The Power of Written Storytelling

Being able to tell your organization’s stories is vital to connecting with your audience. (Again, when I use the word story, I’m talking about a true tale, nonfiction).

How you tell your stories will determine who will be moved by them. You can find inspiring stories, whether you’re at a nonprofit or a business, by spending time with the peo­ple you are help­ing. I under­stand this can be dif­fi­cult, espe­cially if it’s not part of your reg­u­lar job descrip­tion. It’s often easy to get bogged down with daily duties.

In other instances, public rela­tions man­agers focus their atten­tion on get­ting the organization’s mes­sage out to the traditional news media. That used to be the most important way to reach a large audience.  And while good media coverage still matters, some­one in your orga­ni­za­tion should also be aware that a big part of what you should be doing is telling sto­ries to your audi­ence directly. This allows your audi­ence to feel a greater con­nec­tion to you.

Once you find a story to tell, it’s also impor­tant to craft it in a way that imme­di­ately grabs the reader’s attention. It’s essen­tial that you iden­tify what part of your story will do this, as well as how to struc­ture it. The fol­low­ing series will walk you through how to write the beginning, middle, and end of a story.

1. The Power of Written Storytelling: The Beginning (Part 1)

2. The Power of Written Storytelling: The Middle: Why Does Your Story Matter? (Part 2)

3. The Power of Written Storytelling: The Middle: Setting the Scene by Reporting the Story to Death (Part 3)

4. The Power of Written Storytelling: The Middle: Adding Flavor (Part 4)

5. The Power of Written Storytelling: The End: Why Write Awesome Endings? (Part 5)

Also, check out: Nonprofits Telling Awesome Stories: charity: water (Part 1) and Tyler Riewer’s Adventures With charity: water

Plus, Serial Storytelling on Social Media.

The Power of Written Storytelling: The End: Why Write Awesome Endings? (Part 5)

This is the fifth part of a series of posts about writ­ing a story. (Again, when I write the word story, I mean a true tale, non­fic­tion). Here, I will discuss the importance of a great ending.

Girl on tracks.

I always like train tracks, and they remind me of great endings. Maybe it’s because it’s a hint of the future; the journey that you can still go on. (Photo credit: Barta IV)

I’m really into endings. Story endings, that is. Endings that make reading the whole story worthwhile. So you can sit back and reflect in the awesomeness of the moment, not jump up and down in frustration, or worse still, quietly forget it.

If I watch a movie and the ending is terrible, I’ll probably hate the entire movie, even if I’ve liked it up until that point. Or if don’t like a movie that much, but actually make it to the end and the ending is awesome, I will probably say I thought the movie was at the very least good.

(This is a bit off-topic, but so you can totally relate to what I mean by mind-blowing endings before we get started, here are three movies that fit that bill. If you haven’t seen them, now is the time. You can even call it homework: “The Usual Suspects,” “Fight Club,” “Fargo.”)

Oh, and if you haven’t read the stories I’ve been mentioning in these posts, I’m warning you now there will be some spoilers.

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