Storytelling
Use when the intent is to tell an experience, a project's origin, or a meaningful change. Storytelling builds on respect for the reader. It communicates meaning and can help them understand and connect with the text. For factual explanations and procedures, use writing well.
Sources and scope
Will Storr's The Science of Storytelling connects story craft with psychology and neuroscience. The publisher's description emphasizes unexpected change and character. The course excerpt explores how beliefs affect a person's response to change, and how people interpret cause and effect.
These are craft ideas from the book, not universal laws or guarantees of reader response. The rules below adapt them to truthful nonfiction and project origins. They are editorial guidance, not a complete summary of the book or independently tested findings.
Apply to the supplied story
- Choose the point of view. Every story has one. Identify whose perspective carries the supplied experience. If the author is telling their own story, write as I, me, and my in their voice. Use we only when the experience belongs to a supported group. Follow an explicitly requested narrator or perspective. Keep the perspective consistent. Do not turn a personal account into generic you or detached product narration.
- Give the reader someone to follow. Identify whose goal matters. Use a documented author or a clearly framed reader situation.
- Find the disruption. Show what changed or stopped working. Choose the supported detail that makes it concrete.
- Make the consequence visible. Explain what the person could lose or could no longer do. Preserve the source's scale.
- Connect response with consequence. Show how the response follows from the problem. Chronology alone does not establish causation.
- Let the change carry the ending. Show what became possible or what remains unresolved. Cut a repeated moral.
A belief or expectation can make the response understandable when the author supplied it. Do not assign a psychological flaw to an author or manufacture conflict to fit a character arc. Curiosity can come from a real unanswered question. Do not add cliffhangers or hide facts needed for a decision. Keep only details that help the reader understand the person, the change, or its consequence.
Keep story and instructions separate
A README's Why can connect a frustration with the decision to build the project. Setup gives prerequisites, commands, and expected results directly. Keep installation steps outside the origin story. Keep narrative suspense outside the procedure. If the source supports only a problem and response, use that modest story. Never invent personal history to expand it.
Before delivery, check that every event, motive, and causal claim has support. Check that the narrator, pronouns, and voice match the chosen point of view. Preserve the author's actual voice and uncertainty. A compelling story still needs to be true.