By Cecile Bruil

What do improv theater and scientific writing have in common? ‘Well, not much,’ I thought when I entered the workshop of scientific storytelling at the Science Communication Conference in Leiden last week. Two infectiously enthusiastic people were claiming within the first few minutes that improv theater is more alike to scientific writing than we might have suspected. The overlapping factor? Stories! 

Stories consist of three main ingredients: a main character, a desire or goal, and lastly an obstacle. With these basic ingredients you can make an enticing story that your audience wants to continue reading. David and Marloes, the workshop hosts, made it really clear that only one character should be in the spotlight. Because as humans, we feel more empathy towards one person rather than a group. The main character could also very well be one neuron, one flower, or even yourself. 

Given these ingredients, we were set off to cook up a story in groups of four using the classical improv theater structure. These are set words to start a sentence with. For example: ‘Once there was…’, ‘Every day…’, ‘Then one day…’ and so on, leading to a natural evolution of the character’s life into a problem and then resolving the problem. Finally, add a take home message to make your point utterly clear. Everyone came up with one sentence after the other, leading to bizarre improvised stories that structurally made a lot of sense. This was a great ice-breaker exercise that also served to learn the skeleton of a story.

Just like with cooking, you can have your main ingredients but you sometimes need to spice things up to bring your dish to the next level. The spices for storytelling are: action, emotion, and senses. We, as scientists, are often very keen to state the facts, and facts only. We think this is what people want to read, but in fact, people would rather read a more lively story. Therefore, you should sprinkle in some action verbs, so the reader can imagine the motions in great detail. Also include the emotion of the main character, what did they feel in that specific moment? Were they sad? Or very happy? And lastly, what did they physically feel? And see? And smell? Make your story come to life, make the reader want to read more, and feel pulled into the story. While of course stating the facts of the research here and there. After all, this is scientific storytelling. 

If you want to know more about this specific workshop, check out scientificstorytelling.org