The 5Ws and H of Storytelling: Why Tell Stories?

In my origin story on this blog, I wrote about my own journey as a storyteller, why I love stories and how my training and skills as a storyteller, brought over from the word of journalism, have helped me in my communications career.

That's why I care about stories but why should you? 

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to delve into the fundamentals of storytelling, starting with the basics that we use to build any story - the 5Ws and H - Who, What, Where, When, Why and How?

As you would have picked up from the title, I'm starting with the Why. Yes, yes I should probably be orderly and start with the Who which kicks off the conventional order but we just got out of 2020 - what is conventionality?

Plus, I think the Why is the most important part to start with because it provides the basis for a storytelling approach in the first place - the 'why' if you will (see what I did there?).

So why is storytelling even important in the first place? Why can't just the facts or the stats suffice? Why must they be dressed up in stories?

Well simply, because us humans love stories. Any parent who has been asked to read another story and yet another story at bedtime can relate but us grown-ups love stories too. 

Witness for example, the hugely popular Humans of New York , a project which started as a photo blog but took off and became viral when creator Brandon Stanton started interviewing and including little stories about his subjects.

We have a hunger for wanting to know what's the story behind something. An oft-cited stat (heh!) from cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner is that we are up to 22 times more likely to remember a fact when it's wrapped in a story or narrative. This is because stories create and stir emotion and emotion, more so than reason, underpins decision-making in a way that statistics and simple facts do not. 

This 2013 piece from Psychology Today outlines how this is literally a fundamental human trait as people rely on emotions, rather than information, to make decisions.

So for instance in marketing – which is a cousin of communications, depending who you ask - emotional responses to marketing actually influence a person’s intent and decision to buy more than the actual content of an ad or marketing material.

I’ll also share this stat - out of 1,400 successful advertising campaigns, those with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content. This was from an analysis of over three decades worth of campaigns submitted for the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s Effectiveness Award.

Ain't that something? On the one hand, it can be frustrating to think about - that the objective facts don't matter so much as how what you're offering - be it a pie, hair care services, a political candidate or information on a vaccine, makes people feel.

Certainly, I have felt the burn of this frustration myself, especially as a journalist where I've seen folks in the comments run wild with a feeling from just a snippet from an article and ignore the rest of the facts which I meticulously laid out. And you fume this is what y'all got from this...seriously?

On the other hand, if we've learned anything from the last several years, where misinformation has been given unprecedented speed and transmissibility due to social media, is that this is important.

In fact, I started this post on the morning of January 6, eventually breaking off just after midday to go run some errands. By nightfall, we'd witnessed the impact of misinformation on steroids.

So here's the thing.

If those on the side of truth, of facts, of high quality and standards for their work, don't take the time and make the effort to  communicate their stories in ways that are powerful, emotive, impactful and engaging, then someone else will fill the vacuum. And it may not be pretty. 

It can be easy to presume that truth and facts are enough and will speak for themselves. In fact, this is what we are taught but research and increasing evidence shows this is not the case and when those on other side have malign intentions, that is where we find ourselves in trouble.

Researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, who have written extensively about online political propaganda, and who coined the term ‘firehosing’ to describe certain misinformation strategies, have pointed out that truth and facts simply are not enough.

 In fact one of their first recommendations for those working against misinformation is “don't expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.”

Among their recommendations which include getting out in front of misinformation before it even has the chance to take root,  is to provide  "corrections that provide an alternative story to help fill the resulting gap in understanding when false “facts” are removed."

Which brings us right back to where we started - the why of storytelling.

 Simply put, stories are critical tools in the arsenal of communication - they explain, persuade and help to give context to our decision-making. We need them.