What writers & others say
“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.”
— Dorothy Allison, American writer, speaker and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers
“Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it’s kaput — or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture. … Beginnings, middles, and ends are headed for the attic, next to the box marked VCR Rewinders/Beastmaster Franchise.”
— Scott Brown, author, in “Story Bored” for Wired magazine
“Stories … protect us from chaos, and maybe that’s what we, unblinkered at the end of the 20th century, find ourselves craving. Implicit in the extraordinary revival of storytelling is the possibility that we need stories — that they are a fundamental unit of knowledge, the foundation of memory, essential to the way we make sense of our lives: the beginning, middle and end of our personal and collective trajectories. It is possible that narrative is as important to writing as the human body is to representational painting. We have returned to narrative-in many fields of knowledge-because it is impossible to live without them.”
— Bill Buford, nonfiction writer and former fiction editor at The New Yorker
“tick-tock: Moment-by-moment developments. … In journalism parlance, it’s a story that recounts minute-by-minute the breathless details of a single event.”
— BuzzWhack
“Reports convey information. Stories create experience. Reports transfer knowledge. Stories transport the reader, crossing boundaries of time, space, and imagination. The report points us there. The story puts us there.”
— Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Institute senior scholar, in Writing Tools
“To be a person is to have a story to tell.”
— Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), author of Out of Africa and other novels
“Anecdotal leads … are to storytelling what a stripteaser is to sex. An anecdotal lead excites, but the story never delivers what it promises.”
— Donald C. Drake, pioneering science and medical writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer
“What have I learned from talking to all these famous people? That there’s a major story behind everyone.”
— Merv Griffin, talk-show host, game-show creator, entrepreneur, quoted in Esquire
“Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in the world? Because he knew more stories than anyone else.”
— Alan Kay, vice president, Walt Disney Co.
“As a lonely kid growing up in poverty and in the shadow of a violent alcoholic father, I found peace in books. Storytellers became my heroes because they provided escape, because their characters made me feel less isolated, more connected with the human experience. … A storyteller finds order in the apparent chaos of life, and order is a light in the darkness.”
— Dean Koontz, bestselling author of The Husband
“The story — from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
— Ursula Le Guin, American fantasy and science fiction author
“The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.”
— Ben Macintyre, writer at large for The Times, in “The Internet is Killing Storytelling”
“Although businesspeople are often suspicious of stories … the fact is that statistics are used to tell lies and damned lies, while accounting reports are often BS in a ball gown. … If a businessperson understands that his or her own mind naturally wants to frame experience in a story, the key to moving the audience is not to resist this impulse but to embrace it.”
— Robert McKee, author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting
“Sprinkle relevant anecdotes through your stories like chocolate treats to entice the reader to keep reading. We have to work hard if we are to hook readers and keep them.”
— Daryl Moen, professor of journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and former editor of three daily newspapers
“Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases. This story of one cancer’s genesis — of carcinogens causing mutations in internal genes, unleashing cascading pathways in cells that then cycle through mutation, selection, and survival — represents the most cogent outline we have of cancer’s birth.”
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, oncologist and author of The Emperor of All Maladies
“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole word.”
— Paul Murray, author, in Skippy Dies
“What’s unsurprising today would have seemed preposterous just fifteen years ago: an English-speaking thirteen-year-old in Zaire who’s connected to the Internet can find the current temperature in Brussels or the closing price of IBM stock or the name of Winston Churchill’s second finance minister as quickly and easily as the head librarian at Cambridge University. When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.”
— Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
“The lesson of preindustrial societies is storytelling. All our employees should be storytellers.”
— Anita Roddick, founder & CEO, The Body Shop
“Just because we already knew the outcome doesn’t mean we wouldn’t enjoy reading a good yarn about it. But we wouldn’t be satisfied with a good yawn.”
— Art Spikol, president of Art Spikol Inc.
“Don’t tell too much. Don’t tell Exactly What Happened. Exercise a little discretion; decide what’s necessary and what isn’t. The sign of a good researcher, some might say, is getting all the facts, but the sign of a good writer is selecting only the ones that are going to help the piece.”
— Art Spikol, president of Art Spikol Inc.
“A good storyteller knows how to get attention, inject a little suspense, exhibit a little of his character’s character, and dangle a carrot. On paper, at least.”
“The facts are not enough. They never are.”
— Art Spikol, president of Art Spikol Inc.
“Stories are the way to capture the hopes, dreams and visions of a culture. They are true as much as data are true. The truth of the powerful and irresistible story illustrates in a way data can’t begin to capture. It’s the stories that make you understand.”
— Carl Sessions Stepp, professor, Philip Merrill College of Journalism
“Narrative imagining — story — is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining. … Most of our experience, our knowledge and our thinking is organized as stories.”
— Mark Turner, cognitive scientist and author of The Literary Mind
“[S]torytelling can be the most powerful way for a chief executive to sketch a vision and align people behind it.”
— Sangeeth Varghese, founder of LeadCap, a leadership organization in India, and author of Decide to Lead
“If you pick up a can of soda, your brain goes through a whole cascade of processes having to do with the motor commands to your arms. What it looks like to grab the soda can, what it feels like in your hand and arms…. And what we found is that as people are lying in the scanner reading about picking up a can of soda …, their brain processes differ in ways that are similar to the differences that we see in responses to real experiences.”
— Jeffrey Zacks, professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis
“When they’re reading the story, they’re building simulations in their head of events that are described by the story. And so, there’s an important sense that as they build that simulation that it’s significantly like being there.”
— Jeffrey Zacks, professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis
“We’re used to thinking that virtual reality is something that involves fancy computers and helmets and gadgets. But what these kind of data suggest is that language itself is a powerful form of virtual reality, that there’s an important sense in which when we tell each other stories that we can control the perceptional processes that are happening in each other’s brains.”
— Jeffrey Zacks, professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis
How can you tell better business stories?
Stories are so effective that Og Mandino, the late author of the bestselling The Greatest Salesman in the World, says, “If you have a point, find a story.”
Learn to find, develop and write stories that engage readers’ hearts and minds in our Master the Art of Storytelling workshops.
There, you’ll learn how to find the aha! moment that’s the gateway to every anecdote. How to start an anecdote with a bang — instead of a whimper. And how to use “the most powerful form of human communication” to grab attention, boost credibility, make messages more memorable and communicate better.
