How to craft a great story

Storytelling structure: Use chronology

Transform real-life events into narrative arcs with this storytelling template

Tick-tock: How do you organize a short story? Use time. For the best nonfiction narrative, move the reader from the inciting incident to rising action to resolution and, finally, to denouement. And with this storytelling template, you’re three steps away from a great story.

A bear’s tale: Storytelling structure in action

3 steps to a good story

Tell me a story: How can you make the most of your best business stories? Fortunately, great storytelling is as easy as 1-2-3. Here’s how to turn facts that tell into stories that sell, in this rewrite of one of my favorite corporate stories …

Begin in the middle for good story structure

Start your story in medias res

Kick-start your story: You remember learning about in medias res (classical Latin for “into the middle things”) in college. That’s where you open your story in the midst of the action. Here’s a great example, from The New York Times Magazine.

Start with the snake in storytelling structure

Find the inciting incident

Snakes alive: Begin your story with the inciting incident — the conflict that launches the action and moves your subject to act. To do so, find the desk-pounding moment, begin as close to the action as possible and skip the background information.

All’s well that ends in storytelling structure

Punch out your punch line

Means to an end: What’s the secret to writing the last line of a story? Here’s how Hallmark’s late, great Gordon MacKenzie did it in a parable in Orbiting the Giant Hairball, his delightful tome on corporate creativity. (Edited, it must be said, by yours truly!).