Storytelling Tutorial: Key Ingredients for Telling Your Personal Story

Learn the basics of telling your own story with Antonio Núñez

In recent years, the art of storytelling has gone beyond the purely narrative to influence elements of our society such as marketing, politics, and more. Knowing how to tell your own story to convince and inspire listeners helps you define your role as a creative and establish your personal brand.

Antonio Núñez (@antonionunezstorytelling), communication consultant and expert in storytelling, goes over the key ingredients for a personal story that will captivate and persuade an audience. Find out below:

First, Antonio defines what a story is: a communication tool consisting of a sequence of events, loaded with emotions and sensations, that illustrates one or several personal conflicts and ends up revealing a truth that brings meaning to our lives. Below, we detail the different keys to be taken into account when building a good personal story.

1. Sequence of events

What happens in the story. When starting to write, you'll need to consider: what information you want to include and what you'll leave out. You could make a list of ideas you want to highlight and then think about how to order them.

You can do this chronologically, in a more or less elaborate way (i.e. introduction, conflict, resolution), or you could include flashbacks that allow you to, for example, start at the end and return to the beginning of the story. Whatever you choose, try not to overdo it on the information: the ideal is to only give what you really need, without digressing.

2. Conflict

Without conflict, there's no story. The audience will reflect on how they would deal with what's happening to your character and so conflict is crucial for connecting them empathetically to your story.

There are various types of conflict: internal (problems and challenges the character has with themselves), relational conflicts (problems with other characters your protagonist has to face), and environmental conflict (dangerous weather or a hostile environment, for example).

3. Emotion and sensation

They are both related to each other and are key to any personal story. A trick for authentic emotions and sensations is to not focus on the typical sensorial elements, like dialogue or sound or image in the case of a script, but in others like smell and touch. What does the street your character is walking through smell of? What's the texture of the sofa they are sat in?

Another way of provoking the emotions you want to is to think of the genre of your story: Is it a comedy, drama, or horror? Combining genres or using unexpected genres for themes that are not usually linked to a certain tone will also help make your story more original.

4. Its fundamental truth

Every story should carry a hidden truth, they should be able to show a way of seeing life that makes sense and that we can take away with us into the real world. The clearest way of doing this is the typical moral, the message that is made explicit to us at the end of stories and fables. But, it doesn't have to be so obvious in your story, and you can choose to what extent you want to make the truth of your story clear.

If you want to learn to capture the attention of your clients and captivate them through storytelling, discover Antonio Núñez ’s online course 'Introduction to Personal Storytelling'.

You may be interested in:

- Visual Storytelling for your Personal Brand on Instagram, a course by Marioly Vázquez
- Storytelling for Brands, a course by Claudio Seguel
- Creativity: Generating Ideas through Technology and Storytelling