The Secret to Telling Powerful A Story
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 24th, 2023
I’ve got a powerful storytelling tip to share today.
Back in my fiction writing days, I thought non-stop action made a great story. But I was missing something vital, which I found in Shawn Coyne’s “Story Grid.”
Here’s the key: Every great story has two journeys.
First, there’s the external journey, like Frodo’s quest or Luke Skywalker’s mission. But beneath that, there’s the internal journey…the hero’s struggle with identity, self-doubt, and purpose.
The magic happens when these two journeys mirror each other. As external action intensifies, so does internal conflict. The hero’s doubt and self-discovery peak as the external battle climaxes.
Remember, it’s not the explosions that make a story, but the hero’s internal transformation.
For instance, when my fiancee left me, I was in a van with debt. The external struggle was clear, but the internal battle, questioning my self-worth, was the real story.
So, when crafting your stories, intertwine both journeys. It’s a game-changer for connecting with your audience.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Those external events, they didn’t actually carry all that much gravitas because they weren’t fundamentally any different than things that I had experienced previously. But it was who I was and the internal struggle going through those external events that bestowed meaning upon it.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
I want to share with you guys one of the most powerful techniques for telling amazing stories. I learned this many years ago in a book called Story Grid. This was at a time when I was writing fiction, so I was writing science fiction and fantasy novels. I was really trying to understand, like, what makes for a compelling story that makes you want to keep reading forward. And when I first started writing fiction, I fell into the trap of thinking what would make people want to keep reading forward was to continually escalate the action. And what ended up happening then was I would write these stories in. My first book is a great example of this. I think there’s a lot of really great writing in there, but overall, the plot had some weaknesses in that I didn’t understand this nuance yet and how to do it well.
Anthony Vicino:
This was the book time. Heist my second book mind breach. I think I started to figure this out a bit more. What ended up happening in time? Heist was I would tell it was just like the character pretty much got on this action treadmill from chapter one and was just constantly getting into action, scene after action scene, fight after fight after escape, and things going boom and blowing up, and it was just it was breathless. And I thought that was how you told a gripping story, because I would think about, okay, what would make rip for a great you know, things blow up and they move from the thing to thing to thing. And what I ended up with was a story that felt a lot like Michael Bay’s Transformers, where you’re just like, things are happening, but you don’t really care about it. After a certain point, you just become numb to the action and the explosions. You’re like, okay, I can only see things explode so many times.
Anthony Vicino:
You can only escalate the explosion so much. And that was the difficulty that I ran into writing that story. I was like, at a certain point, I was like, how do I make this bigger? And when I read Story Grid, it clicked in my mind what I had been missing. And it’s not super intuitive, because when you read a lot of stories, you watch movies. We intuitively know what makes for a good story or not. We’ve been consuming them our entire lives. And yet to articulate it and then tell it, that’s tricky. That’s actually very tricky.
Anthony Vicino:
We can hear a good story and tell you, is that good or bad? But to self generate why it was good or bad, that’s not so easy. And what I found in the book Story Grid is it laid out this very compelling structure or framework for understanding that there’s actually two stories that are happening in every story. Of course, you have your character, your hero who’s going on some kind of journey. There’s something that’s happening. There’s some kind of inciting incident and usually that is some external event. And this is the storyline that most of us think is, you know, Frodo having to get the ring to Mount Doom and throw it in. This is Luke Skywalker having to blow up the Death Star. This is Harry Potter having to battle Voldemort have to destroy his Horcruxes and battle Voldemort.
Anthony Vicino:
That’s the external journey. And this one’s really easy to write. It’s really easy to visualize because it’s action. Go take the ring, go across Middle Earth and put the thing in the thing. The other journey, though, is the one that gives your external story resonance and importance. And this is what’s called the internal story. And the internal story is the struggle that the character goes through internally about who they are in relation to the world and what their role and purpose is. And so what ends up happening is Frodo has to take this ring and he has to go to Mountain Doom and throw it in.
Anthony Vicino:
But the internal struggle is I’m just a little person from the Shire who’s never stepped outside of my community. Who am I to do this? I’m nothing. I’m weak and I’m small in this world. I don’t have what it takes to go and do this thing when it’s Harry Potter. I’m just an orphan. I don’t come from a magical background and I don’t have what it takes. I’m the outsider in this. Who am I to step up and battle this person, right? It’s wrestling with the question of who you are in relation to the quest that you’ve been called to battle.
Anthony Vicino:
And what ends up happening is, in a good story, these two stories, external and internal, they kind of mirror each other. And so as the action escalates, the doubt escalates as well in terms of your belief in your ability to do the thing. And this is what happens when Frodo and Sam and they’re, like, they go their separate ways for a bit and then they have to find each other because it’s like the doubt about what was possible reaches this crescendo and the hero runs away, right, in some aspects. Or they’re compelled forward in the external action but the internal battle is still raging. And what ends up happening in a well told story is the external will resolve itself at the exact moment that the internal resolves itself. And what that looks like then is the character finally says I though I am small and I am weak in this big world, have what it takes to step forward and answer the call. I can do this. And then at that moment, they also execute the grand finale of The Thing.
Anthony Vicino:
This is Luke Skywalker. Just trust in the Force and then fire the missile, right? It’s finally accepting who you are and it’s in that acceptance that you overcome the big external battle. And that’s what gives the emotional resonance to the story. It’s not the explosion of the Death Star. It’s Luke’s trust, finally in what he learned from Obi Wan Kenobi, to trust in the Force and just to let go, right? That’s what gives it resonance. And when you’re telling your stories, whether this doesn’t have to be science fiction, this can be in your businesses, this can be in social media, you need to be thinking about what was the external battle, but what was also the internal. And so one of the stories I tell quite often is that of my cat, Sparta, when he was on death’s bed a couple of years ago. And this was a call to action for me in the sense that he was sick and dying of something very routine, and the surgery would have been $5,000.
Anthony Vicino:
That’s a lot of money. But for me at the time, it was way too much money. I couldn’t afford it. I couldn’t justify spending that much money. And so the external battle was, my cat is dying. But the internal battle was, who am I? That I would let a loved one die because I can’t afford to help them and wrestling with who that makes me in the world. And if that’s a person that I want to be. And those two things came together to put me on a journey, to say, I’m going to win the money game, I’m going to play it in a way so that if my family, my dad, my sisters and my brothers, they ever get sick, they come to me and they need help.
Anthony Vicino:
Money is not the reason I can’t be there, right? And so it required a big internal shift in how I viewed myself and my responsibility to my family, to my community, to the world around me and my ability to help. And that was the internal battle. It was far, far bigger than the external battle, which was, at the end of the day, just about a cat, right? But it was always something. It was much, much more than just a cat. Thankfully, he’s still alive. He’s still with us. He’s outside, actually, meowing out my door right now. But that is how you give those stories.
Anthony Vicino:
Emotional residence is to figure out how do you tell both the external and the internal simultaneously? So another example of this is a lot of times I start my story by telling people, when I was 28 years old, my fiancee left me. I was living in the back of a van with $80,000 in debt. That’s the external battle, right? That’s the external my loved one has left me. I have where to live and I have no money. But the internal battle is, who am I in this world now? What value do I have that the person who said that they wanted to spend their life with me no longer sees that value and doesn’t want to spend that. And now I have nowhere to live but this beat up old 1980s economy lined van, and I have no money to my name, so I’m pretty much scraping by every night and who am I in this world? What value do I have? That was the bigger struggle. It wasn’t the external, because for many years I had debt. For many years I had lived in the back of a van as a rock climber.
Anthony Vicino:
For many years I had been single, right? Those external events, they didn’t actually carry all that much gravitas because they weren’t fundamentally any different than things that I had experienced previously. But it was who I was and the internal struggle going through those external events that bestowed meaning upon it. And so I wanted to share that with you guys because that is one of the best storytelling tricks or concepts that I’ve ever learned and has been massive in helping me craft stories and content that resonates. And for a long time I couldn’t figure out why my stories didn’t resonate. They had all the pieces there and it was always because they were lacking that fulfilling internal journey to come to a place of happy resolution or unhappy resolution. So take that. Run with it. If you guys want to check out that book story grid, it is fantastic.
Anthony Vicino:
Highly recommended. It’s very technical though, so unless you’re like a storytelling geek, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that. But if you want to learn more about that technique and others, I’m putting together a program right now. I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to call it or how we’re going to angle it. We’re thinking about calling it the Creator Collective. We’re also thinking about calling it the Seven Figure Founder. Not sure yet if it’s just going to focus on storytelling or if it’s also going to focus on storytelling. And then how to be a high performing CEO or founder within your business to help take it from five or six figures up to seven and eight figures.
Anthony Vicino:
So not really sure yet exactly which way we’re going with that, but it is going to be coming here in the next month or so. There’s a lot of content there I’m excited to unpack, and the thing I’m most excited about is to be able to offer weekly group coaching. So that’s going to be part of that package, which I’ve never offered before, with the exception of one other program around capital raising for real estate. And so never done this before. I’m excited. If you’re interested in learning more about that, then shoot me a DM, shoot me a comment, shoot me an email, Anthony@anthonyvacino.com, and just let me know. Hey, that Creator Collective or the Seven Figure Founder, whatever you guys end up calling it, psyched on that. Let me know when it releases and I’ll put you on the waitlist.
Anthony Vicino:
So that’s going to do it for me, guys. I’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow, but until then, stay hyper focused.
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