The Storytelling Edge

The Storytelling Edge will boost your communication and persuasiveness skills by showing you how to tell powerful narratives in a convincing way and giving examples of why you should.

Jacques Prevert, a French poet, once crossed paths with a blind beggar many years ago. Discovering that the poor man wasn’t having much success, Jacques offered to re-write the sign the man was holding. Upon meeting two weeks later, the beggar happily exclaimed how his cup was now always full.

What message did Jacques write to have such a powerful change in the man’s condition? He simply wrote, “Spring is coming, but I won’t see it.” This small statement made a big difference in the blind man’s donations, but why?

In scientific terms, the reason is that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” More simply, as the number of parts of our brains that engage with a narrative increase, so do the chances that we’ll remember it. And stories light up our minds unlike anything else.

Think back to your teenage years in health class. Imagine you’ve got a teacher giving you statistics about the dangers of drunk driving. Doesn’t sound very exciting or memorable, does it?

But let’s say that instead, you’ve got a teacher who shows you pictures of a nice young man similar to your age. You learn that he was a good kid, but that he began taking drugs to make himself feel better about problems at home.

In the next image, you see a miserable, sickly man. This is the young man from before, but 10 years after starting drugs. Your teacher iterates how dangerous drugs are. It’ll be easy to remember the lesson in this case, won’t it?

Are you familiar with reading-level calculators? You put in a piece of work and the algorithm spits out how advanced it is to read. What would you imagine the results would be if you put in the work of a great writer like Ernest Hemingway or J.K. Rowling? Pretty intricate and high-level, right? Actually, the greatest writers throughout history all get lower reading levels than you might think. Hemingway’s work, for example, is at a fourth-grade reading level. In other words, the average ten-year-old can comprehend it! In analyzing multiple novelists, the authors found similar results for all of the most notable writers. To tell great stories you need to be clear and fluent. That means getting to the point quickly and throwing out everything that stands in the way of doing so. Great communicators focus more on the story than anything else, no matter what realm they are in. Take Star Wars for example. Editors of the earliest films in this saga made the storyline more…