Storytelling and narrative get used interchangeably, until someone calls you out. A working distinction that holds up in practice.
“Storytelling is a superpower”, they say. “What’s the narrative?”, they ask.
Storytelling and narrative. They're definitely different, but hard to tease apart. I thought I knew the difference, then got called out and realized I didn’t. Yes, it was a little embarrassing. Here’s how I think about them now.
A story is an account of events. A narrative is the set of choices you make about those events: which ones to tell, and in what order.
Same story, different order, different narrative.
A story is an account of incidents or events. There’s a ton of frameworks, techniques and approaches you can use to tell one, but in the end a story is just that: an account.
Narrative is about making choices around those incidents or events: which of them to relate and in what order. What you end up with is a representation of the story, rather than the story itself. Change the order of events, and you have a new narrative of the same story.
Narrative is Story, reshuffled.
Here’s the best bit. Narrative can transform story into knowledge.
Each event within a story is a block of knowledge the audience requires to move onwards. A good storyteller arranges these blocks so they are revealed gradually. Which means hiding and obscuring the truth of what’s being told in order to tell it (yep, this feels a little mind-bending).
Speaking of mind-bending, the master of reshuffling the order of events may well be the filmmaker Christopher Nolan. Almost every one of his films plays with time and the relation of different events. They lead us somewhere expected, yet unexpected.
People call him a storyteller. But perhaps he’s more an architect and designer of narrative. If you want more of how he works, we pulled together 26 principles that drive his work.
This skill of narrative design is hugely undervalued. And it doesn’t just show up in Hollywood.
The project update. Chronological is the default order, and usually the worst one. The events happened in that sequence, but the decision you need from people doesn’t depend on it. Start with what you’re asking for, then bring the evidence.
“Tell me about yourself.” A narrative question wearing a story question’s clothes. Everyone has the same twelve years. The people who answer it well have worked out which three moments explain the other nine.
The workshop. Running the exercise before the theory is a narrative choice, not a logistical one. People arrive at the point by hitting it themselves, which is a different kind of knowing than being told first.
The pitch. Same facts, different order, and only one version gets a second meeting.
This is most of what we build at Wavetable. In a Program, the order a team meets a problem in is the design, not the packaging. On Rondo, that ordering is what the software actually does: hold back what you don’t need yet, so that the moment you do need it means something.
Write down the events in the order they happened. Then pick the one that matters most to the person listening, and start there instead.
Notice what you had to cut to make that work. That’s the narrative doing its job.
Even if you don't believe you can become a good storyteller (you can, by the way), you might just be a future maestro of narrative design.
Perhaps it'll become the next chapter of your story.
P.S. Christopher Nolan is one of our big influences at Wavetable. We initially included him on our website's 'Inspirations' page because of the way he blends Art & Science. Now we know there's another reason: narrative design plays an enormous part in creating transformative ways for people to learn and discover.
