Live-tweeting a story
I live-tweeted our dinner preparation last night. We decided to make pizza at home and I provided a step-by-step account of the progress we made.
Read my live-tweeted story here.
Constructing my story
The basics
My story had a beginning, middle, and end.
The beginning: Everyone’s hungry and the decision is made.
The middle: All ingredients are ready and we construct the pizza.
The end: Everyone has eaten and left the table.
This was the easy part of live-tweeting the story.
The story spine
My story follows the story spine:
Once upon a time, the family was hungry.
Every day we have dinner.
But one day, we decided to make pizza.
Because of that, we made dough.
Because of that, we chopped vegetables.
Because of that, there were consequences to cutting some of the vegetables.
Until finally, we constructed the pizza and had to wait for it to bake in the oven, before we could eat it.
And, ever since then, everyone was satisfied.
The 4I’s
My story also involves the 4I’s:
Interest: How are we making this pizza?
Instruct: Step-by-step instructions are included.
Involve: Drawing in the audience with fun videos and graphics.
Inspire: Showing easy instructions and a tasty photo of the finished product.
The 8-point story arc
I missed a step in using the story arc:
Statis: The family is hungry at dinner time.
Trigger: The decision is made to make pizza.
Quest: The ingredients are prepared.
Surprise: There are consequences from chopping the onions.
Critical choice: My story misses this point.
Climax: The ingredients are all put together.
Reversal: Emotions are high as everyone is very hungry.
Resolution: Pizza is served.
In hindsight, I should have introduced a dilemma, such as a missing ingredient, but I didn’t plan for that.
In review
The main “character” in the story is the pizza itself, while my family and I are the support characters providing assistance and elements of conflict.
Thinking of my audience, I tried to use engaging and relatable imagery, including using fun gifs and slow-motion/timelapse videos. These short snippets are fun agents in stopping the audience from scrolling their feed and drawing them back to your story. It helps if they’re hungry!
Checking your grammar and ensuring you’re using hashtags can sometimes go by the wayside while live-tweeting. It can be difficult to have someone check that for you and on Twitter, as you’re unable to edit your tweets, it’s really important to stay on top of that.
This story seemed simple enough in planning and execution, but creating it was quite stressful in the moment! I think this reveals how important it really is to plan in advance as much as you can, and ensure you have all of the elements that you need to create a good story.
EXSM 3989 - Digital Storytelling Class Blog 