they're actually telling you is a chronicle of events, and it's super boring and it's a total waste of your time. And you listen to that and you're like, That is not a story.
And you would be absolute correct. It's not a story. A story is not a chronology of events. It's not a series of events. And then if you continue to read on, you might read that a story is a narrative. Okay, so what's a narrative? If you find the definition of narrative, you're going to find that a narrative is defined as a chronicle of events or a story.
So we're in this terrible situation where we're trapped in circular logic. Do you understand what that means? It's like there's no the definition. The key term is defined by its synonyms, which is therefore defined by its key terms. You're not allowed to do that. It's called circular logic. That means that nothing is anchored to truth. There's no actual definition here.
Everything just still continually remains ambiguous and not defined.
We need a definition that helps us clearly understand what this thing is. So the definition I like to use for a story is a story is a character who wants something and endures a series of obstacles in order to get what they want. A story also makes a promise to the audience that it's going to take them on a journey wherein they will learn something at the end, which fulfills the promise.
And lastly, a story is a logical argument which leverages emotion to make sure that its point stick. That is my three three tiered definition of a story. And with that three tier definition is my understanding of story structure laid out. Okay, so let's just start at the top and we'll work our way down.
A story is a character who wants something and endures a series of obstacles in order to get what they want.
So you've got a character who wants something. They are driven by a desire for something better. The whole reason you want something is you are currently dissatisfied with what you have. There is the the whole drive to desire comes from dissatisfaction. You either don't feel satisfied with your current predicament or you come to believe that what you have is not good enough, or maybe even what where you are is oppressive or painful or frustrating.
It's one of those levels. You either are in pain and need to flee from that pain. You're restricted and limited and need to get out of that, which is very similar to being in pain, into getting out, or you feel unfulfilled and bored. And you either need need that level of fulfillment or need some sort of excitement. That is all your current status quo, your current situation that you find yourself in, and therefore a desire grows inside of you to want something better because you're trying to move on.
All stories are some sort of movement from, like I said, point A to point B this this place to a goal, and you're trying to improve your situation in some level. At that you can reduce most stories down to some form of, of fulfillment or status that there's there's the environment is bad or oppressive is trying to escape that or they they feel inadequate internally and they need something better to fulfill them.
Okay. So you've got a character with a driving desire who's in a a current situation that they're dissatisfied with and they want something better. And so they they venture out to obtain that better thing and they endure a series of obstacles.
So the whole story that you're watching then is this drama that then plays out where our character is really focused on obtaining a goal has to now go through some sort of crucible, some sort of gantlet where they're constantly battling problem after problem after problem that keeps popping up that they keep having to solve.
That is their series of obstacles in order to get what they want. And therefore, at the end of this story, they will have exited that gantlet, gotten out of that rat's maze, figured out the solution to to to the problems that that have been facing them, which ultimately culminates at as a personal growth moment. So they become who they need to become.
They finally reach that personal growth moment to receive their reward, to get what they've been struggling to get.
Now, with this definition, it could go one of two ways. You could either tell a tragic story, but a tragic story still follows this framework a character who wants something and endures a series of obstacles in order to get what they want.
The definition does not say whether or not they get what they want. They are simply going through these obstacles in order to get what they want in a tragedy, they don't get what they want. That's why it's tragic. For the most part, we are telling brand stories. So we're speaking from a marketing perspective and therefore all the stories we're telling have happy endings.
So I can't really think of a of a time when you're telling a tragic story because even if the story that you're telling is framed as a tragedy, you're still providing your solution at the end. So even if you're doing like a political hate ad and you're smearing somebody, you're still then bringing your candidate in as the solution.
Even if the the the like a nonprofit like look at the Starving children thing, right? You're still bringing your thing in as a solution. Okay. So we're telling happy endings because we're marketers and Americans really love happy endings. Not saying that you're American, right? I know I've got a lot of listeners out in in Europe, in the Netherlands and and in Belgium.
What's up, people? I need to really learn a bit more about your culture in your language because I don't know anything. Just way too American. Me, I, I don't know. But I would love to know why you're listening. That would be also. Okay, so ignorant American here. My apologies, but in America we love happy endings. We hate sad endings, We hate ambiguous endings.
Love our stories to be buttoned up real nice at the end of it. All right. So what? Okay, character. Once something endures a series of obstacles in order to get what they want, you've got like three core elements to every story. There's the character, there's conflict, and then there's change. Okay, so those are your three keys to storytelling character, conflict, change.
I know you could add in like a bunch of other stuff. Like there's the setting in which there's supporting you, whatever. You can reduce it down to a character. Conflict change setting is obvious. Can't have a character in a void. That's stupid, right? So you have a focal point of your attention and we're not telling like a Greek chorus story here.
We're just keeping it simple here. So you've got a character doers, a series of obstacles in order to get what they want.
All right, So we're just going to cut it right there.
I know. I'm so sorry. It's kind of like the the worst part to turn this off because we just started getting into what a story is. We are we are 25 minutes away from the five step brand story framework. So we're going to cover that framework in part two. But I feel like I did a good enough job of explaining the first half of the title, which is helping you get a better understanding of what a story is.
So hang tight. Part two is coming in a couple of weeks. That's going to be episode 34, and we're definitely going to dig into the five step story telling framework. Don't worry.
In the meantime, if you're struggling to figure out what your brand is and what your story is, how to draw that out and bring that to life.
Contact me at McNabb Storytelling. Com. I'll take you through my storytelling process. Help you identify the core essence of your brand. Craft it into a meaningful story that truly connects with the heart of your audience and then help you map out a content strategy that will bring this story to life.
Or if you're a creative and you want to take your storytelling skills to the next level or elevate the skills of your entire team, we provide training workshops and even one on one coaching to help you do just that. Again, reach me at McNabb Storytelling dot com and I will see you in the next one.
Take care.