Tell THE Story

It’s nothing new to say that stories are one of the most powerfully effective ways of communicating an idea. A well-told story tends to bypass many of the critical filters that we put up to block the onslaught of claims and sales pitches that assault us every day.

Tell me that your all-terrain vehicle can cross rivers and I’ll think, “Yeah, maybe”, but show me, or tell me about, a gritty, old cowboy crossing rivers on your vehicle to find a lost calf and I’ll readily accept it. After all, I experienced it happening through your story.

But I think we make a mistake when we limit ourselves to personal stories. While a story can be a powerful way to hook and hold your audience’s attention, sometimes a story is not THE story.

There are times when the story you need to tell is bigger than that. The experiences of one person can illustrate one aspect of the issue, but the very smallness of its view can’t help but obscure the larger picture.

The story of the search for a cure for AIDS is complex and technical. Personalizing the matter with the story of one desperately ill patient, holding on grimly in hope of a miracle, is a way of making the real stakes palpably clear, while bringing the massive crisis down to a human scale. It’s a compelling and important story, but is that THE story?

The real story is one of brilliant, but flawed, people battling an implacable foe. It’s a story of magnanimous cooperation and vicious, petty rivalry. It’s a story of foolish stubbornness and inspired genius, of dogged detective work and flashes of brilliant insight, of giddy hopes and crushing disappointments.

It’s a story with a grand cast of characters and the dramatic arc and sweep of a Wagnerian opera; a story that can be told with all of the same tools and techniques that Hollywood uses in blockbuster movies, like Titanic, E.T. and Armageddon.

You can use storytelling techniques to show how opposing forces with conflicting desires faced off in a rising drama that led to a dramatic resolution. You can use them to convey the grand sweep of the entire drama.

Even dry subjects like sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the financial crisis in Europe or political campaign finance reform can be explained and illuminated as stories. On the surface they seem like they are just about the numbers, but any good mathematician, accountant or engineer will tell you that there is a story within the numbers.

That’s the real story you should be telling.