Do you call yourself a storyteller?

Hugh MacLeod

Yeah, me too, I pretend to be one also.

Allegedly 550k marketers on LinkedIn list ‘storytelling’ in their profiles. And yet creating content, case studies, adverts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest does not qualify you or me as a ‘storyteller’.

I’ve worked with advertising/marketing agencies and they still ask me to create animations that are explainer videos instead of stories. Bizarre and they’re supposed to be the ones that are good at storytelling.

It’s not just about the story either, it’s about how you dress it up. I am a follower of minimalism and one of The Minimalists, Joshua Fields-Millburn did a webinar on writing a few months ago (June 2018) and he explained it the best way I have ever heard it.

The first sentence you write is to make the reader want to read the second sentence, the second sentence you write is to make the reader want to read the third sentence, the third sentence you write is to make the reader want to read the fourth sentence…

You get the idea, every sentence has to be your best sentence in order to keep someone hooked. So when you’re writing a story script it would be a great suggestion to keep that in mind.

Put some characters into the story, real names, real personalities with a life and a mission. Make it relatable to the viewer, know your audience, you have to know your audience, better than they know themselves. If you don’t yet know enough about them then go and find out, lots of them are very happy to talk about themselves.

Happy storytelling!

Michael de Groot

Stories

You are already the most powerful storyteller walking on the planet, the only problem is you don’t realise it yet. As you are reading this text, your mind is more than likely starting to wander in different directions, you may be reading these words for sure, but what happens to those words when they integrate with your brain is something totally unique.

The words you are reading will only make sense when they match up with the stories you have created inside the depths of your neurons, which of course reside in your brain.

All of us have the ability to make sense of things that are happening around us and we do this through capturing short stories about the times, places, people and things that we observe, including the words that you are reading right now.

You have to create visual cues in your brain for many things and when you add some emotion and feeling to those visuals it will have a better chance of hard-wiring there. When our neurons hard-wire they stay inside our long-term memory for longer.

Stories when told well, will engender some emotion and feeling inside of you and when it does, that’s THE most powerful way for it to lay down new memory neurons. Therefore when you share stories make them relatable, memorable, different, unusual and stand out.

I love the following quote, it’s the one I always recall when creating stories.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
~ Maya Angelou

Happy storytelling!

Michael de Groot