“Show don’t tell.” The mantra for novelists, playwrights, choreographers and artists is a good one for storytelling. The more you can bring people into an experience, the more you engage both their emotional and rational sides. Work with the language to recreate the experience for the senses so they see, hear and touch what it was like to be there.

Comparisons help. To explore using metaphors, think about what the experience felt like—and what else that experience reminds you of or can be compared to. Use your imagination to connect two things that are ordinarily thought of separately. (Remember Forrest Gump’s “Life is like a box of chocolates”?)