How to evolve your storytelling in 3 phases
💡 This blog post is adapted from my Playing Favorites newsletter.
There are but two tiny things I wish I could magically implant in the brains of everyone who wants to create stories for a living -- or just for fun, honestly.
Tiny thing #1: This is all about practice.
Creativity is just repetition (do that thing again...) plus reinvention (...slightly better than last time) over time. (You know time, right? It’s the thing none of us want to admit our work still needs? The thing that separates us from those we admire, even though we prefer to believe there’s some kind of magical hack or cheat or secret? But, no, it’s time.)
That’s tiny thing #1. Creating great stories requires lots and lots of practice.
Here’s tiny thing #2: The carbon element of a story is tension. No tension, no story.
Just as you can’t have life without carbon, you can’t have story without tension. A story is a vehicle for resolving tension. Nothing is happening but then a thing disrupts that until finally it’s resolved. (This is why creative work is so very much about inspiring positive change in the world, not just ranking #1 on Google or selling a bunch of crap. Stories are vehicles for solving problems because stories, literally, solve problems. A story is a communication technique wherein the way you communicate frames things as the path towards relieving tension.)
Without tension, you aren’t telling a story. You’re just stating some facts or describing some stuff.
(Fair warning: I’m about to use the word “storytelling” a whole lot, and I know the industry around you and me has turned that phrase into a buzzword. Which is ridiculous. It’s kinda like chefs turning “cooking” into a buzzword. That’s almost impossible. Cooking is their job. Well, storytelling is YOUR job. It’s just that the industry has lost sight of what a “story” even is.)
As storytellers (deep breath, it gets easier the more you read it), our calling card is our mastery of the use of tension, and that mastery spans three distinct phases. Want to become a better storyteller? Push yourself to the next phase.
Prefer the podcast? Listen to my show, Unthinkable:
Phase 1: No Tension
Early on in a creative career, we tend to shy away from or even omit tension altogether. This means our work looks and feels mainly like advice, or opinions, or flat descriptions. We write lots of list articles and curate a lot of things others have created. We publish how-to posts, tips and tricks articles (if you’re in B2B especially), and craft case studies instead of stories. And why aren’t they stories? Because there’s no tension.
As a result, our work doesn't really grip the audience -- certainly not the way an incredible story does. Without tension, there’s no story arc, and so our work feels flat. The audience isn’t given any good reason to stick around. We provide no open loops that demand closure, no questions in their minds that need answers, and no intrigue to be paid off later.
My college thesis was a Phase 1 project for a time. I majored in English Literature, but I wanted to be a sports journalist. As a result, I wrote my thesis on the use of baseball as a subject and a trope throughout 20th-century American literature. I spent weeks toiling away in Phase 1 ... until my mentor told me to use the very thing I loved using as a sportswriter: story. (He said "story." I now understand what he really meant: "tension.")
“You have a good sense for drama,” he told me. “Use that in how you write.”
Indeed, that’s influenced everything I’ve written since. Just two paragraphs above this very line, you’ll note a small moment of tension.“I spent weeks toiling away in Phase 1 ... until my mentor told me…”
Storytelling is like making a craft cocktail. The ingredients that YOU understand bring out the true flavors aren’t necessarily the ones the consumer even understands are there -- or how to pronounce. But that’s why what you serve is delicious af. So, your stories need a twist of tension … if not a couple ounces of the stuff.
You’ve heard of happy hour? Well, with our work, it’s tension time.
(What’s that? Oh, I went one line too far with the metaphor? Hi, I’m Jay, I thought we’ve met?)
A Phase 1 “story” sounds like this:
The itsy bitsy spider went up the waterspout.
Everyone knows the key to successful storytelling is tension, so today, we’ll list six ways you can use tension in your writing.
Phase 2: Central Tension
I call this phase “central” tension because tension is central to the story, and if you were to plot out the story arc, it’s usually right in the center. It’s what makes the story arc … well …arc. Phase 2 storytelling follows the simple three-act structure: status quo, tension, resolution.
In a career, we enter this phase when we realize that, oh, right, weneedtension to create a story. Maybe you grow disillusioned with all the usual “flat” content, as I did. (When I worked for HubSpot, we were basically Tips N Tricks R Us. And the startup where I worked prior was no better. That was ListicleShack. Like another famous Shack, they too started limping along, barely alive as a business.
Status quo. Tension. Resolution. The tension is in the center, and it’s central to our stories. We’re Phase 2 storytellers.
Sometimes, these are wonderful. Sometimes, they're what Brene Brown calls "gold-plated grit."(We wanted to do a thing, and then this one moment was really hard, BUT NOW IT’S AMAZING AND EVERYTHING IS AMAZING LET ME TALK ABOUT THE AMAZINGNESS.)
Phase 2 is more gripping than Phase 1, but we're still a far cry from capturing the truth, whether intentionally (WE’RE AMAZING!) or not. So we need to level up again.
A Phase 2 story sounds like this:
The itsy bitsy spider went up the waterspout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun and dried up all the rain, and the itsy bitsy spider did the damn thing.
Everyone knows the key to successful storytelling is tension, but rarely if ever do we execute on it. Instead, we share flat descriptions, boring sequences of events, and we fail to intrigue or to grip people. It’s time we learned how to use tension as the storytelling tool it is. Today, we’ll list six ways you can use tension in your writing.
Phase 3: Messing with Tension
Phase 3 is less of a state of being than it is a place we love to visit and wish we visited more, like our favorite spot along a dirt path in the woods as we take our morning walk or that corner booth in our favorite bar. When we enter that Phase 3 place, we feel inspired or emboldened enough to mess with the nice, clean, three-part story structure of Phase 2 stories.
So, sure, there may be one central tension inherent to the story, but then we use smaller and/or more moments of tension so the story has a much more fluid, wavy feel than a single arc. The audience and indeed we as storytellers sense a continual rise and fall of intrigue, with varying peaks and valleys, all of which makes the story feel more like it’s breathing. In and out. Up and down. Intrigue and payoff. Question and answer. This part but then that part.
As Phase 3 storytellers, we acquire some gear and tools that help us venture to those desirable and inspired places in our journeys. We use cold opens and open loops, tangents, asides, and quick little metaphors and anecdotes to illustrate larger points. We introduce secondary subjects, the B-story and C-story, and march our central characters (fictional or real) towards uncertainty in the micro moments of their lives, even while trying to get them all the way to the end of a grander story.
When you mess with tension, your stories aren’t so black and white, as they were in Phase 2. Instead, they more closely reflect the truth. We’ll never capture reality moment to moment. The created work is always derivative of life in some way, at least from a factual, documentary-like standpoint. (I’d argue the created work canenhancethe truth from an emotional standpoint.) And yet, even though we aren’t exactly capturing reality with our Phase 3 stories, our willingness to admit that reality is a mess, that few if any things are as clean as a three-act story, allows us to resonate more deeply with others.
Everything we do is in some ways reductionist, but that’s okay, so long as we remember to dance in the gray areas. That dance is the process of messing with tension.
My favorite example of Phase 3 storytelling is from (and get out your bingo card and cover up the free space in the middle, because yes, I’m once again about to mention him) Anthony Bourdain.
He’d visit a place, lead you down one path, and you’d go, “Oh, I get it: In Mexico, life is like THIS.” Then, they’d cut to another scene where -- wait a second, that’s the exact opposite of what we just saw. “Oh,” you might think, “so life here is like THAT for some people, and like THIS for others. It’s the classic Haves and Have-Nots. I get it!” Then, they’d cut to yet another scene where, hold on, the Have-Nots are acting awfully happy and are starting to make socioeconomic progress. But that means -- wait, we’re entering a new scene? With a new subject? And some new variables?
New questions emerge, and far more questions than nice, neat answers, as the tension rises and falls, but only in some spots, never really resolving itself in other spots, because that’s how life works and there’s never going to be total clarity on anything … and then, finally, to end the episode, a big question spoken by a subject … which is never actually answered … and instead lingers … in a way that’s at once unsatisfying and deeply moving.
That’s a Phase 3 story. Questions beget questions. Uncertainty leads to some kinda-sorta-maybe-a-little certainty … which then plummets into even more uncertainty. As one of Bourdain’s tattoos read, “I am certain of nothing.”
I think we should all feel that way, if we’re going to be Phase 3 storytellers. We so often try to wrap things up with a nice neat bow as we hand our work to the world. But that pithy lesson or insight or conclusion -- that resolution to one form of tension -- should not ignore that rampant questions and plenty of tension still exists.To explore anything through the creative process is to arrive at some answers but also far more questions than you even knew to ask at the beginning.
As a result, Phase 3 storytellers take that nice, neat, pithy insight or final wrap-up, and they gleefully place it into a box labeled “contradictions,” and they shake the box. That’s life. And if we’re trying to capture it, however distantly, then we’re better off admitting it.
“Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman mused. “Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
That’s reality. That’s a Phase 3 story.
As for what a Phase 3 story sounds like? That’s up to you. I can’t say with certainty. I can say with certainty that I’m trying to tell more of these types of stories personally -- and I’m trying to do so on my show,Unthinkable. (It’s coming back, by the way. It’s a major focus in 2021 for me, and I’m trying to find a way to fund that level of storytelling,starting with a paid membership group for ambitious creators, which I am quietly piloting out.)
As storytellers, we can’t evolve without making more of a mess, because the mess is where we practice and where we get closer to reality. Specifically, we can mess with tension. We can introduce lots of moments of intrigue, questions, uncertainty -- some big but most of them as small as the very word between “big” and “most” in this sentence..
As for the pithy insight, the nice neat bow to place on top of this gift I try to package for you? Maybe I should skip it.
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As I mentioned… this blog is adapted from my Playing Favorites newsletter.
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