Crafting Personal Stories That Audiences Will Remember

Understanding the essence and impact of Narrative Transportation

May 05, 2025

We’ve all had the experience of being pulled into a story — whether reading a book, watching a movie, attending a play, even listening to a podcast or hearing a speaker on stage — to the point where the rest of the world simply fades away. We leave our own world and enter an alternate reality of sorts. This doesn’t happen every time, of course, as the story must capture our attention to such an extent that the narrative’s world becomes our world.

For those of you just joining us, welcome. Storytelling with Impact is about helping you create and present more impactful personal stories, as I believe that your story can change the world. I offer tips and techniques, as well as highlight a variety of personal stories worth listening to.

We may get caught up in a hot sex scene, or find our pulse racing during a high-speed car chase. We experience the same feeling of joy, excitement, heartache, and wonder as the actors do. And that’s not to say that we leave ourselves behind, not at all. In a strange way, we’re able to meld our own thoughts and emotions into the narrative.

This process of being pulled into a story is called Narrative Transportation, a term that aptly describes the topic. While a concept commonly discussed in the fields of media psychology and social psychology, it has also been widely adopted by industries such as marketing (stories sell), healthcare (stories heal), and film (stories entertain).

But we’re here to talk about you and the impactful personal stories that you want to share with the world. And while there are many factors that help create impact, this process of narrative transportation is key to engaging your listeners and/or readers. When telling your story, one goal is to pull them into your world. To step into your shoes for a moment; to connect with your experiences, thoughts, and feelings. And ideally have your story resonate, and stay with them. So where did this idea come from? Storytelling has been around for thousands of years, but this term is recent.

It all started with Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading by Richard Gerrig in 1993. Then, in 2000, Melanie Green and Timothy Brock significantly evolved Richard Gerrig's initial concept of narrative within their article: The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Our lives overflow with experiences of narrative worlds. Even a brief story told in response to "What did you do last night?" can swiftly remove us from our day-to-day reality. ~ Richard Gerrig

Gerrig proposed the idea of Narrative Worlds, and he talked extensively about how a reader (his book delt with the act of reading) could easily be transported by narratives — in a sense, moving away from the world around them, towards the world in a story.

Following Gerrig, we conceived of transportation as a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative. ~ Melanie Green and Timothy Brock

It’s a deep subject, with thousands of research pages branching off in many directions. And most of those pages tend to be very dry reading, unless you happen to be a person whose brain is happy while reading research papers. (they usually make my brain hurt) But today I want to explore two key topics that you should think about while writing (and editing) a personal story: mental imagery, and emotional engagement.

Movies have it easy in this regard, as film is a visual storytelling medium. But reading books (articles, blogs, etc.) or listening to someone telling a story is a different matter. This is when your reader or listener turns your words into images, which allows them to envision the events for themselves, and do so through their own unique lens.

How far you go with evoking mental imagery depends, to some extent, on how long a talk or article is. You can’t elaborate on every scene, so you need to decide which ones warrant more attention. So let’s look at an example. Let’s say that in one scene, you’re recalling your first day in high school as you step into one of your classrooms.

Example #1

The only clue here is the phrase sad shape. Since everyone in the audience has been in a classroom, they already know how one typically looks, but they’ll alter the image in their mind based on how they think a room in sad shape might look. This will get the point across, which may be all you need, but could the description be more detailed?

Example #2

It was the first day of high school. First period was history, room 217, second floor at the end of the hall. The door was open, so I stepped in. I was twenty minutes early, which explained why no one was there yet. The room was in sad shape, old and beat up, graffiti scratched on the tabletops and the walls looked as though they hadn't seen a coat of paint in decades.

Here we add a bit more description using the phrase old and beat up, and offer details regarding the graffiti scratched on the tabletops and walls that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in decades. Beyond making the visual more vivid, the details also speak to the larger narrative. This is a school that lacks discipline and is also lacking funding for basic maintenance.

Example #3

It was the first day of high school. First period was history, room 217, second floor at the end of the hall. The door was open, so I stepped in. I was twenty minutes early, which explained why no one was there yet. The mismatched desks were covered in graffiti, some held together with duct tape. Faded posters of ancient Rome and Athens were taped to one wall, patches of paint peeling between them. The teacher’s desk appeared to have been com from a junkyard, papers piled high on the corners.

Adding details about the mismatched desks that were held together with duct tape paints a more dire picture, as does mention of the faded posters and patches of paint peeling. Now the teacher’s desk is included and rescued from a junkyard mirrors the rundown look of the room and the general plight of the school itself.

Example #4

It was the first day of high school. First period was history, room 217, second floor at the end of the hall. The door was open, so I stepped in. I was twenty minutes early, which explained why no one was there yet. The mismatched desks were crowded together, with most of them covered in graffiti and held together with duct tape. The walls, which had been white at one time, were a dull beige, dirty and stained, with paint peeling between the posters of ancient Rome and Athens. The yellow stains on the ceiling tiles were signs of water damage from a leaking roof. The teacher's metal desk was dented and leaned to one side, as though it had been found in an Army salvage yard. Stacks of papers covered both corners, as a half-eaten sandwich sat next to a cracked coffee mug.

In this case the walls are dirty and stained, while the ceiling tiles show signs of water damage, which indicates the school also has a leaking roof. Beyond the room’s worn appearance, the half-eaten sandwich and cracked coffee mug evoke images of what the teacher must be like. Since the teacher is not described in any way, that image will reside in the imagination of those hearing the story.

Try this out on your own. Pick a scene from your story — school, home, work, science laboratory, etc — and write visual descriptions of incresing lengths. To what extent is your prose creating a more vivid and accurate description, versus to what extent will your audience pick up the task and create a vision of their own?

There’s no correct answer. It’s up to you. Many storytellers that I work with will write multiple versions of a scene. One for a 15 minute talk, one for 30 minutes, and another for a 45 minute keynote. The point is to stay focused on the audience’s experience.

The second factor to consider is emotional engagement. This concept speaks to the emotional response your story creates, including feelings about the characters in the narrative — the audience cares about what’s happening at each moment in time, and the scenes to follow. Through emotional engagement, they’re vested in the outcome.

A story that deals with a health crisis can evoke empathy, while a story that describes events in a scientific laboratory could elicit feelings of excitement in anticipation of a new breakthrough. A scene happening during a sporting event can create tension due to the unknown nature of the outcome. It’s an emotional tug of war between the question of who will succeed, and who will fail.

Some scenes have a life-or-death component to them. A mountain climber on a ledge, soldiers in battle, a holdup or a bank robbery. Such scenes will have a mental imagery component, of course, but beyond what a scene looks like, we should think about how an audience will react based on those images. Here’s another example to consider.

Example #1

It’s short and to the point — a lunch hour bank deposit goes south when the bank is robbed. Even though few of us have had that experience, we’ve seen enough movies with such scenes, so we’re aware of how scary this event might be. And we can also imagine how we would feel, on the floor, our face pressed against the cold marble tile.

Example #2

It was just past noon when I pulled into the bank’s parking lot. I figured it would only take a minute or two to make the deposit, then I could grab a bite to eat before heading back to the office. I had just stepped up to the teller and said hello when a man came into the bank and yelled, "Everyone get down on the floor, this is a robbery!" My breathing quickened and my legs began to tremble. Behind me, a woman screamed as I turned around to see the masked man pointing a shotgun at the branch manager. When he pointed the gun in my direction I quickly dropped to the floor, my face pressed against the cold marble tile.

The reality of my breathing quickened and my legs trembled pulls us directly into the scene with an stronger sense of tension that is amplified by a woman screamed. This time, the bank robber is real, pointing a shotgun that is then directed in my direction.

Example #3

Could this really be happening? Is there a guard on duty? Is today the day I'm going to die? Should I try to call the police on my cell phone? Or should I try to escape out the side door? When he pointed the gun in my direction I quickly dropped to the floor, my face pressed against the cold marble tile. I heard the footsteps of the robber coming towards me.

One way to evoke emotional engagement is by revealing inner dialogue, which lets audiences know what you were thinking in the moment. Someone listening to the story will, most likely, begin to imagine what they would do. Maybe call the police? Escape out the side door? And it doesn’t end with the cold marble tile, but we hear the footsteps of the robber which takes the feeling of anxiety and fear to a new level.

That balance, between the extent of detail you share and the audience filling in the blanks isn’t so easy to achieve. It’s something to play with, then decide on your own. Just consider what an audience may visualize, and the emotions they’re likely to feel as you take them on a narrative journey.

Now back to you…

When have you employed narrative transportation to enhance the impact of a story? How much did you reveal, versus how much you asked the audience to seen and feel?

Crafting Personal Stories That Audiences Will Remember

Understanding the essence and impact of Narrative Transportation

Now back to you…

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