Three Common Storytelling Mistakes To Avoid

I blog often – and the world is in enthusiastic agreement – about the need to tell stories to get attention and be remembered. And I often talk about the five fundamental stories: the Quest that Hollywood knows so well, and the four others that are just as fundamental to our thinking: Stranger in a Strange Land, Revenge, Rags to Riches, and Love Story. You can look elsewhere in the archives for explanations of the stories and what they mean.
But what I’ve noticed is that despite all this activity, people attempting to tell one of these stories in their business lives and presentations often make basic storytelling mistakes. So here goes on a few of the common pitfalls to avoid, with a specific eye on storytelling in speeches.
1.Writing what you know. Too much of it. Potential writers are always enjoined to write what they know. Of course, this advice is sound, unless you’re writing the next post-apocalyptic blockbuster and haven’t been subjected to Alien Overlords Who Practice Mind Control and Have Six Heads. Even there, you write about the struggle for survival, about issues with authority, about high school cliques disguised as Alien Overlords, and so on.

But still. Writing what you know is often taken as a license to immerse yourself and everyone else in You, Your Feelings, and Every Thought You’ve Ever Had. The truth is you should write what you know – but not too much. Give us the details – but only a few, selected, choice ones. We want to know that the hero’s blue eyes sparkled in the sun, but we don’t want to know her history with her eye doctor. Is she nearsighted? Astigmatic? Twenty-forty in one eye and twenty-four hundred in the other? We don’t care, unless she’s a witness to a murder and the opposing lawyer in the trial demolishes her testimony by proving that she couldn’t possibly have read the license plate of the departing car at the distance in question.
There’s a real art to knowing what the telling detail is, and know when to stop with the minutia. That art takes time to develop. In speaking, less detail is better, even more so than in writing, because our ability to retain is weaker.
2. Writing what happened. In order. The big trap for first-time writers and speakers is that they want to tell us what happened in order. And that’s natural enough, because that’s the way it happened. But chronology is not meaning. One of the most important responsibilities you have as a storyteller is to arrange your story so that it follows an arc of meaning, not of chronology.
Homer begins the Iliad, not at the beginning of the Trojan War, but near the end, when the Trojans offer the Greeks a bribe to end the war, and Achilles (the Greeks’ most important fighter) has his pride wounded and threatens to scupper the whole war for the Greeks. That allows Homer to create a frame and an arc for the story that is all about the pride of the Greeks, the interference of the gods, and so on – not about the chronological details of the war from start to finish. Starting in medias res (in the middle of things) allows the writer to give us the high points in a compelling order, and allows us to understand the overall structure of the story as we go along, as well as the themes and meanings of the story, more easily.
Speakers need to do the same. Don’t tell us the chronological history of your start up – we don’t care, and it’s confusing. Instead, start us at a key moment – the moment you were about to close the doors, or the a-ha moment when you discovered the breakthrough product, or whatever the most important moment was.
Writers and speakers are afraid to do that because they want to keep the best for last, but it’s a rookie mistake. Start with your best, engage us, and then give us even better.
3. Surprising us with the Ending You Won’t See Coming. This pernicious habit is particularly prevalent today on TV and in the movies. It’s the stuff of endless promotional headlines and teasers. The idea is to save some secret, or give us some surprise, at the end that’s so astonishing that we can never see it coming.
It’s almost always bad storytelling. The death of a main character, for instance, is only justified if it’s prepared for and it’s part of the arc of the story. All too often, the astonishing event is astonishing precisely because the storyteller hasn’t prepared us or created an arc in which the event can – must – has to – happen.
More than that, you’re missing a chance for more excitement if you do warn the reader or listener that something is coming. Hitchcock figured this out, and revealed his secret in an interview about his filmmaking years before his death.
He was complaining about more recent movies and comparing them with his own. He noted that the typical movie, wanting to shock the viewer with a bomb going off, for example, has a couple of people chatting in a café. They chat for ten minutes about ordinary stuff, and then the bomb goes off. As Hitchcock noted, that’s ten minutes of boredom followed by thirty seconds of excitement.
His method was to let the viewer know in advance what was going to happen. Then, as he pointed out, you got the same ten minutes – but it is incredibly tense, because you know a bomb is going to go off at any moment. When the bomb finally does explode, you get a delicious combination of release and shock. Finally!
Writers and speechmakers are much better off letting their audiences in on the secret. That’s the way to build tension. Not by trying to astonish their fans with things they never see coming.
credit: Forbes.

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About King Angela Uyi

I am Angela Uyi aka Mama Naija|Two time Social Media Personality Winner| A smooth talker| Humanitaria| Ghost Writer| CopyWriter |Twitter:@Angelauyi |