Stories provide the basic human need of connection. And to really emotionally connect with an audience you need to be vulnerable. Vulnerability shows trust and faith in your audience and your message, and sends an open, irresistible invitation to empathise.

Remember, you’re taking the audience on a journey with you, and they want to know every step of your emotional journey, as well as what action you took.

👉 When you’re building the story, take a moment to reflect on your emotional journey. Weave it into your plot points. What happened? How did that make you feel? What did you do?

Vulnerability is the best way to draw an audience into the emotional world of the story, but what about the physical world surrounding it?

The time and place surrounding emotions sets the stage for the story to really shine. So be sure to ‘Set the ‘GPS,’ - the time, the place, the era. The more specific you are about the surrounding world, the better.

Another important tool for connecting with an audience and drawing them into the world of the story is through sense and sense memory. What were you hearing? Tasting? Feeling? Seeing? Smelling? As Bobette says “a sensory retelling of a story will help your audience to ‘feel’ it and, if the sense is particularly evocative, allow it to linger long after the telling has ended.”

👉 Where and when does your story take place? What sense is strongest in this world? What sights or sounds did you hear and see? How will you weave these into your story? It's a belief advocated for by Stephen Denning in his 'Springboard Story' framework too — more on that here.

You want the message, the emotional core, and the world of the story to shine. Using ‘multisyllabic, erudite, four-dollar words,’ as Bobette calls them, muddies your message.

Wherever, however and whenever you are telling your story, tell it like you would to a friend. Keep the language simple, and lean into the active tense; ‘she is fired,’ rather than ‘she was fired’. It illustrates a journey - the journey you’re taking your audience on.

Try, as much as possible, to use strong, punchy, ‘Hemingway,’ verbs - for example ‘sprint,’ ‘dash,’ or ‘charge,’ rather than simply ‘ran’.

👉 What ‘four dollar words,’ in your story could you swap out for something simpler? What ‘Hemingway,’ verbs could you use in place of less vivid ones? Copywriting maestro Steve Harrison has something to say on this too.

Bobette references the story of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of clothing brand Patagonia and the first man to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan. In the 1960’s, Chouinard and his best friend decided to climb Argentina’s Mount Fitz Roy; a perilous mountain that had only been ‘beaten’ twice before. But halfway to the summit, a deadly blizzard hit. Rather than head home, they spent 31 days huddled together in a snow cave, living on rations, before the storm cleared and they could reach the peak. When they got there, they watched the view for just 20 minutes before beginning their descent. ‘How we climbed the mountain was more important than reaching the top,’ said Chouinard.

The ending of your story is really important, but the obstacles you faced, the choices you made, and the road those choices led you down on IS the story. Take your audience with you, lead them on a journey: as Bobette says "Nothing else matters."

👉 You know your ending, but what obstacles got in your way? Were there problems with money? With family? With late trains or rude taxi drivers? Set these obstacles up, and knock them down again in your story. Tension is great for keeping people's attention.

“The gleaming detail is the one thing that captures both the emotion and the idea of the story at once, in one fell swoop.” It is the seemingly ordinary thing that comes to represent so much more. And all great stories have them.

Bikes, to use Bobette’s example, are incredibly ordinary. But to a scared and lonely ten year old using one to search for an alien in the woods (Elliot in E.T.) it’s about so much more: exploration, coming out of your shell, looking for companionship. And when that same bike magically flies through the air against a silhouette of the moon, it becomes even more evocative: the power of friendship and childhood wonder.

Gleaming details work for brand stories as well. Innocent Smoothies, for example, still tell the story of their first festival stall. The founders, three advertising consultants, provided two bins beside a table of free samples, one labelled ‘yes,’ the other ‘no’. Written above the bins was a wooden board with a simple question: ‘Should we quit our jobs and start a business?’ That simple set-up became the gleaming detail for Innocent’s brand identity - doing things differently, creatively, and with humour.

👉 What other gleaming details can you think of? What is the gleaming detail of your story? Maybe you'll appeal to the senses in evoking it?