All About Stories

So how do we make our stories interesting? Ever thought what keeps readers engaged to the very last word in your story? What can captivate readers and make them get lost into your world?

Here are 5 tips to get you going and not get lost yourself.

Let’s talk about the BASICS

Remember that you need to know your audience, or at least get a clear idea who you’re writing for. As writers we often see the angle of the story from an author’s angle. We tend to neglect to put ourselves in the shoes of the ones who will consume it or be consumed by it. You have to know what floats their boat, what evokes emotions and what moves readers to action. Ask yourself the What, Who and Why – What will you write about; who do you write for and why do you write?

 Begin with the END in MIND and Make a Good Story Spine

To write a story with no clear end in mind can catapult your whole story to a mess. You have to ask yourself the defining question – what do you want your readers to feel or do after reading your story. The story must progress in a manner that is not cluttered with irrelevant scenes, parts or characters. A great story line only has significant elements and knows how to unravel gems of the story at the right time – not too soon and not too late. A well drafted and structured story spine can help us write better closing / ending to our stories too.     

Let your story come alive!

The characters in your story will be what people would want to connect to. Hence, it’s imperative to think things through before you decide on your leads. Every human is an emotional being. If you can craft your story in a manner that invoke reactions from the audience, then your story is alive. Writing any story isn’t just ideas put into paper in a certain order or manner. A story must be written with a purpose, be it to inspire, encourage, or address any issue that which man is familiar with or generally concerned about. You need to see the story morphed into the individual lives of the readers/viewer

Empower your Story with the use of Multimedia

Visuals always help you capture the soul.  If a picture can paint a thousand words, imagine what GIFs, images, infographics, videos can do to your story? How much more if you can make your story interactive by a montage of all this multimedia? Our generation has an entirely different behavior in information consumption. People in this age are easily distracted, hence if you can make your story appealing to the eye, and since the information is processed faster when visually presented compared to regular text, it allows the readers to capture the gist before their short span interest starts to dwindle.

Our brains value visuals over any other type of information.

• 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual – (Source MIT)
• The human brain can process an image in just 13 milliseconds – (Source: MIT)
• 50% of the brain is active in visual processing – (Source: Piktochart)
• Human brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than they do text – (Source: University of Minnesota)
• 93% of communication is nonverbal – (Source: Ubiquity)
• We are exposed to 5x more information today than we were in 1986 – (Source: Telegraph)