12 Questions to Sharpen Your Stories
1. What changes in the course of the story? What questions get answered? • Show us something or someone at the top that changes by the end and/or raise a question (or questions) that gets answered in the course of the story.
2. Who’s the protagonist? • Stories need someone – better an individual than a group -- to drive the action. • Provide description or background that presents a flesh and blood human being.
3. Have you created a world? • People instinctively want to know who, where, when, what, why. • Supply a little description up front fixing the story in time and space.
4. What’s the hook? • Open the story in a place or moment where the audience can identify with the situation or the protagonist’s goal.
5. What keeps it interesting? • Predictable stories are boring. If your story lacks obstacles, what can you do to make the straight-line pursuit more interesting?
6. Where’s the conflict? • There is no drama and little comedy without conflict. It helps to have clearly defined heroes and villains with different notions of how the story should end.
7. Do you have telling details? • A single telling detail can replace a paragraph of description by vividly and concisely painting a picture of the world you’re describing.
8. Have you created scenes to bring the characters and the story to life? • Ingredients: time, place, circumstances, characters, action, and dialogue
9. Are you tapping emotion? • An audience subconsciously enters into a contract with the storyteller: They want an emotional experience that makes the time worthwhile.
10. Is the meaning clear? • If not, how can you make it more explicit without “spoon-feeding” the audience?
11. Are you showing rather than telling? • Show what is happening. Don’t tell about it from a “safe distance.” • Don’t’ let important action happen “off-screen.”
12. Are you speaking in the language of the audience?
TERRENCE McNALLY C:310-486-3691 / H: 310-476-4999 [email protected] / terrencemcnally.net Resources for Further Learning
Storytelling as Best Practice by Andy Goodman, available at agoodmanonline.com
The Triumph of Narrative by Robert Fulford
The Story Factor; Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact both by Annette Simmons
Storytelling in Organizations by Yiannis Gabriel
Storytelling For Grantseekers: The Guide to Creative Nonprofit Fundraising by Cheryl A. Clarke
What's Your Story? Storytelling to Move Markets, Audiences, People, and Brands by Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker
The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster & Win More Business by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman
All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World by Seth Godin
Screenwriting
Story: Substance, Structure, Style & Principles of Screenwriting By Robert McKee
Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting; A step-by-step guide from concept to finished script by Syd Field
Emphasis on (Slide) Presentations
Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes by Andy Goodman
Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences by Nancy Duarte slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds
Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® Office PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire by Cliff Atkinson
TERRENCE McNALLY C:310-486-3691 / H: 310-476-4999 [email protected] / terrencemcnally.net TIPS ON MESSAGE by Terrence McNally. McNally:Message Matters
Preparation Questions
1. Ask questions about your target audience • Who is your target audience? (can be one person or many) • What does your target audience believe that supports your objectives? • What does your target audience believe that creates barriers to your objectives? • Where does the target audience get information about your issue? • What – approach, style, examples, stories, data, metaphors, etc. -- will make your target audience most ready to help you attain your objectives?
2. Ask yourself questions about yourself -- about your purpose, your goals, your personal connection to your message and your call to action, etc.
3. Ask yourself any questions you think your audience might have – about you, your credibility, your motivation, about your organization, its capacity, etc. Your presentation should take these into account and answer them whenever possible.
4. Finally ask yourself questions about the elements of your presentation. What is your strongest information, most convincing data, most compelling stories, etc.
Be Clear
1. Emphasize your most important ideas and messages. If you fail to define what you want your audience to know, they won't do it for you.
2. Minimize your secondary ideas and messages. You want your audience to recognize, retain, and respond to your key messages. You don't want to distract them with extraneous information.
3. Eliminate everything else. Anything that doesn’t explain or support your key messages tends to obscure them.
Be Concise
Your presentation (spoken or written) should be:
1. As long as necessary Long enough to communicate all the key ideas and messages you identified in preparation.
2. As short as possible All unnecessary words tend to reduce clarity.
Be Relevant
In your preparation and your presentation, address your audience’s experience and their needs. Be Specific, Strategic and Provocative
Communicate your organization’s unique strengths and its capacity to make a difference. Communicate the urgency of your challenge as well as your need for support. Ask and answer questions that your audience might be thinking. Raising questions and answering them attracts the audience’s attention and can give your presentation a dynamic momentum.
Be Personal
Speak from your heart. Share ideas and messages that matter to you – and let us know why they do. In addition to ideas, facts, and data, whenever possible, populate your presentation with flesh and blood characters.
Tell Compelling Stories
Stories are a unique resource you can use to build credibility with new audiences, and to deepen engagement and trust with those already on board. Humans are hard-wired to respond to narrative. Until the invention of writing, story is how we remembered enough to survive. Anthropologists have found societies that have existed for millennia without the wheel, but they’ve never found a society that doesn’t tell stories.
Share Convincing Data
Data is crucial in presenting your challenges, tracking your accomplishments, and demonstrating your value.
If you come up with a great piece of data, I recommend you find a compelling human story to illustrate it. And if you learn about a great story in one of your libraries or programs, I recommend you link that story to a great piece of data, to demonstrate that it’s not just an isolated “feel good” anecdote.
Offer Clear Calls to Action
Since you communicate in order to make things happen, whenever possible add a third element. Link a story and a piece of data to a call to action. When your purpose is advocacy, link story and data to a policy recommendation. When it’s fundraising, link story and data to your “ask.”
Deliver Powerful “Story Packages.”
Story Package: A compelling story plus a great piece of data plus a clear call to action – told so that the connections between them are clear and motivating.
Write the Way You Speak
Before writing your presentation – whether your will ultimately present it verbally or in writing – tell it to someone else. Connect with the authentic and natural ways you express yourself in conversation before putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. When possible, use words and images your audience can picture in their mind’s eyes. TIPS ON PRESENTATION by Terrence McNally. McNally:Message Matters
You know what works.
Recall the best presenters or presentations you’ve ever seen… When it works, why does it work? Can you put it into words? Can you put it into practice?
Be Yourself.
Be prepared. Be in the room and in your body. Breathe. Be in the present. Throw your attention off of yourself and onto your audience. Say what you need to say. Express your excitement, energy, and passion. Communicate who you are as well as what you have to say.
Seeing Is Believing
See the things around you…and they will help you avoid self-consciousness. See the things you talk about.... and your audience will see them with you.
A Presentation is a Conversation.
“Listen” to your audience (whether one person or many). Watch their faces, their eyes, their body language. Invite them to engage with you emotionally as well as intellectually.
Practice. Prepare.
Rehearse as much as you need to. Rehearse aloud. Rehearse in the mirror, on audio, on video. Rehearse in front of others.
Feedback: Pay Attention to Others
We’re freer to learn while watching others, than while watching ourselves.
Ask yourself these questions when watching others present. • Do you interest me? • Do I believe you? • Do you entertain me? • Do I like how you make me feel? • Do I like you? • Do I trust you? • Do I value what you say? • Will I remember what you say?
For each question…Once you’ve answered “yes” or “no”, then ask “Why? Why not?”
In offering feedback, translate your experiences or feelings into information and examples the speaker can put into practice.