The 4 Principles of Storytelling

Storytelling is a buzzword tossed around frequently these days, especially in marketing circles. It’s true that telling stories are one of the best ways to stand out among the constant onslaught of content and advertising.

But newsflash: not everything is a story.

So what is a story? It might seem like a silly question. Yet, do we really know what distinguishes a story from everything else? It’s one thing to talk about storytelling and quite another to do it.

Here are four fundamental principles that separate the true stories from the pretenders: character, context, conflict and creation.

Character

Go ahead. Name a story without any characters. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

A character adds a face to the story. They give the events of the story perspective. Characters allow the audience to see themselves in the narrative and empathize.

Without characters, stories would be unrelatable, uninteresting, not to mention, implausible. In other words, not much of a story.

A main character gives the story focus and personality. Character development describes changes that a character undergoes during the course of the narrative. The better the characters, the better the story.

Context

Stories do not exist in a vacuum. They happen in a specific time and place — better known as a setting. The setting gives an audience much-needed context for the story.

When and where a narrative transpires provides the audience with a crucial framework. Afterall, a story taking place in outer space during the year 2052 might look slightly different from a story happening in Renaissance-era Italy.

Setting provides the internal context for every story. Stories also have two important external contexts — audience and medium.

Who are you telling the story to? And how are they receiving the story? Audiences matter because who you’re talking to can change what you say. The same is true for the storytelling format. Stories in printed books are experienced differently from those shown in online videos.