Story Gathering: Finding and Shaping Stories That Matter

Summary

Before you can tell a great story, you first have to find and shape it. This workshop teaches the underappreciated skill of story gathering—how to locate, surface, and develop meaningful stories from the raw material of interviews, fieldwork, conversations, and everyday experience. You’ll learn how to ask better questions that get beyond surface-level answers, uncover emotion and stakes, and extract story hooks from data, reports, or conversations. Whether you're building case studies, writing profiles, preparing for a keynote, or capturing organizational knowledge, this workshop will help you spot the emotional core of a story in progress. Through guided practice and real-world scenarios, you’ll develop a repeatable process for uncovering the stories you need to tell, and shaping them into finished products that connect, persuade, and endure.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the difference between a topic and a story—and why most story searches fail at the start

• Identify the raw materials of a strong story, including tension, transformation, details, and emotion

• Practice interview techniques that invite openness, not defensiveness

• Ask questions that uncover stakes, motivation, and moments of change

• How to “listen for story” in everyday conversations and documents

• Develop a repeatable framework for extracting story leads from reports, projects, and fieldwork

• Translate fuzzy anecdotes into usable narratives for presentations, reports, or campaigns

• Use “soft structure” to quickly shape gathered material into a pitchable story

• Build confidence in navigating sensitive or high-stakes story contexts with empathy and care

• Take away templates and checklists for conducting story-gathering interviews

• Shift from a reactive to a proactive storytelling mindset across your team or organization