A to Z of Business Storytelling -03

C — Characters

Many of us are aware that a character is the heart of a story. In any story, events happen around characters. Characters are not only vital for personal / motivational storytelling, but are equally important for business storytelling too. As a business storyteller, you may narrate an interesting incident happened in a corporate organization. But that interesting incident would not have happened without the involvement of characters. Hence explicitly mentioning them is vital in business storytelling too.

Characters takes decisions and come with ideas based on logic and emotions. Each character in a story is unique and that make the story riveting. If the character of your story is a celebrity, then the stickiness of the story is much more stronger. In business storytelling, one may not have the luxury to describe the characters in a vivid manner. But at the same time, the key traits of the characters cannot be omitted.

In any story whether it is a short story, novel, movie or motivational story, there would be a set of characters, who move the story forward. This may include a protagonist, an antagonist, a sidekick, a confidante etc. But in business storytelling, the story cannot accommodate more characters due to its brevity as mentioned in the previous post.

So, what are the things to be taken care of, while focussing on the characters in a business storytelling? Here are a few tips:-

• Going through the script and trimming down the characters, who are not adding value to the story.
• Ensuring that the number of characters in the story do not exceed 2–3.
• Giving a quick descriptions for the characters (Ex angry manager, workaholic staff, stern officer, talkative guide etc)
• Not missing to refer the characters by their names. When names are mentioned in stories, they becomes much more memorable. Imagine the difference between saying, “a lady CEO of a multinational enterprise” vs “Indira Nooyi of Pesico”.
• Keeping in mind that the key message that you want to drive home comes from one of the characters.

Characters are the lifeline of a story and the storyteller cannot be complacent about them.

Kindly follow the hashtag #atozofbusinessstorytelling for others posts on this thread.