Storytelling

Storytelling

A story is not a sequence of events. It is a sequence of caused events that changes a character in a way the audience cares about. Everything in this skill flows from that definition.

This skill covers story craft across every domain where narrative is a tool: fiction, business pitches, data presentations, speeches, UX scenarios, and interactive media. It loads focused references on demand rather than front-loading everything, because the right structure for a product pitch is not the right structure for a memoir.

When to use this skill

• Writing fiction or creative nonfiction — short stories, novels, memoir, screenplays
• Business pitches and founder stories — investor decks, sales narratives, customer case studies
• Data presentations — turning a dashboard into a story, executive briefings, report structure
• Speeches and keynotes — TED-style talks, all-hands presentations, ceremonies
• UX scenarios and design fiction — user journey narratives, speculative design storytelling
• Interactive narrative — game writing, branching story systems, environmental storytelling
• Editing and critique — diagnosing why a story isn't working and giving concrete fixes
• Teaching narrative — explaining story principles to writers, designers, or founders

When NOT to use this skill

• Plain technical documentation — API references, changelogs, configuration guides. Use the documentation-generator skill.
• UX writing microcopy — button labels, error messages, form instructions. Use the ux-writing skill.
• Literal journalism — hard news, fact reporting. Storytelling principles inform the form but journalism has its own ethics and constraints.
• Clinical/therapeutic narrative work — therapy uses narrative but requires licensed professional context. Use elicitation for research-oriented conversation design only.
• Persona creation — use persona-definition (though storytelling helps you animate personas once defined).

Core principles (always apply)

Before loading any reference, hold these five principles. They are non-negotiable regardless of domain:

1. Story = causality + change + stakes. A sequence of events is not a story. A story is events where because this happened, that happened, and the change matters to a character the audience is invested in. If you cannot say "because", you have chronology, not narrative.

2. Specificity is power. Abstractions disappear; concrete details stick. "She was nervous" does nothing. "Her coffee shook in the cup" does everything. Apply this to business stories too — not "our customers struggled with onboarding" but "on day three, 47% of new users had not yet completed their first action".

3. Conflict is the engine. No conflict, no story. Conflict does not have to mean fighting — it can be a decision under pressure, a reconciliation of opposing values, an external obstacle, or an internal contradiction. But there must be friction between what the protagonist wants and what the situation allows.

4. Show, don't tell — when possible. Show when you want the audience to feel something. Tell when you need to move past information efficiently. Most narrative failures come from telling where showing is needed (emotional beats, revelations, climaxes) and showing where telling is needed (basic context, time jumps, logistics). See anti-patterns.md.

5. The ending earns everything. Audiences tolerate weak openings if the ending rewards them. A weak ending poisons even the best opening. Work backward from how the story ends and what it means — not forward from a clever premise.

Domain routing

Load ONLY the references that match the query. Do not pre-load everything — this skill is designed for progressive disclosure.

Decision Tree: Which structure?

What are you building?
│
├─ Investor pitch / sales narrative
│   └─ Before-After-Bridge or StoryBrand (customer-as-hero)
├─ Keynote / conference talk
│   └─ Duarte SparkLine or Monroe's Motivated Sequence
├─ Thriller / investigation / escalation-driven
│   └─ Fichtean Curve
├─ Screenplay / commercial fiction
│   └─ Save the Cat (beat-by-beat)
├─ TV series / simplified transformation
│   └─ Story Circle (Harmon)
├─ Protagonist on external adventure with transformation
│   └─ Hero's Journey
├─ East Asian narrative / twist without conflict
│   └─ Kishōtenketsu
├─ General narrative / most purposes
│   └─ 3-Act Structure or Freytag's Pyramid
└─ Data presentation
    └─ Situation-Complication-Resolution

Foundations (usually load one of these first)

Craft for long-form narrative

Applied storytelling

Diagnostics

Multi-domain queries

If a query spans multiple areas (e.g., "write a data-driven pitch that tells our customer's story"), load:

• One structure reference (story-structures.md or business-storytelling.md)
• One craft reference (character-design.md for the customer as protagonist)
• anti-patterns.md for the self-audit pass

Three is usually the right number. Loading more than four references indicates the query is not focused enough — consider asking the user to narrow it.

Reasoning sequence (apply to every response)

1. Identify the use context. Fiction? Pitch? Speech? Interactive? This determines which references to load and which principles dominate.
2. Ask about the audience if not stated. Story decisions collapse without an audience in mind. A founder story for investors is different from the same founder story for employees.
3. Load the matching reference(s). Progressive disclosure, not everything-at-once.
4. Work structure before surface. Fix the skeleton before polishing the prose. A beautifully written story with no structure fails; an ugly draft with strong structure is editable into something great.
5. Ground abstractions. Any time you use a craft term (arc, stakes, subtext, beat), give a concrete example from the user's actual material. Never leave a craft concept hanging as vocabulary.
6. Audit against anti-patterns. Before concluding, check the draft against anti-patterns.md. Most narrative failures are anti-patterns, not missing principles.
7. Connect to meaning. Every story answers the implicit question "so what?" Make sure the draft has an answer — not as a moral, but as a felt point.

Reference files

Storytelling skill by Viktor Bezdek — licensed under MIT.