6 Levels of Storytelling Every Creator MUST Master

There are six levels of storytelling that every creator must master. I call this the story ladder. The higher the level, the better the story and the bigger the results.

Now, unfortunately, most people are stuck at the bottom few levels. Their stories just don't hit. And so, they're playing the content game on hard mode because they can't hold attention.

But here's the good news, which is the few tweaks, you can easily learn how to climb the ladder and become a master at storytelling. So, in this video, I'm going to walk through all six levels of the story ladder and give you tactical tips for how to climb it. And if you can learn to tell stories at a consistent level six, you will crush any business goal you can imagine.

By the way, I'm Callaway. I've done billions of views. And this storytelling framework is the reason I went from zero to 100K subs on YouTube in just 5 months.

It really works. All right, level one storytelling is the foundation level. I call this level the reporter.

And everybody starts here, but you want to get past this level as soon as you can. If you think about an average reporter or newscaster, they're some of the least engaging storytellers on the planet. Respectfully, people watch the news, but they watch it for the facts, not for the stories.

And the reason level one storytelling is so unengaging is because essentially all reporters do is read facts in order. This happened, then this happened, then that happened. They're just reporting what happened.

When you tell stories in level one, you collect all the Lego bricks, the characters, the mission, the scene. But the problem is you just lay them out for a viewer in a predictable boring order. So for example, if I started telling a story like this, a man stood at the corner of the street.

His head was down. He had a duffel bag over his right shoulder and a clown mask in his left hand. When you hear or see just that and nothing else, it feels a bit meh.

It's descriptive and you can place yourself in the scene, but it's just not that interesting yet. And the reason it's not that interesting, as I'll explain in the rest of the video, is that it's missing several core pieces that drive curiosity and contrast. And this really is the secret to great storytelling.

What makes great stories great is that they can hold your attention continuously. If you were to plot every human's base attention on a graph, it would be a flat horizontal line. And flat lines are boring because they're predictable.

Imagine riding a roller coaster that was flat the entire time. Obviously, it wouldn't be very entertaining. It's the ups and downs and unexpected loops that make roller coasters fun to ride.

And it's the exact same thing with storytelling because the brain is really good at guessing what comes next in a pattern. And if it guesses correctly enough times in a row, it gets bored because it's not challenging enough. So the key to telling a good story is to figure out how to bend that attention line so it doesn't look so flat to give the roller coaster twists and turns.

Essentially, a great story's job is to keep the brain offbalance as much as possible. Now, for the rest of the video, I'm going to share a bunch of tactical ways in each level to help you do that. Level one storytelling is just gathering all the Lego bricks, the who, what, when, and where of the story, and then placing them one after another on a horizontal line.

And so, if this is how you tell stories, it's only a matter of time before the viewer gets bored and bounces to something else. My tactical suggestion if you're stuck at level one storytelling is that you need to climb at least one more rung to have any chance at holding attention. All right, level two storytelling is where things really start to get interesting because this is where hooks start coming into play.

Now, when we think of hooks in content, we usually think only about the first couple sentences. How do we stop the scroll and hook the viewer in initially? And while this initial hook is super important, it's only part of the hook equation.

Because great stories have lots of other hooks embedded within the body of the story as well. These are called rehooks. Now, I call level two storytellers the illusionist because hooks are really just illusions.

They're misdirection. You expect to see one thing, but then the story takes a different turn and reveals another. And the reason hooks hook is because the brain struggles to guess what is coming next.

And it turns out people's brains kind of enjoy when they don't know what's coming. That's where the thrill comes from. Now, this difference between what the brain expects and what you actually show it is called contrast.

And contrast is the secret to great hooks. So to continue our example from before, what if it went more like this? A man stood at the corner of the street.

His head was down. He had a duffel bag over his right shoulder and a clown mask in his left hand. A car suddenly appears around the corner and he hurriedly gets in.

So now things have changed. When the Joker was just standing at the corner, the story could have gone many different ways. He could have walked across the street.

He could have turned around. The scene could have cut right there. But none of those things happened.

Instead, the car pulled up and he got in. And this is an example of a micro hook. The contrast between the four possible outcomes that could have happened and the one that actually did creates intrigue in the brain for a split second.

Instead of one flat horizontal line, all of a sudden, there were four different paths you could go down. The uncertainty in that choice is what creates curiosity and hooks the viewer. In level two, all you have to do is focus on adding a few hooks to the body of the story in addition to the already existing foundational blocks.

And to do this tactically, you need to figure out where you want the story to go and then work backwards to set up away from that point to keep the viewer off balance. You want to use a couple lines to get them leaning in one direction, usually where they believe, and then snap back to some alternate reality. And this works for the Dark Knight, but it also works for super niche educational style content on YouTube.

So, for example, let's say I'm an accounting channel and I'm making a video on advanced tax strategies. I might know a great trick about setting up personal 401ks that could save entrepreneurs tons of money in taxes. Now, knowing that I want to make the video about the 401k, I need to ask myself, what is the expected belief that most entrepreneurs have already about 401ks?

And in this case, let's say their expected belief is that they take a long time to set up, they're confusing, and they have high fees. So, if I know that's their expectation, well, then I might hook them with something like this. There are tons of little-known tax strategies that can save entrepreneurs seven figures in taxes.

Most of them take lots of time and money to set up, but personal 401ks are the easiest and least expensive to create tax savings. See, right there, we tease the things they already believed and then misdirected to reveal another. It turns out that including a misdirection every 2 to 3 minutes in the story is a super powerful way to keep the viewer's attention.

And if you watch the full opening scene from The Dark Knight, you'd notice five or six of these little mini hooks scattered within the first 5 minutes. The more hooks, the more they're hooked and the more they keep watching. And with hooks, the attention graph looks a little bit more like this.

It's a flatline, but then it breaks into all these different options. So that's level two. It's foundations plus hooks.

And here's the truth. If you're just starting out with storytelling, it can be kind of hard to figure out how to actually apply these learnings in your own niche. It's easy for me to explain them, but it's hard to actually do in practice.

To make this a little bit easier, I actually built an AI storytelling tool that does all of this for you. You just describe your video topic, add whatever notes you have, and then we take all of these storytelling frameworks, and we write level six stories with great hooks automatically for you. The tool is called Sandcastles.

ai. And I'm biased, but it's pretty incredible. We've had people writing 20 scripts a day.

That's how fast it is. Now, today it's just built for short form video scripts, but we're actually building in the long form script writer as well. We have a wait list below for that.

If you want help telling better stories faster, and you just want us to take all this off your plate, I would check it out. There's a link in the description for you to try it for free. All right, level three storytelling is all about taking those base foundations plus the hooks and adding on a reason for your specific viewer to care.

This is the stakes level and what I call the champion storyteller. It's called the champion because in level three, your story starts to champion a specific use case, pain point, or individual archetype. If you think about it, level one and two are just raw psychology building blocks that can be applied in any story in any way.

It's like a verbal cannon that could be pointed wherever you want. But the truth is, what really makes a story connect with your viewer is when you aim that cannon specifically towards them. You have to get them to care about this story more than all the others.

Now, tactically, you can do this in several ways. The easiest way is just to describe a pain point that your viewer has. So they have a deeper connection to your story because they have a vested interest in solving that pain.

So in the tax saving example, you could literally just say, "If you feel like you're spending too much in taxes, you need to do X, Y, and Z. " And of course, this is literally stating the pain point directly. And this is pretty much all you need to do in the stakes level when you're making expertise or educational style content to get somebody to buy in.

But if you're telling more entertainment style stories, how do you do this in a more nuanced way? You don't often have a pain point when you're doing an entertainment story. Well, the key to adding stakes in entertainment style content is by building characters or conflicts that the viewer can see themselves in.

You need to give them something to root for and a reason why they want the character to accomplish the task. When somebody can connect their identity to what's happening on screen, they immediately buy in more. They identify with the character and they invest long-term in finishing the story.

This is aiming the cannon. A great example of this for me personally is from the movie Miracle. In this scene, the USA hockey coach Herb Brooks is super upset with the players and he puts them through these crazy drills because they didn't play well.

And there's a famous line in the movie where he says, "The name on the front is way more important than the name on the back. " Talking about country patriotism verse individual accolades. And as someone from the US that played sports growing up and had tough coaches, I really resonated with this and saw myself in the players.

And this made me invest in the story and want to stay longterm to find out what happened. So whether you're telling an entertainment story or an educational one, it's worth taking a second to ask yourself what does the viewer think, feel, and identify with and then build common ground against that. If you do, your viewer will overinvest in your message and pay attention for longer.

All right, now we're getting into the advanced stuff. If you're on level three, you have the foundational building blocks, the hooks, and the relevant stakes. And this alone can be really effective for storytelling in today's content world.

But if you really want to ascend into rarified storytelling air, you need to keep climbing. Level four storytelling adds on arcs and loops. I call this level the architect because when you're storytelling with arcs and loops, you're adding on layers and navigation to the story.

And let me explain what that means. Think of arcs like waves. They go up and down.

There are times where you're building up the tension, using choppier sentences, adding some sort of rising action, some conflict, and then there are times when you're releasing tension, letting the plot breathe, adding falling action, relaxing, and letting the story go. Now, you've probably seen some version of this core story arc before. Inciting incident, rising action, conflict, falling action, resolution.

We were taught that most stories follow this one sweeping story arc. And while this may be true for classic stories, what I've noticed for modern stories in the internet era is that there's several of these arcs that rise and fall much faster centered around different hooks. But either way, the point is when you're storytelling in Level 4, you need to add these arcs to build more layers into the story.

One character might be further along their arc than another, and that dichotomy adds depth, which makes it more interesting to watch. Now, on the entertainment side, a great example of this is White Lotus, a show that's currently airing right now. There is no show that does a better job of building diverse character arcs using plot lines, music, and rising and falling action.

And these arcs are like mini stories within the bigger story. Now, tactically, it's much easier to build arcs into entertainment style content because you can use character action and plot lines to play with the tension lever. But for educational and expertise style content like what I make, how do you add arcs into the story?

And this is where I use loops instead of arcs. The difference between loops and arcs is that loops close. So in each expertise style video, I have one major loop, which is the whole video, and then a bunch of minor loops that are every subsequent point in the body.

And you can make those minor loops however you want. It doesn't have to be beginning, middle, end, but as long as they're self-containing and a repeatable pattern, it'll work. So for my videos, I like my minor loops, my individual points to include what is going on, why it matters, an example, and then tactical recommendations for how you can action against it.

And almost all of my videos follow this pattern. Having a set pattern in the minor loops trains the viewer what to look for so they can expect when the next loop is going to open. When you storytell in loops versus one giant unstructured mess, it makes it way easier for the viewer to orient where they are in the story.

And this is called story navigation. So at any point you should be able to pause the video and a viewer can tell you exactly where you're at in the story. Regardless of the type, educational or entertainment, it's critical the viewer is able to navigate so they can stay engaged the entire time.

All right, level five storytelling is where the sauce really starts to get added in. This is the resonance layer, and I call this archetype the translator. It's called the translator because you're doing whatever you can to add to the story to increase comprehension.

The truth is, stories are only as good as the comprehension they drive. If you share a bunch of interesting things, but the viewer is confused when they hear them, well, then those things might as well not have been said. So level five is really about taking a second pass back through your story and making sure that every line hits the way you want it to.

If you play a video and randomly hit pause is a viewer able to tell you exactly what just happened because this is comprehension in a nutshell. Now there are several specific tactics that you can use in level 5 to avoid comprehension loss and make sure the viewer understands what's going on. If you're telling a story with video, using ontarget aligned visuals is obviously the easiest way to do this.

A picture's worth a thousand words. a video is worth a thousand pictures. So, if you're making a complex point, use a video visual to illustrate it.

And that's what we do in my educational videos, and I think it's what really separates us. Another great example of this on the entertainment side is the black hole scene from Interstellar. Obviously, nobody has been inside a black hole.

So, trying to visualize what this scene would look like is a really difficult task. But Christopher Nolan used specific visuals to showcase Matthew McConna in the five-dimensional tesseract. Who knows if this is scientifically accurate, but the point is those visuals helped increase comprehension of what that scene might be like.

Now, if you're not using video and can't use visuals, the next best thing would be to go back through the story and add secondary metaphors where you can. So, if you say something complex like the combustion engine propelled the vehicle at 600 mph, you can repeat this again using a simpler metaphor. That'd be like a plane flying on the road.

This gives you two shots at explaining the point and increases comprehension. Overall, the tactical suggestion for the resonance level is to go back through your story line by line and gut check if everything makes sense to the viewer. Ask yourself, how might a novice viewer get confused if they were to hear this thing for the first time?

And do whatever you can to eliminate that confusion. All right, we've arrived at the top of the storytelling ladder. This is level six and what I call the maestro.

This is all about adding the signature sauce and your unique fingerprint to the story. The first five levels are all about mastering the base story components. We talked about the fundamentals, the hooks, the stakes, the arcs, and the resonance.

You've basically taken a core topic and then woven in as many twists and turns as you possibly could. This last layer is all about taking the story and making it one of one by adding your signature sauce to it. The truth is, signature sauce can exist in many different ways, but what it really boils down to is the one of thing that you can do that no one else can.

For me, I've realized over time that my signature sauce is the way I explain things and how I break down complex things into simple terms using metaphors. My brain just came out of the factory like this. And so, I try to lean in and apply that layer as icing on everything I do.

For my friend Roberto, his signature sauce is using cinematics in his breakdowns. He's one of the best in the world at this. For Christopher Nolan, his signature sauce is taking complex, multi-layered, crazy ideas and distilling them so that they make sense by the end.

For Wes Anderson, it's his signature filming style and color palette. For Kendrick Lamar, it's how he writes and delivers lyrics. Nobody else in the world can do it like he can.

The reason coming up with a signature style is such a massive mode and so valuable is that it takes hundreds and hundreds of reps for you to realize what yours is. Style is the final 1%. It is the last mile.

But once you have it, this is how you stand out. My tactical recommendation for this is to spend all your time mastering the first five levels. And if you tell enough stories, your signature style will kind of appear over time.

All right, that is all I've got for the six levels of storytelling. For beginners, what I recommend is you start with level one, the foundations, and then you slowly build up and add one piece at a time. On my channel, I have several other videos breaking down all of the other pieces.

So, make sure to check those out if you want to go more in depth with the tactics. Again, storytelling is a really hard skill to master. So, if you want help and an assistant that would just do it for you, I would strongly recommend checking out sandcastles.

ai. We actually just released a feature where you can paste in all of your raw notes and we'll just turn that into a finished script automatically. And remember, there's tons of free stuff in the description if you're a business owner trying to make content faster.

All right, appreciate you guys listening. We will see you on the next one.