At the agency, a task force was formed to explore AI filmmaking. They approached me to give them a crash course on storytelling. My first reaction was to laugh. But then it struck me — saying no would be a disservice. So I agreed.
My instinct has always been that there’s nothing to teach in storytelling. It’s already built into us. We’ve been telling stories long before we learned to write or draw. Still, I thought maybe I could remind them of what they already know.
But what can anyone really achieve in a single session? Storytelling, to me, is like enlightenment — you either get it in an instant or you could spend a lifetime meditating on it without getting anywhere.
So I made a deliberate choice: to skip the usual “crash course” routine and not teach the craft of storytelling at all. I didn’t want to glorify art over craft either, because that false divide often traps creative people later in their journey.
Instead, I decided to talk about something simpler and far more human —
The Instinct of a Storyteller
Most people talk about storytelling like it’s some brain surgery. Well, it’s not. Storytelling is like cooking. You need to know the recipe and have the ingredients. Then all you need is instinct and imagination to weave stories.
So, let’s dive in.
To be a storyteller, you need two things:
- Be more self-aware
- Be less self-critical
Why do you need to be self-aware?
Because a story is about emotional resonance with the audience. And no human can fathom the whole universe in their lifetime. The only way to do it is to figure out oneself. When you learn about yourself, you understand the universe better.
That helps you weave emotions into the story. You know what makes you angry, what excites you, what causes pain, and so on. And this helps you bring those emotions into stories that an “unseeable audience” can resonate with.
How else can you write for an “unseeable audience” you have no way of knowing or understanding? Because you’re weaving emotions, and emotions are universal.
This is why it’s generally said to write from experience. But that phrase has been misconstrued. Many storytellers think they have to reveal details about their lives. That’s not the case.
Write from experience simply means write from your understanding of emotions, not from your life events. If it were the latter, no storyteller would have come up with zombies, aliens, or ghosts.
What stories need is not experiences, but imagination.
Take the ingredients you have, look at the recipe you know, and then just explore the possibilities.
Why shouldn’t you be self-critical?
For a simple reason: self-criticism is the enemy of creativity.
We are conditioned to be pragmatic, success-conscious, and result-oriented by our parents, peers, and society. And this conditioning is so sneaky that it camouflages itself as sensibility and sanity, but it actually just paralyzes us like a snakebite. And if left untreated, it can be fatal.
That’s why even with storytelling these days, people lean toward template-driven approaches, because what has worked already is a safer bet.
But to be honest, storytelling isn’t about craft or art. It’s a storyteller connecting with the audience through a narrative. The key to a good story is emotional resonance. But thanks to our conditioning, we prefer safety over taking chances. Success over failure. So, if you feel you need a crash course in storytelling, honestly, you don’t.
Today, if you’re made to babysit an infant for a couple of nights, you’ll end up being a better storyteller than what schools can produce.
All you need to do is be bold and gamble with ideas. There’s no surefire way to write a good story. In fact, there’s no such thing as a good story. A story will have its audience — whether that audience is smaller or larger is inconsequential.
Some stories will work, some will fail, some will never get completed. But that’s the nature of exploration. Not all explorations are fun. But all explorations are adventures.
It is my belief that some of the best authors, filmmakers, and storytellers are not from any school. They just took things from life, added their imagination to it, used the craft of language, and today we know them as storytellers.
One thing they didn’t do is get in the way of their work.
Most of us get stuck because we ourselves get in the way of our work — mostly not because of lack of passion, but because we don’t want to fail in front of others.
Here’s a little perspective:
Across art, literature, music, and cinema, the ratio between total output and lasting fame reveals how few creations define immortality.
- Shakespeare wrote 39 plays and 154 poems; about 50% endure.
- Da Vinci completed around 20 paintings and thousands of sketches; roughly 25% reached legendary status.
- Picasso produced over 147,000 artworks; only 0.05% are iconic.
- Hemingway published 15 major works; about 50% remain landmarks.
- Dalí painted roughly 1,500 pieces; less than 1% became famous.
- Tolstoy wrote around 50 works; about 10% are still celebrated.
- Dickens produced 15 novels and over 100 shorter works; around 40–50% retain popularity.
- Kubrick directed 13 feature films; nearly 60% are regarded as masterpieces.
- Hitchcock made 53 films; about 20% achieved lasting fame.
- Beethoven composed 722 works; roughly 5–10% remain immortal.
- Van Gogh painted about 900 pieces; around 1–2% reached renown.
- Kafka wrote roughly 40 major works; about 20–25% gained classic status.
Artistic greatness has never been about volume. It’s defined by the rare few that outlive their time — born from persistence long after others stop creating.
Yet we expect our first work to be a masterpiece. For being pragmatic and sane, that’s actually an unrealistic expectation.
Now, let’s get to the heart of storytelling.
Understand why in certain cultures, rocks or inanimate objects are used as symbols of a higher power, worthy of prayer and devotion. We treat trees, animals, and planets the same way.
We even give traits to our infants and pets incapable of evolved thought — “My cat is sneaky,” “My dog is angry at me for not feeding it on time,” and so on.
Why do we do this?
Because the only way a human being can resonate with the universe is through personification — by seeing the world around it as itself or an extension of itself.
And that’s the essence of storytelling: a character.
A character is the emotional anchor of every story. Someone or something we can relate to, root for, or redeem. They don’t have to be human. Even a pencil can be a character if it carries emotion and intention.
But a character must come from the same emotional world as the audience. That’s why even Superman needs doubts, fears, and choices — otherwise, he’s just spectacle, not story.
What makes a character resonate?
A character must not be unrealistic. They must come from the same world that the audience inhabits — at least emotionally and psychologically. So even if it’s Superman, they have to go through a roller-coaster of emotions like humans to be relatable.
A good character must have traits and flaws. But here the definitions aren’t as straightforward as one might think.
In storytelling, a flaw is an attribute of the character that stops them from achieving their goal; a trait is an attribute that will eventually help the character reach their goal.
Take Kindergarten Cop (1990).
Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John Kimble, a tough-as-nails Los Angeles police detective who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher to locate the wife and child of drug dealer Cullen Crisp.
As a character, his goal is to go undercover as a teacher to catch the criminal. What he really wants is to survive as a KG cop until he catches the criminal.
What flaw would get in the way of this? He has absolutely no patience or knack for handling kids. What would be the trait? He’s a damn good cop, almost like a superhero — worthy of becoming a role model for kids.
If you look at it, his flaws stop him from achieving his goals, and his traits eventually help him reach them.
When you have a character with goals, flaws, and traits, you can be sure you’ve found your main ingredient.
But would that alone guarantee a good story?
Not yet.
Once you have the character, you need to decide what they want. A purpose. It could be anything, but there has to be at least one. It could even be a character wanting to reach home from work. That purpose is good enough for a story.
Ebbe Roe Smith and Joel Schumacher made a story out of it with Falling Down (1993), starring Michael Douglas.
But a story needs more than motion. It needs transformation. A journey, to be precise.
Here, journey doesn’t always mean physical traveling. A journey can be emotional, psychological, or spiritual.
But a journey must be there.
If a character asks for a wish and it’s granted, there’s no story in it. At least not the story the audience will resonate with.
Because everyone in the audience is aware of life and knows that nothing comes easy. So when a story seems too easy, it disconnects because it deviates from the audience’s understanding of life and the world around them. That, or the story has to be slapstick comedy for the audience to accept the unrealistic scenarios.
So a character with a purpose must go on a journey.
Then what?
A good journey must take the character out of their comfort zone. That means there have to be challenges.
Basically, a character wanting something must encounter conflicts that stop them from achieving what they want.
Conflict is the salt of a story. Without it, you get a bland story.
Now, a conflict isn’t just a hurdle for the sake of it. A conflict is something that compels the character to question their beliefs, make life-altering decisions, and in a way, transform. It doesn’t matter if that transformation is for good or bad. But a transformation must occur.
That transformation becomes both the character’s arc and the story’s arc.
This is where the journey ends — for the story, the character, and for the audience.
Everything else is just garnishing.