I came across an interesting article about speech geometry and how we should tell stories in circles (link at bottom).
It’s a very interesting read but is based first on the premise that you’re telling a story. It’s something you should be doing anyway. If you don’t know yet, stories are the form of oral communication that the human brain has evolved to process most effectively after thousands of year of being told stories to.
To get a message across effectively, you have to use stories.
Funnily enough, we often think of stories as going in a line. The start, the middle and the end. Kind of like a race.
But this article says that we should probably change the way we think about it and instead think of it as a circle, starting with the beginning, going through the middle then circling back and having the ending where the beginning started. And it turns out that the best classics often have this element of going back to the beginning.
What I’ll also tell you here though, is why it works.
Why you should tell stories in circles
Well, first you have to look at the purpose of telling the story. When using a story, it means you want to convey a message as effectively as possible. Traditionally, this message was about moral values (moral of the story), but nowadays it can even be an advertisement (yup, those commercials that tell a small story) or even a message about an important issue (like the environment).
The purpose of telling a story is to convey a message effectively
To show the value of that message, you create a character that doesn’t have that “value” and take him through a story where events happen. By the end of the story, the character should have grown and changed and finally gotten that “value” (whatever it is). And that’s how you show that the “value” should be adopted.
But wait a second… does the audience really get the full impact of how important your “value” was? Did it really change the character? If it did, then by how much?
So now you have to take your ending character and show how much he has grown and changed. The best way to do this is to explicitly compare him to how the character was at the beginning.
And this is why the circular story technique is so effective. Because you can contrast beginning and ending. You can easily show the change that happens to the character throughout the story.
And here’s the interesting part… you are made to accept that the story is what changes you.
Anchoring change to the story
If you can tell a story, and the only thing that happened to the character was that “value”, then it’s an automatic association in our brains that the reason why there was a change from beginning to end was because of the new “value”. And it’s not necessarily true.
It anchors to your brain that the “value” can bring the change.
Stories tell us that the new “value” is what causes the change
Sounds too philosophical? Think of those commercials where someone drinks an energy drink and suddenly they have all these sports/football/basketball skills.
The “value” is your energy drink. The change is your sports skills. It’s circular too: the story starts on the court where he can’t play, and ends on the same court where he’s now awesome.
Stories sell. Circular stories sell even better. Now you know why.
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