John Yorke Story: Story for Business

With more and more media competing for our attention, businesses that can tell compelling stories about themselves have a huge advantage over their competitors.

But turning the information about a business, brand or product into a story that grips people from beginning to middle to end is challenging. 

Story for Business makes it easy and straightforward by showing you the basic rules all professional storytellers use.

During this seven-week course, run with our partners at John Yorke Story, you’ll experiment with different story-structure techniques to develop your skills. You’ll learn how to apply the techniques to your own business, and by the end you’ll able to craft a story to grab and hold people’s attention. You’ll also understand why some stories engage people while others fail. And you’ll apply the principles to everything from letter-writing and presentations to brand strategy and market research.

Story for Business is the only course based on real-life examples from the worlds of business and entertainment, devised and taught by people with track records in creating some of the world’s most popular stories.

The course will give you not just a new skill, but a thorough understanding of why the shape of stories is hardwired into our brains, and how you can use this knowledge to transform your business and marketing communications. 

UK Screenskills Bursary Funding Opportunities

This course has been made possible by the support of Screenskills, and has been approved as part of an informal or formal continuing professional development (CPD) programme.

As this is a professional development course, you may be able to get funding from your employer to do it. All participants who successfully complete the course will receive a certificate of completion evidencing their learning and study hours.


NEXT COURSE

Start date: 24 February 2020
Duration: 7 weeks
Skill level: Intermediate
Session length: Weekly
Sessions: 6

Special early bird price
(Ends 24 January 2020)
Price: £1,200 £1,020 (inc. VAT where applicable)



APPLY NOW
John
Yorke
Course Director
Nick
Parker
Course Director
Richard
Benson
Tutor

We’ve developed the Story for Business course for individuals and organisations looking to develop and apply a practical understanding of the mechanics of good storytelling.

It’s for anyone who needs to communicate as part of their job. From brand and marketing communicators, internal and external communications teams, HR teams, and anyone who needs to write briefs and case studies. You don’t need any previous experience and you can take the course for personal or formal professional development.

We teach this course in groups of up to 15 people. You can book as an individual for the group course, and businesses and brands can block-book a dedicated class exclusively for their teams.

The course is suitable if you:

  • Are a novice storyteller and want to learn how stories work and how to plan and structure your narratives
  • Are a seasoned professional and want to refresh your skills, learn new ones and improve your knowledge of how stories work, and how you can apply this to your work
  • Are developing online content for businesses, charities and other organisations and want to understand how to use stories
  • Want to learn how to select, develop and realise your ideas
  • Are keen to master story structure
  • Would like to see the underlying framework behind all stories everywhere
  • Need to discover why your business stories aren’t working — and how to fix them
  • Want to gain the confidence to create your own brand or business stories
  • Are looking for a CPD (Continuing Professional Development) course
  • Want to join a friendly and supportive group of learners
  • Can dedicate 5-7 hours per week for the duration of the course

The course is based on studying and applying the five-act structure set out in John Yorke’s acclaimed book, Into The Woods. John has worked with brand and business writer Nick Parker to tailor the course so it’s packed with brand- and business-focused themes, examples and exercises.

Over seven weeks, we’ll look in detail at the act structure of stories, protagonists and antagonists, inciting incidents, climaxes and resolutions. We’ll also look at the big things they can teach us to apply to business communication.

Your tutor will introduce you to how stories work in business, teach you the building blocks needed to write a compelling narrative and fix broken stories, and guide you as you write two short business stories. Along the way, you’ll be working within a supportive community of fellow writers keen to share their experiences with you.

Session 1: The shape of all stories
We’ll introduce you to the core shape all stories take, through viewing short clips and examples from film, TV and the business world. We’ll look at the elements all great stories have in common, whether it’s cinema classics like Jaws, or the founder’s tale of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. This session is also about getting to know the other writers in your group.
Session 2: Finding your heroes and villains
We’ll examine what makes us identify with key characters — and how these apply to business stories. Is your business the protagonist of your story? Or is it your product or your customer? How do your heroes and villains travel through your stories? You’ll learn to précis the essence of a story into a single sentence or doodle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nick Parker will answer your questions in a live Q&A session.

Session 3: Getting the best out of conflict
All great stories have at their heart a conflict to resolve, an obstacle to overcome, or a villain to vanquish. We’ll look at how to identify the conflict in business stories and at moments of drama and crisis — and how to deal with the urge in business to pretend that everything’s positive and there are never any challenges! You’ll learn the 10 failsafe questions to ask every story to make sure it’s working as effectively as it could. You’ll find examples from your own line of work to pick apart and rework.
Session 4: Keeping your audience on the edge of their seats
We’ll look at the techniques great storytellers use to shape stories, including creating unbearable suspense and can’t-look-but-can’t-look-away tension, and how you can use these superpowers in your own work. By the end of this session you should also be able to create a perfectly constructed story.

At the end of this session John Yorke will take your questions on using stories in business.

Session 5: How to avoid telling bad stories
We’ll look at key story archetypes most often used in business and some of the common pitfalls that business stories fall into — including the ‘there’s no conflict here!’ problem, and the ‘we want to be a blockbuster, but we’re more like a soap opera’ dilemma.
Session 6: Putting it into action
You’ll apply the techniques you’ve learned to some work relevant to your professional role, and assess it against John’s master list of storytelling tips. At the end of the course you’ll submit your real-world business stories for feedback from your tutors. This might involve bringing to life an abstract concept from your business, rewriting or picking apart stories you’ve worked on before, storyboarding new stories or analysing the founding stories of key businesses.

You may also request a CPD certification of completion at the end of the course.

We teach this course in our online classroom, which is open 24/7 so you can fit learning around your work, family and friends. You’ll work in a small group of learners so you can discuss ideas, ask questions and share your writing as you progress through the weekly sessions.

You’ll learn from:

  • Short podcasts from John Yorke and Nick Parker
  • Short videos from John Yorke and/or other industry experts
  • Written guidance notes and carefully selected reading and viewing lists devised by John Yorke and Nick Parker
  • Practical exercises and prompts, devised by John and Nick to help you experiment and practise your skills
  • Guest lectures from industry experts
  • Guided discussions with your group
  • Live chatroom sessions with your group and tutor to give you the opportunity to ask questions
  • The opportunity to share your work and give and receive feedback from fellow writers
  • Tutor feedback on your two business stories at the end of the course

You’ll need:

  • 5-7 hours per week to work through the course
  • A notebook and pen or pencil, if you like to make notes by hand
  • Access to the following films on DVD or via streaming sites:
    • Jaws, Cars, Inside Out and Steve Jobs
  • A laptop or computer* with:
    • A reliable broadband internet connection
    • Speakers or headphones
    • The latest version of Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge, or Safari
    • Microsoft Word. If you don’t have this you can download Open Office free
    • Adobe Reader, latest version. Download free
    • QuickTime Player, latest version. Download free

*You can access the course from a tablet or smartphone, but we recommend using a laptop or computer, as this makes it easier to share your work files with your writing group.

 

Join our alumni

After your course, you can join our online alumni where you’ll meet our growing network of past students. The alumni is a friendly group of writers who support each other as they continue to explore and develop their writing.

Within our online alumni area you can:

  • Rejoin your classmates on a private forum and access an archived version of your course materials and forum posts
  • Meet alumni from other courses and groups and share your work for feedback on our alumni critiquing forum
  • Join in on discussions about reading, writing, editing and ideas on our general discussion forum. This is also where we share news and useful info
  • Retain access to our resources area, which has interesting and informative links
  • Chat with other people online using the alumni area live chatroom. We also host live chats with guests here


Mentoring and one-to-one feedback

The John Yorke Story tutor team offer mentoring, script reads and reports. We are happy to quote by job or script, or to arrange a longer mentoring scheme as you work on a specific story idea. We’ll create a package to suit you, so for more information please email susannah@profwritingacademy.com

Taking things further

If you’d like to continue on to another John Yorke Story or Professional Writing Academy course, we’ll give you a discount. Please get in touch for more details.

Videos

Watch John Yorke and Nick Parker discussing why businesses need stories 

Watch John Yorke and Nick Parker discussing how businesses can use stories 

Watch John Yorke being interviewed by the Market Research Society 

Podcasts

Listen to John Yorke in conversation with Jonathan Schwabish on the PolicyViz podcast

Listen to John Yorke explaining how to create business stories people care about

Listen to John Yorke explain how story techniques give your business communications more impact

 

What our students say...

I’ve really enjoyed this course and its well-balanced mix of film and business-focused tasks. While it’s simple enough to recognise a successful business story, I’ve realised it’s another thing entirely to pinpoint the reasons for its success and understand how to recreate that in your work.

Emily

What our students say...

I have already started applying what I have learned on the course. In particular, when we have a potential new client and have to pull together a proposal. Identifying what they need, what they specifically want and what the forces of antagonism are has been really useful.

Zoey

What our students say...

When it comes to business writing, the point about passive protagonists is very helpful, because so many business briefs can be unambitious, and would benefit from being challenged a bit. This course gives a good framework for making those challenges.

Richard

What our students say...

The course has such a wealth of useful, practical examples from business and film to help really bring the theory to life. It is hard to pin down one greatest learning from all this; perhaps it is that great stories are about fighting something — injustice, character flaws, baddies — and that it is also really important to make people care. A lot of business content can be dry and lifeless, but this course shows us great opportunities to make it really engaging.

Adam

What our students say...

The course has made me aware that there’s now a whole thing called brand storytelling that often isn’t storytelling at all. I also liked the helpful critique, support and conversations that came from the community aspect of the course.

Bob

Ready to start writing?

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Price: £1,200 £1,020 (inc. VAT where applicable)
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