What makes for a good story? (Part 2)
What Story Frameworks Reveal About The Best Stories
Filed Under: Brand Messaging | Read Duration: 15–20 min
Abstract
Storytelling frameworks may differ dramatically in their structure, terminology, and cultural origins, but many are designed to solve the same fundamental problem: how to move an audience from one point of understanding to another. The Hero's Journey emphasizes transformation. The Three-Act Structure emphasizes progression. Freytag's Pyramid emphasizes dramatic intensity. The Story Spine emphasizes causality, while Kishōtenketsu demonstrates that narrative momentum can emerge from surprise and reinterpretation rather than traditional conflict.
This article looks beyond these individual frameworks to identify the principles they share. The research suggests that effective storytelling is fundamentally about motivation, causality, information, and change. These mechanisms give audiences a reason to care, create momentum, shape how information is interpreted, and ultimately provide a meaningful shift in perspective or circumstance.
Understanding these underlying principles is more useful than treating any individual storytelling framework as a formula. It allows storytellers to deliberately construct narratives that are engaging and meaningful while recognizing that different stories may require different structures.
Key Takeaways for effective storytelling
Great stories give audiences a reason to care.
Causality turns events into narrative.
Storytelling is the strategic management of information.
Tension can come from conflict, curiosity, or surprise.
Emotion deepens audience engagement.
Meaningful change gives a story purpose.
No single storytelling framework works for every story.
The best frameworks help storytellers create meaning—not simply structure.
Introduction - Beyond the Framework
In Part I, we explored several of the frameworks storytellers have developed to construct narratives.
The Hero's Journey.
The Three-Act Structure.
Freytag's Pyramid.
The Story Circle.
Save the Cat!
The Story Spine.
Kishōtenketsu.
At first glance, they appear to have relatively little in common. One focuses on transformation. Another on dramatic escalation. Another on pacing. Another on causality. One can create narrative movement without relying on traditional conflict at all.
And yet, when we look beneath the terminology, a pattern begins to emerge.
These frameworks aren't really competing formulas. They are different ways of managing the same fundamental challenge:
How do you move an audience from one point of understanding to another in a way that makes them care about the journey?
That question takes us beyond the mechanics of storytelling and into something more fundamental about how narratives work.
1. Stories Give Us a Reason to Care
The first common thread is motivation. Something has to matter. The Hero's Journey begins with a character whose ordinary world is disrupted. The Story Circle gives the character a need. The Three-Act Structure introduces a problem that requires action. The Story Spine introduces the disruption through its famous: “But one day…”
The terminology changes, but the underlying function remains: something creates a reason for the story to move. This is important because events alone don't create engagement.
Imagine two descriptions:
A woman moved to another city.
Versus:
A woman moved across the country after accepting the job she'd spent ten years working toward.
The event is essentially the same, but the second version gives us a reason to care. We understand what the move means. There is ambition behind it. There is history behind it. There is something at stake.
The audience can now begin asking questions:
Will she succeed?
Was the sacrifice worth it?
What happens if she fails?
Motivation creates what we might call narrative gravity. It gives the events weight.
Motivation is more than wanting something. This doesn't necessarily mean a character needs a clearly articulated goal.
Sometimes the motivating force is:
fear
curiosity
love
belonging
survival
revenge
What matters is that the audience understands, at least implicitly: Why does this matter to this person?
This connects with research on character identification.
A 2023 meta-analysis examining audience-character similarity found that similarity can contribute to identification with narrative characters, although the relationship is more nuanced than simply matching demographic characteristics. Identification is influenced by the extent to which audiences psychologically connect with a character's experiences and perspective.
In other words, we don't necessarily need to be the protagonist. We need to recognize something in their motivation.
A story about a professional athlete can resonate with someone who has never played a competitive sport because the underlying experience—fear of failure, desire to prove oneself, pressure to succeed—is recognizable.
This gives us our first major finding: People don't necessarily need to recognize the circumstances of a story. They need to recognize something about the human experience within it.
2. Causality Turns Events Into Narrative
This may be the most important commonality across the frameworks. A chronology tells us what happened. A narrative tells us why what happened led to what happened next.
Consider:
John lost his job → He moved home → He started a business → The business grew.
That's a sequence.
Now introduce causality:
John lost his job. Because of that, he moved home. Because of that, he began helping his father's business. Because of that, he discovered an opportunity he hadn't previously considered. Because of that, he started his own company.
Now the events are connected. This is precisely why the Story Spine is so powerful. Its repeated “because of that” forces the storyteller to establish relationships between events. But the principle is much older.
In Poetics, Aristotle argued that the events of a well-constructed plot should be connected through probability or necessity. A story should not simply contain everything that happened; events should contribute to the larger action.
Modern narrative research continues to emphasize coherence as an important component of narrative comprehension. Audiences need to be able to construct a meaningful representation of how events, characters, and actions relate to one another.
The implication is significant: Storytelling isn't fundamentally about sequence. It's about consequence.
That distinction helps explain why some stories feel compelling while others feel like a list of facts.
3. effective stories know when to reveal and withhold information
This is where storytelling becomes considerably more sophisticated than simply arranging events in chronological order.
A storyteller controls the audience's information environment.
At any point in a narrative, there are three important categories:
What the audience knows
What the audience doesn't know
What the audience thinks it knows
The storyteller can manipulate all three.
That is the foundation of:
suspense
mystery
surprise
dramatic irony
revelation
foreshadowing
twists
anticipation
Save the Cat!'s emphasis on the timing of narrative beats is essentially an exercise in information management. Kishōtenketsu provides another example. The Ten stage introduces a shift that can change the audience's interpretation of the preceding narrative.
The story doesn't necessarily become interesting because something dangerous happens. It becomes interesting because our understanding changes. This suggests that narrative tension can come from at least two different sources.
1) Outcome uncertainty
What is going to happen?
Will the protagonist succeed?
Will they escape?
Will they get what they want?
2) Interpretive uncertainty
What does this mean?
Why did that happen?
Who is this person really?
How should we understand what we've already seen?
These are different forms of curiosity. And effective storytellers can use either—or both.
This drives one clear takeaway: The Audience Is Constantly Making Predictions
This also explains why storytelling can feel almost interactive. As audiences receive information, they make predictions about what comes next.
A character introduces a problem → We anticipate a solution.
A new piece of information appears → We revise our prediction.
The story violates an expectation → We become curious.
The story resolves the uncertainty → We experience satisfaction.
This doesn't mean audiences consciously analyze every narrative in this way. Rather, narrative comprehension involves continuously building and updating mental representations of characters, events, goals, and causal relationships.
In this sense, storytelling is not simply delivering information. It is guiding the audience through a series of changing expectations.
4. Tension Doesn't Always Mean Conflict
This is one of the most useful lessons from comparing storytelling frameworks.
Traditional Western storytelling often emphasizes conflict.
A protagonist wants something → An obstacle emerges → The protagonist struggles → The conflict escalates → The conflict resolves
This structure is powerful, but it isn't universal.
Kishōtenketsu demonstrates that narrative momentum can emerge from contrast, surprise, or a change in perspective without requiring a traditional antagonist or escalating confrontation. This matters because it broadens our definition of tension.
Tension can come from:
Conflict - Will the character overcome the obstacle?
Curiosity - What is going to happen?
Mystery - What is actually happening?
Surprise - I didn't expect that.
Anticipation - I know something is coming, but when?
Recognition - I suddenly understand what this means.
These mechanisms all create a gap between the audience's current state of knowledge and a desired future state. That gap creates momentum.
Key Insight: Conflict is one way to create tension. It is not the only way.
5. Emotion Makes Information Matter
If causality helps audiences understand a story, emotion helps them experience it. This is where narrative transportation becomes particularly relevant.
Green and Brock's foundational research on narrative transportation proposed that people can become absorbed into narratives through a combination of cognitive attention, emotional response, and mental imagery. Their research connected transportation with narrative persuasion.
Subsequent research has continued to investigate the concept. A 2024 systematic review examined 95 peer-reviewed studies of narrative transportation and found it to be one of the central constructs used to explain how audiences engage with narratives and how that engagement can influence subsequent responses.
This helps us understand why simply communicating information isn't always enough.
Compare:
The company nearly went bankrupt. VS By December, there was barely enough money left to make payroll.
The first tells us the situation. The second gives us something to imagine. We can picture the calendar, the pressure, the uncertainty, and the people waiting for their paychecks.
The second statement doesn't necessarily contain more factual information. It contains more experiential information. And that's an important distinction.
This leads us to one of our key takeaways: Emotion doesn't mean manipulation.
It is tempting to reduce this finding to “emotional stories are better.” That's too simplistic. A story doesn't need to make someone cry to be effective. It can create engagement a host of different ways:
Humor
Wonder
Curiosity
Nostalgia
Excitement
Even discomfort
The important question isn't: Does this story make the audience emotional?
It's: Does the emotional response help the audience understand why the story matters?
Emotion without meaning can feel manipulative. Meaning without emotion can feel abstract. Effective storytelling often connects the two.
6. Stories Create Change
This next common thread may be the most important: Something changes.
The Hero's Journey ends with transformation.
The Story Circle explicitly concludes with change.
The Three-Act Structure moves from disruption toward resolution.
Freytag's model moves from exposition through climax toward a new state.
Kishōtenketsu concludes by integrating the shift introduced in the third stage.
Different structures, same underlying idea: The audience should not arrive at exactly the same place where it started.
The change doesn't have to be dramatic.
It can be:
a new piece of knowledge
a changed relationship
a solved problem
a new perspective
a transformation of identity
What matters is that the story produces a meaningful difference.
This is what separates narrative from observation. Change Is What Gives the Story Meaning.
Consider two scenarios:
Scenario A
A man walks into a coffee shop → He orders coffee → He drinks it → He leaves → Nothing has meaningfully changed
Scenario B
A man walks into the coffee shop where he used to meet his father every Saturday → He orders the same coffee his father always ordered → He sits at their old table → Then, for the first time, he realizes he isn't thinking about his father's death, he's thinking about the life they shared
The physical events are nearly identical, but the second scenario contains change in meaning. The story isn't necessarily about coffee. It's about grief, memory, and acceptance. The events become meaningful because the audience understands that something has shifted.
7. Effective Stories Are Focused
This brings us back to another instinct from our original research: Conciseness. Conciseness is often treated as a matter of word count, but storytelling suggests a better definition: Conciseness is the elimination of information that doesn't contribute to the audience's understanding of the narrative.
This is closely related to Aristotle's concept of unity. If an event can be removed without changing the larger action, why is it there? Modern storytellers face the same problem.
A brand story may include:
the founder's childhood
the first office
the first employee
the first big customer
the company's awards
its growth
its community involvement
its new location
All of those things might be true, but truth isn't the same as relevance. The question is: Which details move the story forward?
The best storytellers are often not those who have the most information. They're the ones who know what to leave out.
From Story Structure to Brand Storytelling
This research began with a relatively simple question:
What makes a story good?
The answer turns out to be more complicated—and more interesting—than simply saying that good stories are concise, emotional, compelling, relatable, or understandable.
Those qualities emerge from deeper structural choices.
Motivation gives the audience a reason to care.
Causality helps them understand why events matter.
Information management creates curiosity and anticipation.
Emotion turns information into experience.
Change gives the experience meaning.
And suddenly, storytelling looks less like a creative trick and more like a sophisticated form of information design. That distinction becomes especially important when we turn our attention toward marketing.
Businesses have no shortage of information they want customers to know.
Products
Services
Features
Awards
Credentials
Statistics
And the list goes on! But the challenge isn't simply getting more information in front of a customer.
It's helping that customer understand why any of it is relevant to them. That is where storytelling becomes strategically interesting. A company doesn't necessarily need to invent a dramatic origin story. It needs to understand the narrative structure already embedded in what it does.
Who has the problem?
What do they want?
What's standing in their way?
What changes when the problem is solved?
Why does that change matter?
Those questions take us from storytelling as a creative discipline to storytelling as a marketing strategy.
Conclusion - Tools to build strong Brand Messaging
The different frameworks for storytelling may look radically different on the surface.
But beneath them lies a remarkably consistent idea: Stories work by organizing information around motivation, causality, attention, emotion, and change.
The Hero's Journey shows us how transformation creates meaning. The Three-Act Structure shows us how events create progression. Freytag demonstrates the importance of dramatic intensity. The Story Circle connects desire with consequence. The Story Spine demonstrates the power of causality. Kishōtenketsu reminds us that surprise and reinterpretation can create narrative momentum without traditional conflict.
None of these is a universal formula. Together, however, they reveal something much more useful:
Effective storytelling isn't about telling more. It's about making what you tell matter.
And that may be the most important lesson for marketers. Because the question isn't whether a brand has a story. Every brand has one.
The strategic question is whether the brand understands how to structure that story so its audience can see themselves in it, care about it, and understand why it matters.
That's where storytelling becomes brand messaging. And that's where the science of storytelling meets the strategy of marketing.
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