Two tips to plan better stories
I teach my copywriting students to plan stories by mapping 5-7 key events onto a timeline. You can do this on a plain piece of paper, napkin, post-it note, or whatever you have to hand.
This rudimentary planning method would be too simplistic for say a novel or a play, but it’s reliable enough for most business storytelling use cases.
For instance, on page 125 of Simple Story Selling I tell a story about a time I was almost mugged on a dark Sheffield street…
The beauty of the timeline is it forces you to pick a single path through a multitude of possible timeline events. It also forces you to write with the ending in mind. You’re always working towards a specific endpoint and message.
I have two pieces of advice for creating better timelines:
1. Raise the stakes at the start
Generally you’ll have a ‘C’ at the start of your timeline, which stands for ‘context’. You need to set the scene for the reader so they can imagine being in your shoes.
The best stories use this section to raise the stakes of the story. If I were to rewrite the story above, I might add that I was hurrying home because I had an essay deadline the next day and 2000 words still to write. Strictly speaking that wasn’t true, but do you see how it would raise the stakes?
2. Each point on your timeline should correspond to some deliberate act either by you as the protagonist or by an antagonist or negative force. Deliberate acts involve choices and consequences; the message of the story is delivered within these consequences.
For instance, let’s say you’re telling a story about a time you camped out on a remote mountainside and got stuck in a snow blizzard. You’re freezing cold with no supplies. Suddenly the weather changes and the sun comes out, allowing you to survive and escape back to base.
(Excuse me while I stifle a yawn…)
The weather changing is in theory an ‘up’ event on the timeline because it facilitates your progress towards the goal of the story. In practice however you didn’t do anything proactive to change the situation. The weather changing of its own accord isn’t really a timeline event, it’s just something that happened within the environment of the story. You didn’t make a difficult choice, so there can’t be consequences of that choice. This diminishes the impact of the story.
Imagine instead that you had decided to strike out for base through the storm, and then the sun came out to save you. That’s a much stronger ‘up’ because it’s deliberate action. Every story needs a hero* and you’ve stepped into that role. The reader roots for you and the story delivers an underlying message.
Make sense? These are common mistakes but are simple to fix at the planning stage.
Rob
*Hero or heroine. Androgynous hero.
P.S. This is the kind of work we do in the Story Copywriter training community. Founder-level pricing expires on 1st Feb.