Stories are an essential part of our everyday life, vehicles to understand how the world around us works, both physically and emotionally. They allow us to organise otherwise random facts and events into a cohesive and logical structure, making them easier to understand and remember. Science itself is also full of facts and processes, often seemingly disconnected but that, when put in context, pave the road for scientific discoveries. We propose that classical story-telling strategies can also be used to communicate science to a variety of audiences, specialist and non-specialist alike, and present a few practical examples of how this can be achieved. We focus on what we call the “story circle” narrative structure (see Fig. 1), a distillation of the “Hero’s Journey”(Campbell, 1949; Harmon, 2009). In this storytelling framework, the circle begins with a hero who, posed with a question, chooses to venture beyond their familiar space in a quest for answers. When the hero returns to familiar territory, they have been forever changed by their journey. Firstly, we discuss how this story circle can be directly mapped onto the structure of a research paper, enabling researchers to write up their work in a way that makes it easier to follow for the reader. Then we apply the story circle strategy to a real research example aimed at explaining large-scale mantle convection, in a story where silica is the “hero” who descends into the deep in a subducting slab to then rise back up to the surface in an upwelling plume. This approach to communicating science by exploiting its story-like qualities is key when explaining complex deep Earth processes to the non-academic public who, understandably, can struggle to grasp these concepts due to their abstract nature and detachment from everyday life. Ultimately, the scientific process is an expression of the most fundamental story of humanity – researchers look at the world as it is, see questions that need answering and go on a voyage of discovery to find the answers. When they return, the world has changed because of what was found on that journey. And so the cycle repeats, the circle keeps turning, and the ideas keep changing after every iteration. In science, however, we will never truly write “The End”.