One of the more helpful books that I’ve read in the last couple of years is The Story Factor by Annette Simmons. In it she talks about six different types of stories and how they can each be important in influencing people.
These six types of stories are:
- “Who I Am” Stories
- “Why I Am Here” Stories
- “The Vision” Story
- “Teaching” Stories
- “Values-in-Action” Stories
- “I Know What You Are Thinking” Stories
I’m looking to write a series of posts on these types of stories in the future so won’t go into great depth about each one except to say that stories are incredibly powerful ways of communicating for bloggers.
Stories are effective because they:
- engage the imagination of readers
- go beyond facts and theories
- reveal something about yourself as a blogger
- trigger emotions and the senses
- provide hooks for readers to latch onto in your blogging
- are relatable to readers
- illustrate your points in ways that can be much more convincing (and convicting) than other types of information
The key with stories on blogs is making them tie into the rest of your blog – ie make them relevant and ensure that they have some point to them that is useful to your readers on some level. While telling the story of how your dog dug up your vegetable patch might interest you, the readers of your blog about (insert your blog’s topic here) may not be quite as fascinated – unless you use the story to illustrate something about your topic.
