8 Elements of a Story | What Makes a Story Good?
What would it feel like to know you can write a story that works every time?
I’d say pretty dang amazing. I used to struggle with writing stories. Sure, sometimes I hit the nail on the head, but it felt like a game of chance. Then, I learned about story structure and everything changed.
If you’re looking to level up your story skills and craft a story that predictably lands with your audience, keep reading. Today, I’m covering the foundations of story structure, the 8 elements of a story, and how to reward your audience through storytelling. To dive even deeper, you can download my storytelling guidebook here.
Stories Are a Mechanical System | Introduction to Story Structure
Stories are a system.
Think of it like building a house. There are certain rules you have to follow in order to build a structurally sound house. You can’t just throw some lumbar up, slap on some paint, then add insulation. You make plans. You build a foundation. You deal with infrastructure. I’m no builder, but from watching construction over the years, it’s clear there is a set formulation and rhythm to creating a sound home. Likewise, a story missing certain foundational principles and structure, won’t stand up.
Did you ever learn about story structure in school? I didn’t. The irony is we’re constantly reading all sorts of novels in school, dissecting them, but never learning about what makes them work. You never learn to be a storyteller. Rather, you emerge as a reader with an ability to recognize a great story, but not articulate what makes it work.
I kept struggling as a storyteller, feeling like a veil was blocking me from understanding the story world. Then I encountered story structure and learned the necessary elements to build a great story every time. Turns out being a great storyteller isn’t just for the “talented ones.” It’s for all of us if we’re willing to take the time to learn the method.
Are you ready to become a great storyteller? Let’s start learning.
A Tale of Two Stories | Character-Driven and Idea-Driven
We tell two different kinds of stories: character-driven and idea-driven.
Character-Driven
Definition: This is the chronicle of a character who wants something and endures a series of obstacles in order to get what they want.
The entire narrative is about a specific person. Within brand storytelling, you often see this for a customer testimonial or employee spotlight.
Idea-Driven
Definition: A logical argument that leverages emotion in order to make sure its points stick.
Company messages regarding their purpose, a product or program often fall in this category. You also see this in journalistic nonfiction storytelling and educational documentaries. Instead of focusing on a person, the story is about an idea or movement. All the pieces come together to prove a central point.
Today, we’ll be focusing on character-driven stories and the eight elements you need to build a solid story.
Setting, Character, & Theme | The Foundation Layer
Element 1: The Setting
As you begin a story, you must ground your audience and set the stage. You're introducing the story world and inviting them in. A robust setting will answer:
Where are we?
What’s going on?
Who’s here?
What’s important here?
From a brand storytelling standpoint, the setting often tells the name of the company, the market served, what they make, and where they’re located.
Element 2: A Character
Stories need characters to bring us into the narrative.
As we're listening to a story, something called narrative identification or narrative transportation takes place. We’re transported into the story world. We identify with the main character and start experiencing the story from their point of view. And so when something sad happens to them, we feel sad and want to cry.
A story itself is an emotional ride. The character acts as the guide and takes you on a story rollercoaster. The ride turns based on the character’s driving desire. They want something and we follow along as they pursue their desire. Your story must have a character with a driving desire. Otherwise, there’s no ride to go on.
Element 3: The Theme or Controlling Idea
The theme or controlling idea are very similar -- not quite interchangeable, but close.
A theme is often broad and emotional or philosophical in nature. Some of the best themes are primal emotions -- they hit on life and death, security, love.
A controlling idea is a bit more specific. It’s what you want the viewer to internalize after experiencing your story. You take your opinions about a specific topic and transfer them onto the audience. The story ends up becoming a logical proof designed to communicate and prove the controlling idea throughout the journey.
The theme or controlling ideas serves as the Occam’s razor for your story. Everything that goes into the story has to support the theme. If it doesn’t, cut it out. The theme gives you clarity on how to properly edit your story. It holds the entire story together and provides logic to stand on.
Ever suffered through a movie that didn’t make sense or went all over the place? Wonder what went wrong? The movie either didn’t have a strong theme or strayed from it. It lost the connective tissue holding the story together so it didn’t work. If your story seems scattered, go back and see which scenes or plotlines don’t support the theme. Remove those and see how your story sounds now.
How does this relate to brand storytelling? If you're trying to communicate your value proposition, use it as the theme of your story. The audience is most likely to internalize that message because the entire story is basically singing that central song. They won't remember your value proposition word for word, but they'll definitely internalize it and feel it. They’ll be able to communicate it back to you in their own language.
Curiosity & Conflict | Things Just Got Interesting
Element 4: Curiosity and Mystery
A story is an experience you’re inviting the audience into. To make sure they accept the invitation, you must get them interested in your story. You have to prove it’s worth their attention. To keep them listening, you must create a sense of mystery and curiosity.
It’s a very fine line to walk -- you don't want to confuse the audience. If the audience gets confused, they’ll bail on your story. Pay attention to that as you use business storytelling. Too many details, characters, or jargon can confuse your audience, rather than invite them in. (As a caveat, confusion can work for mystery/detective stories since the audience expects some level of confusion with a promise of resolution at the end.)
To keep the tension and curiosity, you don’t want to reveal everything at once. Parse out information over time to keep the audience guessing. They’ll enjoy the journey of learning you’ve created.
The story is essentially a reward for your audience's attention. You create a positive feedback cycle: create curiosity, gain attention, reward their curiosity, create curiosity again.
Element 5: Conflict
This is something I’ve actually gotten the most pushback on when people are interested in doing brand storytelling. Most companies who value storytelling tend to be purpose-driven and crave meaningful communication. They love the emotional quality of storytelling and engaging in empathy. What they don’t love are direct response marketers who use fear-based tactics to manipulate or convince people to buy something. Because of that strong moral aversion to using negativity or marketing from that perspective, companies may try to avoid using conflict at all in their marketing. They’d rather make it all happy and positive.
But let me tell you something: You don’t have a good story unless you dig into conflict.
In a previous episode, I outlined how stories create value. Conflict is necessary to communicate value. If nothing is at stake, there’s nothing to gain or lose. There’s no meaning. Properly defining the stakes ensures you have a story. What will the hero lose? What might he gain? The audience wants to know.
Stories without conflict are terrible….and rather boring. They become a really weird emotional list of events. You keep waiting for the conflict, but it never comes. You want to watch someone go out and endure a series of obstacles, not have random meaningless encounters leading nowhere.
Every story starts with a character with a driving desire. After you learn who they are, something happens that shocks them out of their normal life and disrupts their world. Or they’re so driven that they set out to obtain it, but are immediately met with conflict.
There is a central conflict to each story. It’s often an internal struggle the hero must overcome within himself. But in the storytelling space, that internal thing is manifested externally so we can watch the psychological theater take place.
Relationship, Change, & Transformation | Fulfilling Expectations
Element 6: Relationship
Every story is about relationship. What kind of relationship does the character have with the environment? With other characters? With themself?
Stories dig into relationships. They show how these characters’ relationships are tested through conflict and how that conflict either strengthens their relationship or breaks it. Ultimately, stories are a tool for empathy. They help us relate with one another and see each person’s point of view. Our entire being is built upon relationships, thus stories speak to our core.
Let’s say you're doing a customer testimonial between your customer and a sales rep. You could dig into how a specific conflict tested their relationship, but ultimately made it stronger through how they each responded to it. That’s a great story. If you want people to fall in love with your company, tell that story.
Element 7: Change
Stories are about change. If you hear a story and it's just event, event, event, event -- you check out.
I recently put out an episode where I'm talking about why I don’t like event promo videos. No one watches them past 30 seconds because they get boring. As an audience member, we’re expecting something to change. And when we realize nothing is going to change, we stop paying attention and leave.
So you have to catch this: the expectation of the audience is that something will change. They want to be surprised and watch things shift. It continues to build that curiosity and mystery to keep the audience engaged.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, have a really great story formula they use in their writer's room. Their rules is: Look at how your scenes connect. If the words “and then” connect them, you have a pretty boring story. Instead, replace them with “therefore” or “but.”
So now you're shifting. Instead of ending up with “and this, and that, and this…” which is just a list of events, you have something better. You’ve created a twist or the result of a twist by using “but” and “therefore.” As a result of those twists, your characters are now being surprised and forced to react and solve that twist which creates interest.
When you start to formulate a story, there's one core problem you’re solving. But most problems we face in life don't have simple solutions. So think about your problem as an onion. That problem is going to complicate and morph over time. That change requires the characters to adapt.
A story is a roller coaster of emotion. You can draw this out as a story arc. To keep the ride moving, you’re simply changing the emotional state back and forth for the audience.
Each scene of the story should move and shift emotional poles. As you're shifting those emotional polls, it’s creating momentum just like a physical ride. You dive down into the negative, then bring them back up into the positive. Then back down and up again.
That emotional momentum maintains the story's forward motion. By shifting emotional poles, the audience knows change is happening and wants to see what happens at the next shift. If a story maintains a single emotion too long, the audience senses nothing will change and wants out.
Element 8: Transformation
None of this change is arbitrary or for just a moment in time. The character’s change should be lasting. It transforms them. They’ve been tested and are someone different now. They’ve not only learned something, but found a power within themself. They’ve become something greater than when they started.
Stories communicate this promise of transformation. You're promising the audience you're taking them on a journey. And as they lock themselves into that roller coaster ride, you're giving them the promise of transformation: They’re going to leave that story changed, just like the character did.
That happens through the process of narrative transportation -- whatever happens to the character, feels like it happened to us. We receive this vicarious experience of enjoying the transformation with them.
From a business perspective, you want to prove your brand is making a lasting transformation in the lives of people. It’s not a quick fix or something they’ll soon forget. You’re proving you can bring them from their current state to a better place. They’re transformed and better situated to achieve their ultimate dream state.