Storytelling Is The Number One Skill

To make a story truly relatable, Authors should structure their stories to align with the psychological processes of problem-solving within the mind.

Over on Medium, Jon Westerberg tells us Storytelling is the Number One Skill You Want to Improve:

I think that storytelling is the greatest technology that humans have ever created. Storytelling is the basis for almost everything in our society, and the way we interact, build, communicate, live and dream all derives from it.

Couldn't agree more.

And we would go further to say that Dramatica is the greatest combination of both technology and theoretical story structure humans have ever created.

In the last week we helped two companies align storytelling with their core values. The first--a company that sees close to a billion dollars in revenue annually--was pleased to hear that our concept for their big budget animated feature synchronized perfectly with their company-wide marketing campaign. Instead of simply helping them tell a story, we helped them craft a structure that propagated one of their core values.

A complete story is an argument. When one of the principal characters resolves their own issues by completely changing their world paradigm, the Author makes the argument that changing this position resolves even bigger issues in the world around them. Instead of marketing an idea through imagery, a story markets values by showing the results of taking that new position.

With the other project, we managed to weave the company's mission into both the pilot episode and entire series of a proposed animated television series. By developing two similar, yet vastly complex arguments, into one work, the production company can move forward with the confidence that the end result will be more than simple diversionary entertainment.

Storytelling should be the number one skill you want to improve--understanding the psychological structures behind effective storytelling accelerates and deepens that skill set far beyond simply making it "relatable." Making it truly relatable requires aligning structure with the psychological processes that dictate problem-solving within our own minds.

Dramatica--and specifically Narrative First--provide the tools and know-how to make that alignment an easy and fun process.