From the course: Selling with Stories, Part 1: What Makes a Great Story?
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The context
From the course: Selling with Stories, Part 1: What Makes a Great Story?
The context
- The context is the first of four main phases of your story. It answers the following questions. Where and when does the story take place? Who is the main character? And what do they want? When done well, the context provides a number of benefits for the tellers and the listeners. First, let's start with the where and when. Clearly stating upfront where and when the story took place satisfies a fundamental curiosity humans have when trying to understand something that happened. If you don't answer these two questions early on in a story, it creates a dissonance for the audience, an unanswered question that nags at them until they get the answer. Another benefit of starting the story with the where and when is that it provides instant credibility. If I start a story by saying "Last year at an art fair in Cincinnati," what do you immediately assume about the story? That it's a true story. And if my story started "Once…
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