Good storytelling begins in pain.  At the core of every great story is conflict, and that means that someone is in pain.  That’s why most business storytelling is so bland and forgettable:  businesses focus on delivering solutions, not problems and typically want to avoid pain.

Yet the need for good storytelling in the business world is greater than ever.  There are countless products and services vying for our attention (and ultimately our money); to stand out from the crowd they need a story that will grab the potential customer and refuse to let go.

So, start by identifying the conflict that will animate your story.  It’s the nature of conflict that it has human emotion attached to it, but get clear on what the emotion is in order to ensure a sharply focused story from the start.  Is it the embarrassment of bad breath? The embarrassment of dandruff? The embarrassment of having your credit card declined?  Notice a theme here?  Apparently, social embarrassment sells.  Each of these emotions and conflicts began a commercial message, and a story, that led to highly successful product sales.

Next, pinpoint the arc that your story will describe.  Begin with the conflict, lead to a crisis, and resolve the problem with a successful wrap up that has the evil put down and the virtuous living happily ever after with the right mouthwash, shampoo, and credit card.

What gets in the way of this sort of basic, strong storytelling?  I see several problems over and over again.

First the fear that your audience won’t pay attention, because attention has become such a scarce commodity.  So, storytellers are tempted to go for shock value (and then the café exploded!) because that seems like it’s a way to catch an audience’s attention.  But that interest quickly fades.  The late great Alfred Hitchcock understood this well.  In an interview about his movie-making craft, he derided the then current tendency to insert bombs in crowded cafes without allowing the audience to know what’s going on (until the bomb goes off).  As he noted, if the audience knows that a bomb has been planted, they will watch in fascination waiting for the explosion as the hero and heroine sit at the café innocently discussing anything – even the weather.  The result?  Thirty minutes of great movie tension.  But if the explosion comes as a shock, without any warning, then you get maybe thirty seconds of shock and surprise, rather than a half-hour of steadily rising tension.

Avoid the shock, go for the real tension.  Let it build over time.

Second, would-be storytellers often tell anecdotes rather than great stories, because so much of life is like an anecdote – something happens, but there’s no resolution. And so we fall into the trap of thinking that great stories should be like life – open-ended, messy, and unresolved.  Rather, understand that the real point of storytelling is to give us a sense that human life does have meaning, and a pattern, if only we can see it.  We find good storytelling satisfying precisely because it’s not messy and open-ended.

Finally, and this is perhaps the trickiest part of the art of storytelling, great stories ask big questions and are not afraid to struggle with the answer before offering a resolution.  Shakespeare is the master at this aspect of the art.  A great play like Macbeth asks the question, what is the price of ambition?  Shakespeare’s answer in that case is that ambition without a strong moral compass to point it in the right direction leads to disaster.

Find the conflict.  Build the tension.  Impose a structure on the messiness of life.  And delve into a big question.  Those are some of the building blocks of good storytelling.  Here’s hoping you find the right alchemy, the magic, of a great story.