1.7 Telling Engaging Stories

Story elements like the overall narrative, individual plot events, characters, and settings are all part of the raw material that makes up a story. Good stories have other elements as well, and the ones we’ll see next are not easily identified by many people. We can see these parts of stories as techniques that authors use to engage an audience’s interest and advance the narrative.

The Hook

A hook is whatever a story uses to grab a reader’s attention. Most readers begin at the beginning, so the hook always comes first—either in the first few pages or in the very first line. The hook is what makes a reader want to stick around for the rest of the story.

Hooks can be exciting, mysterious, disturbing, or anything else that will convince a reader to keep going. Here are some examples:

In all three of these examples, we read the hook and are immediately left wondering what’s going on: what is so bad that you could only tell God? Who is about to die, and why? What is frightening Gared so much that he wants to go back? Good hooks leave readers wanting more as the story becomes the focus of their attention.

The Conflict

A conflict is a struggle between two entities in a story. Conflicts can be simple, like two people disagreeing about what restaurant to go to, or larger and much more complex, like Batman’s fight against the Joker in The Dark Knight.4

Conflicts can arise naturally out of the characters with their personalities and interactions, or characters may be pushed into conflicts that they are unwilling participants in. In The Hunger Games,5 Katniss Everdeen is drawn into the titular event when she volunteers to take the place of her sister. Katniss’s conflicts include struggles against not only other children and the government but also the deadly landscape itself.

Characters and their conflicts help drive the events of a story. As characters act and react to what is happening around them, their choices allow a narrative to unfold.

The Stakes

The stakes of a story are what is up for grabs or in play due to the events in the narrative. The stakes can be small, involving only some children and their relationship with their mother, as in The Cat in the Hat. They can also span the entire universe, as in a movie like Avengers: Endgame.6

Stories become compelling as authors increase the stakes. Lives are in danger, fortunes are at risk, and worlds teeter on the brink of destruction as the stakes rise and the importance of the narrative grows. When we learn to properly manage what is at stake for our characters and the world, we can pull our readers along for the ride.

Storytelling Attracts Audiences

Story elements like narrative and characters, along with techniques like hooks, conflicts, and stakes, work together to create compelling tales that can grip audiences for hours, days, or months at a time. It is the story and its quality that have these gripping powers rather than ancillary concerns like production values or marketing. Without a good story, even the shiniest project dissolves into a Pompeii,7 Jupiter Ascending,8 or Mortal Engines9—you likely don’t remember those movies because few people watched them. They weren’t popular because the stories weren’t interesting.

It isn’t just novels and movies that need good stories, either. As we’ve seen, scientific articles sell their findings by telling a story about characters, conflict, and high stakes. They set up a narrative in which the heroes—the authors of the article—provide the key piece of knowledge or the crucial next step. Even though scientists are discovering truths about the natural world, they’re sharing those truths by telling stories about them.