How to Get Storytelling Right Every Time

As I peruse social media (which I do a lot for *cough* marketing *cries*), I see writer after writer step up and ask the same question: How do you do storytelling “right?”

You might hear the question phrased slightly differently, such as, What makes a good storyteller? or What makes a story engaging? But the intent is the same — to find out how to communicate so that people not only remember what has been communicated, but are influenced in some way by it.

Stop arranging vases

Many answers go into technical detail about how to tell your story well: Engage the senses. Get the pacing right. Cut the fluff.

But great storytelling isn’t about perfectly arranging techniques like flowers in a vase. Think about it. Dickens isn’t Rowling, Rowling isn’t Patterson, and Patterson isn’t Hemingway. They all have wildly different approaches, yet we’d never dare to say that any of them stink. That’s because great storytelling is less about voice than about empathy.

What this means in a nutshell is that, if you want to write well, you have to connect to the audience. To do that, you have to know who they are.

Solid, impactful storytelling requires going beyond superficials

When I say “know” your audience, I don’t just mean what you write in a proposal package (e.g., Caucasian females, aged 18-40), — i.e., a persona. You have a significantly deeper sense of how your audience thinks and what they do. You have to know how to use what they know to paint your picture. You must feel as though, even though you’re putting words to the page in a way that’s your own, you are having a very instinctive, reverent, and highly empathetic conversation. Everything you write is something your ears have spoken.

Achieving this sense and understanding paradoxically requires you to forget your own story for a moment and home in on theirs. What have they experienced? What makes them excited? Sad? What dreams do they have? What values do they rest on?

Say goodbye to immediate gratification

It’s only after you know your audience’s story that you can match them to you, that you can pinpoint what elements of your story they’ll find relatable. People don’t often like to hear that, because learning someone’s story can take time. They tend to want immediate gratification and results, the ability to create a draft on demand and at a rhythm of their choosing. But once you have relatability, you have engagement.

So don’t worry so much about your paragraph size or any of that. You can always clean a draft or have an experienced editor do it for you. Worry about how deeply you know people. That is what will train your pace, give you analogies, and allow you the important details all great stories are built on.

The original version of this post was published on Medium on November 2, 2021.