Your research is exciting. It can solve huge problems and open up amazing opportunities.
This is obvious to you and me. So why isn’t your audience jumping up and down with enthusiasm?
Why aren’t potential partners begging you for ways to get involved and advance your research mission?
Chances are it’s the story you’re telling—or not telling.
The problem with most research stories
Much research storytelling falls flat because it focuses primarily on plot.
As I’ve described here, the outline of the typical story looks like a spiffed-up version of the researcher’s c.v. or a lab report. It traces the “research journey” but leaves the audience by the wayside, put off by descriptions about the trials and travails of the discovery process.
Plot is just one of the many elements that form a rich, compelling story. To tell stories that get your audience excited about your research, try breaking away from the chronological approach.
Instead, root your narrative in one of these six other facets of storytelling so you draw your audience into your world and kindle their enthusiasm for the work you do there.
Character
Besides the researcher, who are the other characters in your research story? Consider alternative protagonists (main characters). To engage your audience, you want to choose the protagonist they’ll find most relatable.
For example, let’s say you’re describing a research project that has led to some breakthrough findings in the area of women’s mental health. The study focused on an understudied, underserved population: young Indigenous women.
Your first instinct may be to center your story on the researcher, an Indigenous man with an impressive career as a therapist, community activist, and academic. But the audience you want to woo is a community organization that provides housing for women who have recently been released from prison.
While they may appreciate the researcher’s career journey, if you want to stir up their empathy and their passion, then make a young Indigenous woman the star of your story. Create a fictional representative of the women in the study and enable the audience to experience life from her perspective.
By the way, it’s not just the community organization that will find this recentering of the narrative more engaging than the typical blow-by-blow of the research process. Giving the research participants center stage emphasizes what journalists call the “human interest” aspect of the story, and that’s a strategy with wide appeal.
Setting
The setting of your story is the where and when. Some research stories naturally seem to lend themselves to a focus on setting because their subject is the natural world. But every story has a setting, and you may be surprised by the creative possibilities that open up when you take the time to fully envision that context.
Let’s take as an example a research study investigating the long-term effects of safe injection sites. In this case, let’s say your audience comprises residents and business owners in the area around the site. Many of these citizens would like to see the site closed down because they picture the site as a “drug den” and worry about its influence on neighborhood safety and property values.
In this case, you might want to challenge such misperceptions by painting an alternative picture. Take your audience inside the safe injection site. Give them a virtual tour, enabling them to see how clean, orderly, and homey the clinic space is.
You might do this with just a couple sentences, but what a difference those sentences could make. Immersing your audience in a concrete setting is a powerful way of showing, rather than telling, the value of your research.
Conflict
If you don’t have a problem, you don’t have a story. In a typical chronological version of a research story, the problem is presented as a gap in the existing body of knowledge. To connect with audiences outside the lab and library, however, you’ll need to zero in on a practical problem they’re bumping up against.
This problem, in other words, must be an obstacle that’s easy for them to notice, not an issue they have to be educated about.
Back in junior high, you probably learned that story problems fall into categories of conflict: human against human, human against world, and human against self. In more practical terms, here are some examples of how those different types of conflict could be relevant to your research:
- Human against human—your research challenges oppressive practices, addresses a specific problem your audience has with a person or group or people, or gives an organization an edge over its competitors
- Human against world—your research addresses environmental issues or social systems
- Human against self—your research enables people to overcome internal struggles and limitations that prevent them from reaching their full potential
It’s especially important to foreground the human-centered conflict of your story when you’re describing fundamental or curiosity-driven research. For example, I once met a researcher who was doing innovative things with the residue left behind from the process of turning wood into paper. He had discovered, and was refining, a number of different ways to turn this residue into a variety of sustainable materials.
Such materials could be used in a number of different contexts, and the researcher couldn’t understand why prospective industry partners couldn’t seem to see this.
They couldn’t see the possibilities because they couldn’t see the problem. In this case, the researcher needed to tell a story that pitted his audience (the potential partner) against a specific problem, such as a shortage of traditional materials or a need to meet sustainability targets. Otherwise, he didn’t have a compelling story to tell; he just had a bunch of data looking for a storyline.
Theme
What’s the message you want your audience to take from your story? Don’t assume that simply stringing the facts together along a story pyramid will convey your main point or theme.
If you’re having trouble articulating the theme of your story, start by asking yourself how you want your story to change the audience. Picture your audience before they encounter your story and afterwards. In the “after” view, what’s different?
When the facts of your research are intangible, you may find that bringing out the theme helps your audience grasp the significance of your findings. For instance, I once created a research impact story for a regional data center that collected and analyzed large amounts of public data. Although I could appreciate the ways the data was being used to make policy recommendations, I had a hard time imagining how I could possibly make an audience of non-experts connect personally with the center’s mission.
Then the researcher helped me understand that each data point collected was a human being, a citizen on a journey through the public systems. He explained how one person’s life journey showed up in the data as a series of interactions with public institutions, such as hospitals, schools, the Department of Motor vehicles, and different social programs.
For me, someone without a background in data analysis, this was a revelation, and a theme around which I could build a captivating story.
Point of View
A story’s point of view is the perspective from which you tell it, and you don’t have to stick within the narrow guardrails of the standard approach.
The default for most research stories is to present the narrative from an “objective” vantage point. The go-to is usually the third person: “the researcher did this,” “the research subjects did that,” “the findings showed….” Some stories take a slightly more personal approach by using the first person plural: “We did this” and “We discovered that.”
If you’re looking for a creative way to draw your audience into your research world, consider breaking out of these molds. You might, for instance, try telling your research story in the second person. Here’s an example of this strategy:
“As you walk into the cybersecurity institute, the tiles beneath your feet don’t feel different from ordinary vinyl flooring. But each of them contains more than a million sensors picking up the unique characteristics of your gait.”
You might also experiment with the first-person point of view by narrating the story using “I”. That “I” could be the researcher, a participant in a research study, or someone affected by the research. Let your imagination explore the possibilities!
Narration Style
A key, but often overlooked, element of your research story is the way it’s told, the telling itself, or the “narration.”
The style of the narration creates a “narrative voice,” even when you’re using a traditional third-person point of view. What kind of voice are you creating, and how do you want it to influence your intended audience?
Think of a documentary film you’ve found thought-provoking, moving, or inspirational. (My vote goes to The Biggest Little Farm.) Reflect on how the voice telling the story shaped your experience of the story. How might that experience have been different if the voice had been different?
You might also try this thought experiment. Imagine you’re watching a documentary on an archaeological study of the site of an eighteenth-century shipwreck. The film is narrated by the lead archaeologist on the study. Depending on their personality, they might tell the story of their discovery in an energetic, casual way, as if they’re sharing their excitement with a group of friends. Or they might narrate the story in a formal, pedantic style, as if they’re lecturing a room full of undergrads. Or maybe they think outside the narrative box and take on the identity of an avatar, a sassy swordfish who tells the story in a style filled with slang, pop culture references, and cheeky humor.
The human voice is a powerful instrument, so don’t neglect it when you’re considering the different aspects of storytelling that could help your story resonate with your audience.
Create an experience, not just a storyline
We use stories to take our audience where facts and logic can’t take them. Through the magic of story, you can do more than simply tell your audience about your research. You can enable them to experience it.
When you think beyond plot, you expand your storytelling toolbox so you can do more than just join together details from the researcher’s biography or the research process. You can invite your audience into your research world and bring it to life for them. You can give them the chance to participate imaginatively in your mission and kindle their enthusiasm for becoming involved in real life.
To exploit the full power of research storytelling, try playing with the different elements we’ve explored. How might using one of these as your starting point change the stories you tell and your relationship with your audience? How might breaking out of the biography trap open up new ways to engage, educate, and inspire collaborators and move your research forward?
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