How do we write stories that move our audience?

Training modules are full of stories, from anecdotes to conversation simulations, and the training as a whole is often a story onto itself. Through it, the learners make sense of the notions being taught, and they become emotionally invested in the results you are trying to help them achieve.

While stories can easily be structured using the three acts method of Greek plays, or the hero’s journey from Disney movies, writing a good story is another topic altogether.

So, the question is: where can you find inspiration for your stories? How can you make them coalesce into something interesting?

Find something that matters

One important part of any story is that it needs to matter, emotionally speaking, to the person watching it.

The rule of thumb is this: if the story matters to you, or to the expert, it will matter to the learners too. Pick personal stories that have affected one of you emotionally and start with that. The emotions can be positive or negative.

For example, if you are working in healthcare, you might want to use a situation where a parent almost lost a child, or when the expert told a patient that she was in full remission from cancer. Don’t go into the improbable or overly dramatic, however. Ideally, the notions taught in this training would directly relate to the event in question. And help either avert the negative situation or make the positive situation possible.

Use convergence

The convergence of ideas is the key to original stories. No single idea is truly original by itself. No single idea can create a whole story.

It is the combination of ideas that make for a great and unique story. Let us take an example from my own literary writing projects. We start with 4 ideas:

1. The characters line in a space station
2. The society is a cultural hegemony: no cultural differences
3. A planet under the space station inhabited by an alien lifeform that is close to reaching space travel
4. Séances where the living and ghosts can spend an evening together, crossing into each other’s world

None of those ideas, by themselves, make an original story.

1. This was done in Babylon V
2. This was done in 1984, or Le Meilleur des mondes
3. This is a recurring theme in Star Trek, the subject of their Prime Directive
4.  This was done in Coco (the Disney movie)

However, if you weave them together, you get a story no one ever wrote:

The characters live in a space station where humans, a homogeneous cultural group who ignores its past cultural genocides which led humanity to hegemony, survey a planet and watch in fear as they realize that the alien lifeform below has the potential to reach for the stars, and perhaps, eventually, threaten humanity. This tempts many humans to consider genocidal action against the alien lifeform to prevent this possibility.

Within that society, some secret societies have harnessed the ability to contact the world of the ghosts. One of the two main characters die at the beginning of the story, and the other one is thrust into this occult underworld trying to contact her beloved.

Those storylines mingle as the hero comes to understand that there is a limited amount of soul stuff, or ectoplasm, in the universe, and the demographic growth of humanity is forever stunted by this limitation, lest humanity come to bear once again the birth of soulless humans, and the cataclysm that unfolded when that event first happened towards the end of the 21st century of the old calendar.

The alien lifeform below, however, seems able to produce its own ectoplasm, ever giving itself more soul to work with. A secret well guarded. The true purpose of those humans who wish to protect the alien lifeform is not a moral one. Rather, it is to enslave those beings, terraform worlds to make them fit prisons for them, and forever harness the soul stuff they generate to bring humanity forward.

The characters will navigate those conflicts and try to work their way towards a third conclusion, where humanity will establish contact with the alien lifeform and broker peace and collaboration instead.

The same goes for any story you write. If you pick a few common occurrences in your line of work, all of them related to what you want to teach, and bring them together into a coherent story, you will get a story that is meaningful, and that has depth in characters and storyline both.

Note that, as opposed to the example above, which is meant for literary fiction, your examples should be believable. They should also be applicable to the learners’ line of work.

If you wish to learn more about writing stories, I strongly suggest Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass. Simply listening to Neil Gaiman speak is a pleasure by itself.

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Photo by Nong V on Unsplash