The biggest problem with learning storytelling is how complicated it is. The best storytelling books, according to most experts you ask, are heavy tomes that deconstruct the intricacies of the most complicated stories that exist, namely novels and feature length films. They involve complex story arcs, interactions between many characters and dozens of scenes that each serve a different purpose.

It's like if you were trying to learn how to build a dog house and your plan involved learning how to build a mansion or a castle. You have to start at square one.

What is a story? The best way to understand story is to understand where it comes from and why it exists and why it is such a powerful way to communicate.

Stories are an offshoot of our evolved ability to use language. Humans evolved language so that they could communicate complex ideas so that they could hunt together and make plans for the future. Stories are all about how to communicate an experience that others can LEARN FROM.

If I was out walking back 10,000 years ago and I saw an animal nobody had ever seen before and I hunted it and killed it and brought it back, you might want to know how I did it. And to teach you how to do that yourself, I would tell you a story. This is how stories evolved.

Learning how to tell good stories becomes easy once you realized that they are just a learning tool. They are the best way to teach because they allow me as the story teller to give you an EXPERIENCE, as opposed to just INFORMATION, about how something works. Our brains are wired to experience a story in our own body when we hear it, or when we tell it ourselves. In truth, a story is just evolution's version of a virtual reality machine. You tell a good story and it transports the listener (and yourself) into the reality you create with the story. You can think about it like directing a movie or taking someone into a video game.

Besides going more into depth on what story is and how it works, you will learn:

1. 1. What exactly separates a good story from a bad story
   2. Why a good story actually involves a combination of certain different types of problems (you will learn the 4 types and how they work, kind of like combining sweet, salty, sour, and umami in cooking)
   3. How to understand the 12 archetypes that explain any character in any story
   4. How to use the archetypes to make your story resonate most deeply with the person you are talking to (by matching the story to the archetype they fit into)
   5. The relationship between personalities and archetypes
   6. Why the perceived quality of the story has as much to do with the audience as with the story and how to match your story to your audience
   7. Why all great stories really involve two stories (a story within a story)
   8. How to use a story to sell something as opposed to just entertaining
   9. How to understand the Hero's Journey in 3 simple steps instead of the traditional 15-18 step sequence
   10. How to install the Hero's Journey framework into your brain so you start seeing it everywhere and you can create stories on the fly
   11. A framework for organizing any story, from simple fairy tales to epic mythic movies into one of 8 categories, and how to build each one
   12. Why most blockbuster movies (especially action and love movies) are so bad despite their high production values and huge budgets