Two Ingredients for Writing a Great Story
Great stories are relatable, but also innovative
Great stories are relatable, but also innovative
Storytelling is a very powerful tool to transmit all kinds of knowledge, from factual to more subtle emotional understanding of other people’s perspectives. We consume and immerse ourselves constantly in stories of all shapes and sizes through novels, comics, movies, video games, among others. But what makes or breaks a story? Why do some stories stay in our memory forever and others are immediately forgotten? There are two basic ingredients done right in a great story: They are relatable, but also innovative.
Relatability
What does it mean for a story to be relatable? On the most basic level, this means that the story is understandable. You can only get what is happening in a story if the characters, their actions, and their consequences make sense to you. Imagine if you watched a movie made for an alien culture. You probably wouldn’t understand a thing because their way of life would be so different from anything we experience here on Earth.
Every story makes assumptions about what the audience knows. And these assumptions need to be correct for the story to make sense. However, good stories are not only understandable. They go one level higher and become relatable to the audience. This means that the readers and watchers can identify with the characters: Maybe the same or similar things have happened to them before. Maybe they faced the same obstacles.
Identifying with characters in this way makes the audience care for the characters. The audience becomes invested in the plot and this is where the magic happens: We become immersed in the story and we get to feel like we are a part of it, experiencing all the ups and downs together with the characters.
When I try to come up with relatable stories that can awake a deep emotional connection with the reader, I start with true stories from my personal life. I am only at the beginning of my storytelling journey, so it makes sense that the best stories I can come up with are the ones that are true because they are the most relatable ones. I have listed a few of them below.
The Messy Truth About Santa and How I Found Out
Is it any good making kids believe in Santa?medium.com
Why Humor Allows Us to Overcome the Tragedy of Life And Death
Or why life and death are one big cosmic joke.medium.com
The Quiet Strength of “Ordinary” Women
Two inspiring personal stories that will change how you see female strength.medium.com
So, if you want to make a story relatable: Think personally (what happened to you) and think about who would relate to it. That is your audience. For example, I often make comics about linguistics. These will be generally most well understood by linguists. I also make comics and write about mental health. This will be well understood by people who suffer from certain mental health problems or are interested in wellbeing.
And I also make stories about life, relationships, loss, and humor. I think these have the highest potential to be understood by almost everyone, although even here there might be a generational or a cultural gap, depending on the topic. For instance, a young person who hasn’t lost anyone might not relate to loss and grief.
Ok, so we have established that a story needs to be understandable and relatable, which means somewhat similar to the experiences we all share. But what happens when we’ve seen similar stories over and over again? Well, we quickly get bored of them and they become clichés, even if they are relatable. So, the only way to keep your story interesting is to add an innovative element.
Innovation
By innovation here I refer to all the elements of your story that are somewhat unexpected. This could be a twist in the end, done in a way that is not often seen in other movies or novels, or it could be an introduction of a quirky character that is not a typical protagonist. If you are basing yourself on a true story, you might highlight an aspect of it that doesn’t frequently happen in the lives of other people.
And most importantly, every story, true or not, can easily become creative and innovative simply by focusing on aspects of it that are not frequently the main focus in other (mainstream) stories. Since we are constantly bombarded by stories everywhere we go, we develop a sort of literacy for how a story is usually told. We learn to expect the twists and turns we see very often. That is why we often guess who is going to betray whom in a movie, or that the couple in a romantic comedy will definitely end up together in the end.
However, if you decide to shift your focus to a more nuanced conflict, or if you slow down the pace, when most other stories are super fast, you will find yourself in the territory of innovation. So, keep an eye on what is not being done elsewhere and try it out! It might not work, but it might just be the creative spark you were looking for.
You might ask: Why is innovation even necessary? Common motifs and clichés are not always bad, they can make us feel good. Well, besides making us feel good, excellent stories also teach us something. If we feel that a story is telling us something we already know, in a way that we have seen before, it will just feel like a rerun of other stories, and it won’t stick with us.
Putting it together
The amazing thing about great stories is that they talk about well-known emotions or situations that everyone has experienced but in a new way.
Think about Pixar’s Inside Out, one of my all-time favorite films. The plot of the film is about basic emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust, and most of the situations are based on everyday events. But the way these very well-known concepts are developed is truly unique, from imagining that the basic emotions are little humans on their own to all the fantastical things happening inside the human brain. But the most original idea of all is how all these innovative concepts relate to the known everyday situations.
There is no way around it. Relatability makes us understand the stories and innovation makes us love them for shining a new light on something we thought we knew well.
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