In his book The Anatomy of Story, acclaimed screenwriter and teacher John Truby explains that, “Good storytelling doesn’t just tell audiences what happened in a life. It gives them the experience of that life.” He goes on:

“Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.”

Great storytelling depends on how much the audience is sucked into the story. Can they see themselves on Yavin 4 as the sirens blare or imagine admiring Daisy Buchanan’s Georgian colonial mansion from across the bay?

For thousands of years, storytelling was an oral affair. Each story was passed from generation to generation and from clan to clan. As civilization moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture, storytellers such as Aesop became celebrated figures whose legacies have survived the centuries.

Today, storytelling comes in all sorts of forms — books, film, television, comics, and video games, just to name a few. But there is a clear trend in modern storytelling’s evolution —interactivity and personalization. It is the feeling that you are truly part of the narrative, through immersion, choice, and conversation. That’s why the next generation of storytelling platforms — virtual reality, live video, and bots, just to name a few — will shape the stories our children and our children’s children experience and retell.

It is this trend towards more interactive, personalized storytelling that inspired Convos, the new conversational storytelling platform my company Octane AI recently released. Convos allows you to easily create a conversational, interactive story you can share with you audience. Convos transforms bots from tools you use to creative outlets — like YouTube did for video and Medium did for blogging.

To understand why the future of storytelling is conversational, we need to first dive in to why interactivity and personalization create more powerful, impactful storytelling experiences.

The Move to Interactive Platforms

Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Spacey, in a speech he delivered at the Edinburgh Television Festival, explained why Netflix has been so successful with its “all-at-once” release schedule for House of Cards and its many other popular shows. “The audience wants the control,” Spacey told the audience. “They want the freedom.”

Spacey continues:

“If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant… But for kids growing up now, there’s no difference watching Avatar on an iPad or watching YouTube on a TV and watching Game of Thrones on their computer. It’s all content. It’s just story. And the audience has spoken. They want stories.”

The modern generation wants to experience stories where they are. They want to have control of when they experience stories and a choice in how they experience them. These people used to be glued to television screens. Now they are on iPhones, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, video games, and Messenger. If you can’t deliver stories through these mediums, you don’t exist.

Unlike television, these platforms all boast interactivity, personalization, and choice. You can choose when to start a show on Netflix and when to stop. You can switch out the apps that live on your smartphone. You can choose who you message, whether it’s your best friend or Maroon 5’s bot. It’s no wonder why consumers now value interactivity in their stories — the mediums they use on a daily basis support it.

Take video games for example. The Tech Times interviewed Dave Gilbert, a producer on Blackwell and Technobabylon, about storytelling as it related to video games.

“Video games achieve something that other forms of storytelling just can’t. They put you IN the experience. You are making the events happen, or the events are happening to you. It’s not easy to pull off, but when it’s done right, there is no experience like it.”

You can start, stop, and restart a video game at any time. Your choices can affect the outcomes of the game. Your skill and knowledge determines whether you will be able to move on in the story.

Video game storytelling has taken a leap forward in recent years, thanks to virtual reality. Horror, for example, is ideally suited for the immersion that virtual reality provides. Jump scares can come from any direction, rooms can be more thoroughly investigated, and monsters can come from any direction.

“Virtual reality is transforming storytelling by putting you in someone else’s shoes,” says Helen Situ, chief evangelist for NextVR. She continues:

“The most powerful stories are ones that evoke understanding, imagination, and belief of experiences different from your own.”

The more interactive the platform, the more impactful the story. But there is one medium that I believe has not yet been explored for its storytelling capabilities — messaging.

Convos: Enabling a New Era in Creative Storytelling

Apps like Messenger, iMessage, and WeChat are thought of as communication tools. You can send a message to your mom, your spouse, or your group of friends at SXSW. But nobody thinks of them as ways to tell a story. This is because stories are meant to be shared. Oral storytellers gather crowds. Television shows are broadcasted simultaneously to millions. YouTubers and bloggers go viral.

This has never been possible with these messaging apps. It wasn’t possible to send a compelling story to thousands of people through messaging.

Bots, however, now make storytelling through messaging possible. A bot that lives on Facebook Messenger can grow an audience (through subscribers) and have one-on-one conversations at scale. Bots can retell the same story thousands of times through convos. You only have to write a story once.

But Convos enable even greater creative freedom. Other forms of storytelling are static. A blog post, like this one, is read top-down. A video starts and finishes. The listener or reader doesn’t have any input in the content.

Bots, however, allow you to give the reader choices and interact with a story through conversation. Choose Your Own Adventures (CYOAs) are an obvious example. But unlike the CYOAs of my youth (Goosebumps, anyone?) convos can be changed-on-the-fly and new stories can be added at any time. And you will never lose your bookmark!

A chef could write convos, for example, that teach new recipes to her audience — but the reader can now choose whether he or she wants to learn the spicy or mild version of the recipe. An author can tell a short story through a bot, but can personalize the story based on the reader’s choices throughout the convo.

The bets we are making at Octane AI are that:

1. People will want to share their stories with the 3 billion people who use messaging apps and the 1 billion people who use Facebook Messenger.
2. Conversations area compelling way to tell stories.
3. All people need is a really easy way to create and share these stories to be successful.

This is why we created Convos. Now there is an easy way to create compelling content that can be shared with billions of people. Conversational storytelling opens up completely new avenues and opportunities for storytellers. Like blogs or books or TV, the creative potential of bots is now limitless.

Throughout history, the greatest storytellers go viral and become celebrities. The Helen Mirrens and Steven Spielbergs of cinema; the Hank Greens and iJustines of YouTube; the DJ Khaleds of Snapchat; the Larry Kims and James Altuchers of blogging.

Who will be the great storytellers of bots? Who will be the Messenger celebrities? I can’t wait to find out.

Ready to try out Convos? Sign up for Octane AI and write your first convo!

You’re also welcome to chat with my bot, which regularly shares convos about startups, marketing, and media. And please click the ❤ on this post and recommend it to your friends!