You don’t have to be writing fiction to be telling stories. Today, I gave a presentation on hardware. I showed them a case full of servers, talked about what it did when we demonstrated it in Spain, and finished the whole story without ever plugging the boxes in. The story I told worked, because I thought hard about the end.
The end of my story was an understanding: “I’ve shown you the hardware to demonstrate that it LOOKS appealing, that it demos well, and that we should use it more.” With this end in mind, I didn’t have to think as much about the nuts and bolts of the presentation. I knew from the moment I walked in that room where I wanted it all to end.
This hack works with your own storytelling needs. Are you negotiating a raise? How will the story end? What will your boss say? Pick a few endings. Write stories to match them all.
Fiction? Start with an end that you want to see. How will you end it? What do you want your audience to have experienced by the time it’s over? Then, all you have to do is go back and write so that things end up there. Not ALWAYS easy, and not always what you want, but it is a great device for moving things forward.
What’s your take?
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