Applied storytelling in the lecture hall (and elsewhere)

Challenge 5: Mapping your story arc

The context

Every great story takes the audience on a journey—through ups and downs. A compelling story arc keeps people engaged and makes the lesson more memorable.

The challenge

My challenge to you this week is map out your story arc. As you may remember from our workshop, your story arc is the journey that you take people on, where the “ups” are the positives and the “downs” are the negatives.

A long story may have many ups and downs, but in the interests of time, you may want to simply mention the ups and downs, and only go into detail for one – which becomes a “story moment”.

Try it out

Take a story from your storybank and flesh it out using the Story Spine.

The story spine:

Now draw a simple line graph of your story’s emotional highs and lows.

Observe how the ending leaves your audience—does it resolve on a high note? A low note? How does that impact the story take-home message?

Note: you can end a story at a different point if you wish – to create a cliff-hanger, at which point you introduce audience engagement.