Story features and narrative pleasures

We don’t have to look far to find examples of storytelling in professional communication contexts. TED talks, podcasts, and feature articles all use storytelling to reach and engage audiences. Advertisements tell stories to imbue a product with meaning, while influencer-led marketing involves the sharing of stories in order to put a human face on an otherwise faceless brand. A successful journalist is commonly understood to be someone with an instinct for a good story, while activists and campaigners often try to grab mainstream media attention so that their stories are picked up by the news and told to a wider audience.

Meanwhile, the ability to tell a good story might make you the preferred candidate for a job, or help you secure funding for a start-up. Research has even shown that good storytelling skills can make you seem more attractive and appealing as a romantic partner (Donahue and Green 2016).

As an educator in this field, I know how important storytelling is to students, and to the industry practitioners who employ them. Many years ago, I helped design a media studies course at an Australian university. We conducted a lot of market research with prospective students, asking them what they really wanted to learn about journalism, screen production, and public relations. Their answer: storytelling. These students already knew how to use technology; they could shoot, edit, and share their own video content; they were bloggers, podcasters, and social media experts with high levels of digital literacy, many of them already working in the industry. What they really wanted was guidance on how to tell good stories. And when we asked prospective employers what they wanted to see in communication and media studies graduates, their answer was strikingly similar: they wanted people who could tell compelling stories across multiple media platforms.

But, as Michael Kent points out, “knowing that storytelling is important and knowing how to create effective narratives is not the same thing” (2015: 480). Kent, a public relations scholar, argues that storytelling is sometimes depicted as an easy tool for brand communication and social media engagement, “something quite simple that everyone already knows how to do well” (2015: 481) rather than a craft that can take decades to hone. He points out that online lists, blogs, and social media posts often talk about storytelling without really understanding what it means – and often, such texts simply use the term “storytelling” interchangeably with “communication”. Similarly, you may have heard someone described as “a good storyteller” in a way that means very little. In this chapter, we want to dig deeper and explore below the surface. What makes storytelling an effective tool for communication? What does it mean to tell compelling stories in a crowded media landscape?

To answer these questions, we need to understand how storytelling works. We also need to understand the impact of storytelling as a practice: on social change, on understanding, and on the ideological structures that surround and underpin our everyday lives.

Our world is full of stories, in “almost infinite forms”, as the semiotician Roland Barthes once wrote (1994). The examples given by Barthes include comics, conversation, and stained-glass windows, along with the usual suspects – news, cinema, and novels. In the years since Barthes compiled that list, we’ve been telling stories on Instagram, with infographics, and in virtual reality experiences. A playlist on Spotify can tell a story, as can an exhibition in an art gallery. Yes, storytelling is more than the delivery of information – but with such diversity of story forms, is it possible to find defining features that are common to all stories?

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay. Stained glass windows remind us that storytelling is all around us, and stories can take many forms.

Perhaps it is. Let’s start with character. Most stories have a human (or non-human) character at their heart. And stories become stories via the magic ingredient of care. By “care”, I don’t just mean that stories are crafted with care – although this is important too. In most stories, it’s vital that we, the audience, care about one or more of the characters. We don’t have to like them, but we should care about their experiences and their plight, for any of a number of reasons including curiosity, admiration, empathy, or a stronger form of identification where we imagine ourselves in the character’s shoes. This investment in and connection to the character binds us to the unfolding events that constitute the narrative.

And these events within a story are linked rather than randomly arranged. Usually, they are connected in a way that is feasible or believable according to the logic of the storyworld. These links involve causation and consequence: one event causes another and these causally linked events form a plot. For example, in the children’s story Where the Wild Things Are, the hero Max misbehaves, which causes his mother to send him to bed without supper, which causes him to travel to the land of the wild things.

Often, stories begin when the character experiences some kind of change in their circumstances – something happens to disrupt the equilibrium of their everyday life. In his book The Writer’s Journey, screenwriter Christopher Vogler (1992) describes this as leaving “the ordinary world” and responding to “a call to adventure”. Think of Dorothy being whisked away from Kansas, or Frodo Baggins leaving The Shire to set off on his quest.

And stories end: they don’t just fizzle out. Endings are important because they bring a sense of resolution and balance to the narrative. Sometimes, stories have a “sting in the tale” or an unexpected ending. This may be a twist (an ending that changes our experience of the narrative) or it may be a punchline (an ending that helps us understand the narrative or “get the joke”). An ending can also come about when the character achieves their goal. For example, Where the Wild Things Are ends when Max returns safely home and finds a hot supper waiting for him.

Stories elicit pleasure in a way that information alone does not. We enjoy stories. They are entertaining. Good stories are frequently described as “compelling” – this means the narrative events attract and hold our attention, often to the extent that it is difficult to disentangle ourselves from them. Think of a book you’re unable to put down, or a TV program you can’t stop thinking about.

To be entertained by something is to be involved in a sort of transaction – you give a story your attention in return for pleasure. But to say that stories are “pleasurable” does not mean they are necessarily happy, light-hearted, or frivolous. Much of the entertainment media we consume for pleasure is neither “fun” nor “happy”; our entertainment texts do not always console us or make us feel that the world is a comfortable, safe, or enjoyable place to inhabit. Dark or troubling stories can still be entertaining if we form a strong relationship with the characters, sharing their experiences, vicariously living their struggles, victories, adventures, and even their everyday routines. These characters may not always be people we admire or aspire to be like: they might be people we fear becoming. For example, stories about crime or horror can satisfy our desire for escapism by transporting us to another world and allowing us to experiment with alternative identities.

Complex narratives

In today’s entertainment media landscape, narratives and the pleasures they offer have become very complex. Looking specifically at TV drama, Jason Mittell (2006) identified “narrative complexity” as a feature of new storytelling patterns that surfaced in the late 1990s and continue to dominate TV writing today. Such complexity emerged as the product of what Mittell describes as an intersection between technological developments, changing audience expectations, and shifting production practices. Informed by these intersecting forces, TV programs today – especially television dramas – often feature complex plotlines unfolding over multiple episodes and impacting a large cast of characters rather than a single protagonist. Audiences can be relied upon to remember intricate plot details and do not need cliff-hangers to lead them to the next episode – but they do need a reason to retain their subscription to a video-on-demand service. The pleasures of following a sophisticated storyline and vicariously participating in the adventures of characters we care about may give us just such a reason. Storytelling practices, then, are also built into business models and shaped by industry imperatives, and can be used to make creative content more profitable.

Meanwhile, entertainment media franchises like Star Wars or The Avengers consist of vast storyworlds created by teams of writers; rather than one central character there are hundreds. Such franchises often disperse narrative elements systematically across multiple media platforms, a process known as transmedia storytelling. Single stories tend to get lost in a cluttered, noisy, and fast media environment – but transmedia stories can deeply engage audiences, build their loyalty, and hold their attention.

The term transmedia storytelling was coined by Marsha Kinder, who wrote in 1991 about the “entertainment supersystems” that were emerging in children’s television. Media theorists like Henry Jenkins (2006) have since teased out the idea of transmedia storytelling, which has become an important communication concept used not just in studies of entertainment media but in theory and practice relating to journalism, documentary filmmaking, and advertising. In the video below, the advertising agency FCB Global explains transmedia storytelling from an industry perspective.

Cinderalla 2.0 – Transmedia Storytelling, FCB Global