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The audience

You should focus on the audience. What are their problems? What would make them listen actively, instead of texting or catching Pokémon, while at a user story discussion? Even if the project is about scratching your own itch, you should spin the story so it's their itch that is scratched. Engaging the audience can be indeed a challenge.

Once upon a time, I had written a sci-fi novel. Actually, it was published in 2000, with the title Tűzsugár, in Hungarian. The English title would be Ray of Fire, but fortunately for my future writing career, it was never translated into English. The book had everything my 15-16 years old self considered fun, for instance, a great space war or passionate love between members of different sapient spacefaring races. The characters were miscellaneous human and non-human lifeforms stuck in a spaceship for most of the story. Some of my characters had a keen resemblance to miscellaneous video game characters, from games such as Mortal Kombat 2 or Might & Magic VI. They certainly lacked emotional struggles over insignificant things such as mass-murder or the end of the universe. As I certainly hope that you will never read that book, I will spoil the fun for you by telling the end. A whole planet died, hinting that the entire galaxy might share the same fate, with a faint hope for salvation. This could have led to a sequel, but fortunately for all sci-fi lovers, I stopped writing the sequel after nine chapters.
The book seemed to be a success. A national TV channel did an interview with me, and I certainly got to all local newspapers, as a young author. Even more importantly, I had lots of fun writing it. However, the book itself was hard to understand and probably impossible to appreciate. My biggest mistake was writing only what I considered fun. To be honest, I still write for fun, but now I have an audience in mind. I tell the story of my passion for user experience mapping to a great audience: you. I try to find things that are fun to write and still interesting to my target audience. As a true UX geek, I create the main persona of my audience before writing anything and tell a story to them. We will get to personas in the next chapter. For this book, I call the main persona Maya, and she shares many traits with my daughter. Could I say, I'm writing this book for my daughter? Of course, I do, but I also keep in mind all other personas. Hopefully, one of them is a bit like you.

Before a talk at a conference, I always ask the organizers about the audience. Even if the topic stays the same, the audience completely changes the story and the way I present it. I might tell the same user story differently to one of my team members, to the leader of another team, or to a chief executive. Differently internally, to a client or a third party.

When telling a story, contrary to a written story, you will experience an immediate feedback or the lack of it from your audience. You should go even further and shape the story based on this feedback.

Telling a story is an interactive experience. Engage with your audience. Ask them questions, and let them ask you questions as a start, then turn this into a shared storytelling experience, where the story is being told by all participants together (not at the same time, though, unless you turn the workshop into a UX carol).

When you tell a fairy tale to your daughter, she might ask you, why can't the princess escape using her sharp wits and cunning, instead of relying on a prince challenging the dragon to a bloody duel? Then, you might start appreciating the story of My Little Pony, where the girl ponies solve challenges mostly nonviolently while working together as a team of friends, instead of acting as a prize to be won. So, why not spin a tale of heroic princesses with fluffy pink cats?