Blog Post and Storytelling Structures You Can Use Today
Christopher Booker wrote a book called The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories which investigates the idea that there are only seven prototypical story types. You’ll probably be able to spot at least one of these plots in every book or movie that you’ve read. These seven plot types can be useful to help formulate a structure for telling a story in a blog post.
These are the seven plots and structures that the book discusses:
- Overcoming the Monster
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Rags to Riches
- Rebirth
- Tragedy
- Comedy
For overcoming the monster, the monster can be either literal (like Godzilla) or figurative (like a metaphorical concept or despicable person).
Any kind of story where an epic quest is involved would apply to the quest (movies like The Hobbit). Voyage and return is somewhat related to the quest.
The tragedy and comedy are classic Greek theater genres. These would make great blog posts as well.
Sometimes it might be a bit of a reach to apply these plots to a story related to your business. It would probably be a challenge for a chiropractor to tell a voyage and return story, for example. Let’s say a football player had an injury that kept them from being able to play. Their chiropractor figured out the appropriate treatment and six weeks later they’re back to playing on the team. This could be a great example of following the rebirth plot.
A while back we talked about why CPAs should blog. Every CPA probably has their own overcoming the monster story about how they helped their client through an IRS audit. Almost everyone has a related accounting tragedy. There could be someone who didn’t use a CPA and ended up losing their business and assets as a result of an embezzler who was never caught.
If you have a headline in place but aren’t quite sure how to piece the story together, try applying one of the seven plots. Could you flesh out the story in your headline as an epic quest or a rags to riches tale? These basic storytelling plots can help you to figure out what story you’re trying to tell and then model it after how others have told similar stories in the past. This can be a handy technique to employ for creating interesting blog posts.