Last week, my daughter came home from the school library with her first graphic novel. She excitedly showed me how the story moved through the speech balloons and panels. Her excitement came from the novel approach (pardon the pun) to telling a story. She recently graduated to chapter books, and I think she was missing the imagery she had grown accustomed to in her beginner books. As I watched her flip through the pages and giggle at the jokes, I realized the effectiveness of being exposed to different approaches and why we shouldn’t force a one-size fits all style to storytelling.
As trainers, we are storytellers. How we structure, write, and tell our stories can vary depending on the team and the content. What approach should you take to storytelling? There are various ways and it can be overwhelming. To address this, we put together a few resources you can use to create a great story in your next training.
Storyboarding
A recent article on Vox discussed the surprisingly good storytelling in animated films which they argue comes from storyboarding. Storyboarding doesn’t have to be complicated and may be an essential first step in the story development process. We use a storyboard process to help us be creative and keep us organized.
Story Structure
Once you have a storyboard put together, you may want to take some time to discover your storytelling style with our fun quiz. Next, take a look at our guide on how to structure a training story along with this training story example that uses a similar format.
Story Techniques
Once you have a structure in place, take a look at a few ways to make you storytelling more effective and think about what happens when we add rhetorical appeals to training.
Do you have a favorite approach to storytelling? Let’s talk about it in the comments below!
