This is the third article in The Fabric of Story series. I’d suggest circling back to articles one and two, first, so you can fully enjoy this one.
No clever opening this time, just a simple truth – the world is saturated with brand stories.
Every company has a purpose paragraph. Every startup has a founder narrative. Every agency reels off storytelling as one of their 67 services. LinkedIn posts read like confessional memoirs. Campaigns arrive dressed as mini-documentaries.
We live in a time where every time we open our phone, we trip over brands insisting they have a story to tell.
On the surface, that sounds like progress. More storytelling, more meaning, more humanity. But sadly not. In reality, it’s noise. Fluff stacked on top of fluff. Carefully polished, neatly packaged, optimised for attention… and lacking something human and authentic.
These stories live for the length of a deck presentation, the span of a campaign cycle, the brief flicker of a press release. Then they vanish. Forgotten, ignored, replaced by the next one on the conveyor belt.
Because here’s the truth – a story that stays on the page isn’t a story. It’s a slogan. A piece of wallpaper. Something to point at during a pitch and then quietly abandon when real life kicks in. If we want our work to be effective, if we want stories that don’t just sound good but actually matter, we need to understand what it is that makes stories stick. We need to ask the harder question: how does this story get lived?
That’s where our story thread becomes more than metaphor. It stops being a pretty line on a slide or in a word doc and starts showing up in people’s choices, behaviours, and language.
Inside a brand, it’s an employee making a decision that reflects the company’s values even when no one is watching. Outside a brand, it’s a customer repeating your words back because they feel like theirs too.
Living the thread means creating the conditions where your story can move off the page and into daily life. Where it becomes a living, breathing thing that people take ownership over by turning it into behaviours and actions.
And this is where we as writers need to elevate ourselves. Because this work isn’t just about filling space with words. It isn’t just about turning briefs into headlines or crafting clever taglines. To make stories live, we have to think beyond the writing brief. We have to think strategically about context, about culture, about behaviour. We’re not just writing words for people to read. We’re designing words people can act on, carry, and repeat.
That’s the leap from copywriter to story strategist. From wordsmith to architect. From decorating a brand with language to creating a razor sharp story that threads its way through the core of it. It’s not enough to write well. The real craft is writing in a way that gives the brand what it needs to live well.
Stories that never leave the page
For all the noise about storytelling, most brand stories never make it past the page. They’re written, reviewed, approved, and then quietly forgotten. A manifesto that once made a room of executives nod with approval becomes a PDF attachment buried in an inbox. A values statement gets printed in bold letters on a wall, but no one can remember a single word of it. (3800, a studio I used to work for, wrote a book about how to do values properly).
It’s not that the writing is bad. In fact, most of it is technically good. Clever turns of phrase. Polished rhythm. A sprinkling of purpose to make it feel important. But these stories have been designed to impress in captivity. They sparkle in pitch decks. They sing when read aloud in a workshop. They look beautiful when the brand team points to them in the boardroom.
But THEBIGWIDEWORLD is different. It’s the service desk at 5pm on a Friday. It’s a confused customer trying to reset their password. It’s an employee explaining what their company does to their mum over Sunday lunch. And most stories, the second they step into that reality, collapse.
We see the wreckage everywhere. Brands that talk about “integrity” but can’t be trusted to deliver the basics. Campaigns that insist on “community” while their customer service still treats people like case numbers. Companies that publish glossy diversity statements while their hiring policies quietly reinforce the opposite.
People notice when stories don’t match reality. Employees notice when the values they were given in onboarding don’t actually guide decisions. Customers notice when the marketing promise doesn’t match the lived experience. The public notices when the story a company tells about itself doesn’t align with the headlines in the news.
The result is worse than irrelevance. It’s mistrust. Because a brand that fails to live its story doesn’t just look clumsy – it looks dishonest. Performative. And once an audience decides your story is an act, you’ve lost them. The most elegant copy in the world won’t bring them back.
This is the core problem: we’ve confused writing the story with living the story. We’ve mistaken output for outcome. The job feels done once the words are written, the poster printed, the campaign launched.
For writers, that’s a dangerous trap. Because if all we do is make things sound good, our work risks becoming disposable. Copy that lives for a moment and then disappears. To be effective – to be taken seriously in a world of AI – we can’t just write stories that read well. We have to help brands create stories that live well. Otherwise, everything we make ends up in the same place: the landfill of brand language, piled high with broken promises.
From storytelling to storyliving
If finding the thread is discovery, and weaving the thread is craft, then living the thread is proof. It’s the moment when the story steps out of theory and into reality. And this is where most brands stumble. They’re brilliant at finding truths. They’re diligent about weaving them into polished copy. But they rarely stop to ask the harder question: how does this story actually get lived?
That’s the shift we need to make. From treating stories as words to treating them as systems. From writing in a way that looks good on the page to writing in a way that shapes behaviour in the world.
Writers and marketers have to stop thinking of themselves as decorators and start acting like designers, not just producing lines of copy, but building the frameworks, cues, and conditions that make the story liveable.
So how do you do that? It starts with clarity. A story can’t be lived if it’s vague. Ambiguity kills action. Clarity is oxygen.
Next comes tangibility. Stories need to show up in the messy, everyday places where brands actually happen. If your story doesn’t stretch into those touchpoints, it isn’t being lived.
Finally, stories need to be repeatable. Survival depends on spread. Brands can only control the story until they let it free into the world. After that, they depend on people to carry the narrative forward.
We must move from storytelling as performance to story-living as practice. From clever words that sit in captivity to usable words. From writing as output to writing as strategy that aims to capture and influence a lived reality..
Tools to make stories live
So what does it look like in practice? How do you, as a writer, take a story beyond words and make sure it’s built to live? This is where the craft comes in. Not just the craft of writing well, but the craft of writing in a way that creates behaviour, culture, and continuity. It’s about treating your words like blueprints. They don’t just describe reality; they design it.
It’s about creating a story that influences people’s thoughts, behaviours and actions. Because that’s what brings the story to life. That’s what makes it real.
Here are some principles, habits of thought that you can use:
Write beyond campaigns.
Most stories die because they’re written for the big moments and ignored everywhere else. But culture isn’t built in campaigns. It’s built in the everyday. In the confirmation email. In the tone of a help page. In the signage by the lift. In the employee handbook. If your story only exists in the splashy external work, it’s performative. If it filters into the mundane, it’s alive. Writers who think beyond the brief, who insist on shaping those overlooked spaces, give their story a fighting chance.
Give the story handles.
If people can’t pick it up and use it, the story won’t spread. Handles are short, simple, memorable turns of phrase that travel. These aren’t just taglines; they’re everyday tools. They’re what employees reach for when they need to explain the brand to a friend, and what customers repeat when they recommend it. Your job isn’t to write for applause in the pitch meeting, it’s to hand people language they can carry with them. To give them stories that feel like theirs.
Make the internal external.
Most writers focus on external comms, the glamorous stuff. But the internal words are often more important. Values, principles, codes of conduct, training guides – these are the places where a brand’s story either embeds or evaporates. If those words are clunky, corporate, or forgettable, no one will use them. If they’re clear, human, and sharp, they become everyday reference points. The best brand stories don’t just speak to customers; they speak to employees first.
Check for alignment.
This is where writers often underestimate their power. You’re usually the first person to spot when the words don’t match the reality. If you’re writing copy about “seamlessness” while the process is clunky, that’s a problem. If you’re writing about “care” while customer service emails sound robotic, that’s a problem. Alignment is everything. A story that overpromises and underdelivers is dangerous. It erodes trust. Writers who challenge the disconnects, who ask “does this ring true?”, are protecting the integrity of the story.
Design for spread.
Good writing travels. Great writing travels without you. That means writing in a way that’s simple enough to repeat, flexible enough to adapt, and meaningful enough to stick. Don’t think of your story as something you hand down. Think of it as something you pass on. The job isn’t to keep it pristine, but to make sure it survives translation. Your aim is to get your story to show up in customer conversations, in employee anecdotes, in memes, in unexpected places.
That’s the craft. Not to be clever for its own sake, but to make language useful, usable, and alive.
When the thread is lived
A story doesn’t matter because it was written. It matters because it was lived.
Think about it. The most powerful stories you know from brands aren’t the ones you read once on a billboard. They’re the ones where brands act relentlessly on the same story. This isn’t about telling a hundred stories to a thousand customers. It’s about telling one razor sharp story again and again and again until it becomes the fabric of the brand. That’s when a story stops being theory and starts being reality. That’s when it lives.
And that’s the role of the writer now. Not just to craft elegant sentences, but to create the conditions where stories can move into daily life. This is strategic work.
Look back across this series. Finding the Thread showed us where stories begin – in truths, tensions, and transformations. Weaving the Thread showed us how stories are shaped – through structure, craft, and care. And Living the Thread shows us where stories prove themselves – in the world, in people, in reality.
Because stories are living systems. And when they’re designed to be lived, they stop being fragile, temporary things and start becoming culture.
So the challenge is simple, but it’s also the hardest part: don’t just write the story. Make it liveable. Make it something people can carry, repeat, and act on. That’s the difference between another piece of brand noise and a story that actually changes something.
The series is written by Sam Lightfinch, a brand story strategist and the birdbrain who founded Lovebirds. Lovebirds is a story studio that works with organisations to tell the stories that make people care. Sam also writes a Substack called Stories With Heart.
This is the third article in The Fabric of Story series. I’d suggest circling back to articles one and two, first, so you can fully enjoy this one.
No clever opening this time, just a simple truth – the world is saturated with brand stories.
Every company has a purpose paragraph. Every startup has a founder narrative. Every agency reels off storytelling as one of their 67 services. LinkedIn posts read like confessional memoirs. Campaigns arrive dressed as mini-documentaries.
We live in a time where every time we open our phone, we trip over brands insisting they have a story to tell.
On the surface, that sounds like progress. More storytelling, more meaning, more humanity. But sadly not. In reality, it’s noise. Fluff stacked on top of fluff. Carefully polished, neatly packaged, optimised for attention… and lacking something human and authentic.
These stories live for the length of a deck presentation, the span of a campaign cycle, the brief flicker of a press release. Then they vanish. Forgotten, ignored, replaced by the next one on the conveyor belt.
Because here’s the truth – a story that stays on the page isn’t a story. It’s a slogan. A piece of wallpaper. Something to point at during a pitch and then quietly abandon when real life kicks in. If we want our work to be effective, if we want stories that don’t just sound good but actually matter, we need to understand what it is that makes stories stick. We need to ask the harder question: how does this story get lived?
That’s where our story thread becomes more than metaphor. It stops being a pretty line on a slide or in a word doc and starts showing up in people’s choices, behaviours, and language.
Inside a brand, it’s an employee making a decision that reflects the company’s values even when no one is watching. Outside a brand, it’s a customer repeating your words back because they feel like theirs too.
Living the thread means creating the conditions where your story can move off the page and into daily life. Where it becomes a living, breathing thing that people take ownership over by turning it into behaviours and actions.
And this is where we as writers need to elevate ourselves. Because this work isn’t just about filling space with words. It isn’t just about turning briefs into headlines or crafting clever taglines. To make stories live, we have to think beyond the writing brief. We have to think strategically about context, about culture, about behaviour. We’re not just writing words for people to read. We’re designing words people can act on, carry, and repeat.
That’s the leap from copywriter to story strategist. From wordsmith to architect. From decorating a brand with language to creating a razor sharp story that threads its way through the core of it. It’s not enough to write well. The real craft is writing in a way that gives the brand what it needs to live well.
Stories that never leave the page
For all the noise about storytelling, most brand stories never make it past the page. They’re written, reviewed, approved, and then quietly forgotten. A manifesto that once made a room of executives nod with approval becomes a PDF attachment buried in an inbox. A values statement gets printed in bold letters on a wall, but no one can remember a single word of it. (3800, a studio I used to work for, wrote a book about how to do values properly).
It’s not that the writing is bad. In fact, most of it is technically good. Clever turns of phrase. Polished rhythm. A sprinkling of purpose to make it feel important. But these stories have been designed to impress in captivity. They sparkle in pitch decks. They sing when read aloud in a workshop. They look beautiful when the brand team points to them in the boardroom.
But THEBIGWIDEWORLD is different. It’s the service desk at 5pm on a Friday. It’s a confused customer trying to reset their password. It’s an employee explaining what their company does to their mum over Sunday lunch. And most stories, the second they step into that reality, collapse.
We see the wreckage everywhere. Brands that talk about “integrity” but can’t be trusted to deliver the basics. Campaigns that insist on “community” while their customer service still treats people like case numbers. Companies that publish glossy diversity statements while their hiring policies quietly reinforce the opposite.
People notice when stories don’t match reality. Employees notice when the values they were given in onboarding don’t actually guide decisions. Customers notice when the marketing promise doesn’t match the lived experience. The public notices when the story a company tells about itself doesn’t align with the headlines in the news.
The result is worse than irrelevance. It’s mistrust. Because a brand that fails to live its story doesn’t just look clumsy – it looks dishonest. Performative. And once an audience decides your story is an act, you’ve lost them. The most elegant copy in the world won’t bring them back.
This is the core problem: we’ve confused writing the story with living the story. We’ve mistaken output for outcome. The job feels done once the words are written, the poster printed, the campaign launched.
For writers, that’s a dangerous trap. Because if all we do is make things sound good, our work risks becoming disposable. Copy that lives for a moment and then disappears. To be effective – to be taken seriously in a world of AI – we can’t just write stories that read well. We have to help brands create stories that live well. Otherwise, everything we make ends up in the same place: the landfill of brand language, piled high with broken promises.
From storytelling to storyliving
If finding the thread is discovery, and weaving the thread is craft, then living the thread is proof. It’s the moment when the story steps out of theory and into reality. And this is where most brands stumble. They’re brilliant at finding truths. They’re diligent about weaving them into polished copy. But they rarely stop to ask the harder question: how does this story actually get lived?
That’s the shift we need to make. From treating stories as words to treating them as systems. From writing in a way that looks good on the page to writing in a way that shapes behaviour in the world.
Writers and marketers have to stop thinking of themselves as decorators and start acting like designers, not just producing lines of copy, but building the frameworks, cues, and conditions that make the story liveable.
So how do you do that? It starts with clarity. A story can’t be lived if it’s vague. Ambiguity kills action. Clarity is oxygen.
Next comes tangibility. Stories need to show up in the messy, everyday places where brands actually happen. If your story doesn’t stretch into those touchpoints, it isn’t being lived.
Finally, stories need to be repeatable. Survival depends on spread. Brands can only control the story until they let it free into the world. After that, they depend on people to carry the narrative forward.
We must move from storytelling as performance to story-living as practice. From clever words that sit in captivity to usable words. From writing as output to writing as strategy that aims to capture and influence a lived reality..
Tools to make stories live
So what does it look like in practice? How do you, as a writer, take a story beyond words and make sure it’s built to live? This is where the craft comes in. Not just the craft of writing well, but the craft of writing in a way that creates behaviour, culture, and continuity. It’s about treating your words like blueprints. They don’t just describe reality; they design it.
It’s about creating a story that influences people’s thoughts, behaviours and actions. Because that’s what brings the story to life. That’s what makes it real.
Here are some principles, habits of thought that you can use:
Write beyond campaigns.
Most stories die because they’re written for the big moments and ignored everywhere else. But culture isn’t built in campaigns. It’s built in the everyday. In the confirmation email. In the tone of a help page. In the signage by the lift. In the employee handbook. If your story only exists in the splashy external work, it’s performative. If it filters into the mundane, it’s alive. Writers who think beyond the brief, who insist on shaping those overlooked spaces, give their story a fighting chance.
Give the story handles.
If people can’t pick it up and use it, the story won’t spread. Handles are short, simple, memorable turns of phrase that travel. These aren’t just taglines; they’re everyday tools. They’re what employees reach for when they need to explain the brand to a friend, and what customers repeat when they recommend it. Your job isn’t to write for applause in the pitch meeting, it’s to hand people language they can carry with them. To give them stories that feel like theirs.
Make the internal external.
Most writers focus on external comms, the glamorous stuff. But the internal words are often more important. Values, principles, codes of conduct, training guides – these are the places where a brand’s story either embeds or evaporates. If those words are clunky, corporate, or forgettable, no one will use them. If they’re clear, human, and sharp, they become everyday reference points. The best brand stories don’t just speak to customers; they speak to employees first.
Check for alignment.
This is where writers often underestimate their power. You’re usually the first person to spot when the words don’t match the reality. If you’re writing copy about “seamlessness” while the process is clunky, that’s a problem. If you’re writing about “care” while customer service emails sound robotic, that’s a problem. Alignment is everything. A story that overpromises and underdelivers is dangerous. It erodes trust. Writers who challenge the disconnects, who ask “does this ring true?”, are protecting the integrity of the story.
Design for spread.
Good writing travels. Great writing travels without you. That means writing in a way that’s simple enough to repeat, flexible enough to adapt, and meaningful enough to stick. Don’t think of your story as something you hand down. Think of it as something you pass on. The job isn’t to keep it pristine, but to make sure it survives translation. Your aim is to get your story to show up in customer conversations, in employee anecdotes, in memes, in unexpected places.
That’s the craft. Not to be clever for its own sake, but to make language useful, usable, and alive.
When the thread is lived
A story doesn’t matter because it was written. It matters because it was lived.
Think about it. The most powerful stories you know from brands aren’t the ones you read once on a billboard. They’re the ones where brands act relentlessly on the same story. This isn’t about telling a hundred stories to a thousand customers. It’s about telling one razor sharp story again and again and again until it becomes the fabric of the brand. That’s when a story stops being theory and starts being reality. That’s when it lives.
And that’s the role of the writer now. Not just to craft elegant sentences, but to create the conditions where stories can move into daily life. This is strategic work.
Look back across this series. Finding the Thread showed us where stories begin – in truths, tensions, and transformations. Weaving the Thread showed us how stories are shaped – through structure, craft, and care. And Living the Thread shows us where stories prove themselves – in the world, in people, in reality.
Because stories are living systems. And when they’re designed to be lived, they stop being fragile, temporary things and start becoming culture.
So the challenge is simple, but it’s also the hardest part: don’t just write the story. Make it liveable. Make it something people can carry, repeat, and act on. That’s the difference between another piece of brand noise and a story that actually changes something.
The series is written by Sam Lightfinch, a brand story strategist and the birdbrain who founded Lovebirds. Lovebirds is a story studio that works with organisations to tell the stories that make people care. Sam also writes a Substack called Stories With Heart.
