By: Chandni Desai
As a PR professional, it’s essential to understand storytelling through the different perspectives of some of the most critical thinkers in the history of storytelling.
Delving into fundamental narrative theories can help PR professionals understand how to take a client’s story and make it compelling to the media through experiential communication and storytelling tactics that guarantee success in the media.
In this way, think of understanding storytelling frameworks as the foundation for understanding how stories get created and what makes them worth pitching to the media.
Your job as a publicist is to hone in on your narrative intuition so that you can recognize where stories are. You can then discern the narrative arc your client has and pay attention to the details of what makes or doesn’t make a compelling enough story to keep the media’s attention.
For instance, understanding how Gustav Freytag, a German novelist, conceptualizes his bell-shaped story arc can be beneficial when constructing a story for a client, or analyzing stories in general, while developing a strategy and a campaign when pitching them to the media.
I find Freytag’s Pyramid to be one of the most utilitarian of narrative theories. Freytag offers a simple philosophy—his choice of words is more precise to the function of what you’re trying to accomplish at various points within a story.
Remember that, as a storyteller, you are not just creating event after event to create an overall plotline. Rather, some events will serve as inciting incidents.
In the story you craft, your client acts as the protagonist and will have to deal with some initial turning points before the action continues. Those steps, themselves, will not be equal in weight, but instead increase, though not always. Then, they will somehow find resolutions, however small, and however multiple, until there is some capstone of conclusion.
So, in that sense, Freytag’s Pyramid can be superimposed not only onto this trajectory of a story spine but, of course, also on the more global approach.
If you’re going to be successful at public relations, experiential communication, and storytelling, you must be able to grab hold of someone’s attention, make them look up from their smartphones, and not merely scroll past your client’s story on their device’s screen.
You want to engage them, and perhaps, even engage with them. If you deliver facts and sometimes boring facts— it could prove a decent bet you won’t succeed in grabbing attention. Most pitches to the media include facts and statistics, but what makes a pitch strong is how those facts are utilized to tell the overall story.
If you wrap those bits of the information you want to impart to others in some form of narrative exposition, and if you do it well—say you touch their emotions or deepen your connection with them, make them laugh, or even pause to reconsider something they believe—you will have achieved your goal with telling those stories by using facts and statistics effectively.
While we’ve covered the process of how to create stories through these approaches and discussed the structure of stories, other critical elements appear in any good narrative.
The setting is crucial. When I say setting, I refer to something more substantive than just the way to introduce a story. The setting isn’t necessarily always something you do at once at the opening. It can evolve. It can be numerous. It can be diverse.
For example, the way clients are branded and positioned in the media is their ‘setting’ in the media. You have the storytelling skills to take something or someone mundane and turn them into something relevant and applicable to the media, all through how you set up your client’s story.
Then, when you look at this notion of story spine, you see that it is a linear process of translating Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and flow into a more helpful apparatus. It encompasses structure. It tells you your story must start somewhere that probably needs to be some sort of setting, someplace, some time, some scene.
It leads you onward toward a series of events. It utilizes a mnemonic approach so that the minute you read them, you instantly recall what is being asked to create a series of unfolding events in sequence, until finally, the events culminate into whatever conclusion you’ve made, which is the story you want to tell.
The story spine is a simple, elegant process that can be used no matter the story you’re trying to create, and it reminds you that these are the critical elements of a solid story.
Beyond familiarizing yourself with how stories achieve structure and cohesiveness using these methods, these concepts can show you how stories insert themselves in various everyday settings—the media, especially.
When telling a story, one of your goals should be to develop and hone in on narrative intuition, your perceptions about how stories arise in the world, and your ability to discern the appropriateness and validity of those stories.
To relate these lessons more closely to life experiences and what’s trending in the media, you have to observe how stories manifest in different settings during the storytelling process. You can then start applying what you know about traditional storytelling practices and utilize theory and structure to the stories all around you that are there for you to decode and share to the media more compellingly.
