Using Strategic elements to design your story

Stories are all around us. No matter what source you use for inspiration, you will find that a good story is built with roughly the same elements.

Choosing the right elements of the story is guided by strategy, that’s why we call it Strategic elements

Your childhood stories, fairy tales, fables, religious stories, novels, block buster movies from Hollywood, Walt Disney: all these sources use the same building blocks and techniques, because they work.

So take advantage of this practical experience and use the same elements to create your story for conservation action:

• Main message or key point
• Conflict
• Characters: hero and adversary
• Structure or plot

Main message or key point

A good story has a clear moral. The moral of the love story of Romeo and Juliet is: true love conquers all, even death. The moral of a story about the Sundarbans could be: The tiger protects the forest, the forest protects the people: by protecting the tiger, we protect ourselves.

Conflict

Stories are characterized by conflict, which is overcome by the hero in the story. Humans like balance. But balance gets boring. Imagine a story about a main character who is doing great. His life is on track. He is having fun. He falls in love and marries. His wife is beautiful and smart. He gets two wonderful kids, a boy and a girl. He has a fantastic job. He gets promoted every year and is loved by his community. He lives a happy life and dies peacefully in his sleep at the age of ninety. End of story.

Who will be interested in this story? Nobody! What key point is hidden in these sequence of events? None!

To get us interested, the main character must struggle to reach his goal. The balance must be disturbed by a conflict. You could also call it a moral dilemma –a struggle between good and evil. A ‘bad guy’ is needed. This can be a person, for instance a colleague who always tries to take the position and block the career of the main character. Or a jealous neighbor who wants to destroy this happy family. But it can also be an event: the main character falls ill and has to travel around the world to look for a remedy for his rare disease. Or the economy crashes and a war starts, our hero is called for duty and has to fight for years before finally returning home. Storytellers get their key point across through conflict and its resolution.

Characters (who)

A character is a person or an animal in a story. Main characters have important roles in the narrative, and the sequence of events. They have specific physical and psychological traits.

Examples of physical traits are: tall-short, strong-weak, fat-thin, blue or brown eyes, black or blond hair, young or old.

Examples of psychological traits are proud, ambitious, smart, honest, shy, witty, introvert, brave, mean or bold.

A story needs at least a hero and an adversary. The hero represents good, the bad guy stands for evil. The world of humans is made of shadows and lights. None of us are only good, we all have our weak points, we all have our personal battles to fight.

A good story shows us we are human, having strong and weak points, so we can identify with it. In order to get personally involved with a story, the listener must be able to identify with both the hero and the conflict.

Structure or plot

A story develops in four main steps:

• Beginning
• Middle
• Climax
• End

Beginning

Most stories start with the introduction of the setting and the main characters: what, where, who, when? The author describes the place where the events unfold and the people (characters) who play a central part. It is an important part of the story because the listener must be drawn in. The listener must see, feel, smell and hear the things the main character experiences. All our senses should be awakened to get full impact.

In the beginning, there is usually balance. Sometimes a story starts right in the middle of the conflict but then the character looks back in time, when everything was all right and still in balance, before the adversary began his evil actions, before disaster struck.

Middle

The conflict is introduced and escalates. The hero struggles to jump over obstacles to solve the conflict. This never happens in one go. There are several crises before the climax. If the conflict is too easily solved, the story won’t stick and will be less entertaining.

Climax

The tension rises and rises until the hero finally resolves the conflict. The bad guys are beaten. The hero wins. That’s the climax. Of course, not all stories have happy endings, but to engage your target audience, they need faith in a better future.

End

After the climax, the story fades out. Tension disappears. It is difficult to keep a listeners attention after the climax, so the story finishes fast after it.