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The 1 Odd Thing That Makes a Great Storyteller
Hint: It’s nothing technical
As I peruse social media (which I do a lot for *cough* marketing), I see writer after writer step up and ask the same question:
What makes a good storyteller?
Or, to put it another way,
What makes a story engaging?
Lots of answers go into technical detail about how to tell your story well. For example, engage the senses. Get the pacing right and cut the fluff.
But great storytelling isn’t about perfectly arranging technique like flowers in a vase. Think about it. Dickens isn’t Rowling, Rowling isn’t Patterson, and Patterson isn’t Hemingway. They all have wildly different approaches, yet we’d never dare to say that any of them stink. And that’s because great storytelling is far less about voice and much more about empathy.
What this means in a nutshell is that, if you want to write well, you have to connect to the audience. And doing that, paradoxically, requires you to forget your own story for a moment and hone in on theirs. What have they experienced? What makes them excited? Sad? What dreams do they have?
It’s only after you know their story that you can match them to you, that you can pinpoint what elements of your story that they’ll…
