Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

How to Create Compelling Stories Even If You
Don’t Think You Can
Ideas come and go. Stories stay.
—NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, AUTHOR
W
hen you do the work from the 
previous chapter
, you’ll end up with two
things. The first is a collection of story ideas: the seeds of potential stories that
you can use to captivate, influence, and transform. The second is a singular story
idea: one that you chose from the collection as the best possible story idea for
the job at hand.
Your next job is to craft that story in a way that makes it compelling for the
person who will read it, hear it, or see it. As I reread that sentence, I realize this
may sound intimidating if you’ve never considered yourself much of a writer.
Perhaps you prefer formulas and equations. Or maybe you enjoyed journaling,
but the last time you had to write anything other than an email or product
description, you were still hopeful that 
Lost
would have an adequate ending.
If this sounds like you, rest assured you can do this. I don’t say this to flatter
you. I say this because I’ve seen the most analytical, unemotional, self-

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proclaimed more-robot-than-human people craft unforgettable, irresistible
stories. How? By using the system and components in this book. A formula you
already know, a system you’ve seen in action with every story you’ve read here.
Whether compelling storytelling is in your DNA or you eat data for breakfast,
crafting great stories is a simple skill anyone can master.
Putting the Storytelling Framework and Components to
Work
You remember our storytelling framework from chapter 3:
Normal → Explosion → New Normal
Three parts. Not nine. If you ask me, that’s kinda nice. Nine seems like a lot.
Three seems manageable. And as we’ll see in this chapter, it totally is. Each one
of these three parts plays an important role in crafting stories that will captivate,
influence, and transform your audiences.
All you need are the story scraps you found in the 
previous chapter
, mastery
of the four components we’ve discussed throughout the whole book, and the
story you’ve chosen to fit your objective. Once you have these elements in place,
you’ll be ready to start putting your story together. And although I’m usually the
“let’s start at the very beginning” type, when it comes to crafting a story, it’s
best to take what you found in 
chapter 8
 and start in the middle.
Explosion: Start in the Middle
Though the explosion is the middle of our three-part framework, I find this is
where our stories usually start. As you were looking for scraps of stories in the
previous chapter
, the memories, the moments that rose to the top were likely
explosions, because when a story happens to us, more often than not, we don’t
recognize it until we’re in the middle of it. We don’t notice a story is happening
until we get to the explosion. Which makes sense, because the first part of any
given story is, by definition, normal. Hence the name. It’s essentially not a story
until the explosion happens, and as a result, we don’t really notice the normal
until we see it in contrast with the explosion and new normal.
This natural oblivion to the normal means it’s a pretty tough place to start
when crafting a story. Better to start with the explosion, the thing that happened,

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and then work backward.
For example, the explosion in the Workiva value story was when the aspiring
athlete started using the Workiva product. The explosion for the financial
advisor was when she was caught washing her money. The explosion for the dad
trying to bestow wisdom on his daughter was when she pointed out he was
wearing mismatched socks. As a sentence or a statement, none of these
experiences, or explosions, are much of a story. They aren’t going to draw you
in and start the co-creative process; they aren’t going to engage you in the
emotions and the process of painting a collective mental picture.
But they are a place to start.
Once you identify that pivotal moment to build the story around, it’s time to
go back to the beginning.