A burger with just a bun and ketchup is boring! A good story is like a good burger! You need all the right ingredients to make every mouthful delicious.
A good story has all the right ingredients to make the reader savour every morsel. From the first taste, a good story will captivate its reader and hold them right to the end. Bonus points if the reader is licking their fingers at the end!
The bun holds all the ingredients together. The top bun creates a scrumptious setting for your story. This sets the mood and works as a backdrop to the narrative you are about to tell.
The bottom bun holds it all together! Every great story follows a story arc. Make sure to include a beginning, middle and end to your story. Captivate your reader with a unique setting, rising tension, a climax and a spectacular finale.
Have you ever wondered what makes a good story? What is it that keeps a listener, viewer, or reader’s attention?
Perhaps it’s the overwhelming urge to find out what’s going to happen next. But why do you feel the need to find out? What keeps you engaged in the story?
If you think of story telling like a graph, it looks something like this:
This particular image of a story is quite boring and doesn’t really explain anything. So what does it mean, you ask? Well if you notice, there are 5 points in this particular graph and each point represents something that’s happening within the story. Five stages of storytelling, if you will.
What are the stages?
The stages are much easier to understand with this helpful infographic.
The Power of Three
There are 3 divisions within a good story; a beginning, a middle, and an end.
In the infographic, the first two stages are the beginning of our story. This is the setup of the background and the characters, the hook that will keep you engaged.
The peak of the infographic is the peak of the story, or the middle. This is the area where the main character has some sort of moment. Whether it be a resolution to a conflict, an a-ha moment, or realizes he/she knew all along.
The last two stages are the ending. This is when all the loose ends are tied up nice and neat and our character goes back to his/her regular life.
There you have it. Five stages to good storytelling. Next time you want to tell a story, just keep these things in mind and you will have people hanging on your every word. They will be listening, watching, or reading until the very end.
I went back to re-read Module 2 and Pixar’s 22 pointers for story telling. I liked this read back in Module 2 because the points are simple and all point to the fact that writing is HARD. Rather, writing well is hard – and takes a lot of thought, planning, and work.
For my infographic, I picked 4 of the points from the Pixar article and put them into an easy to follow chronological order of how to write a story.
“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” – John F. Kennedy
I have always wanted to capture moments that I believe deserve to be remembered. I thought it could help me hold on to those memories because we can’t stay in that moment as long as we want. Eternal bliss is not found in this world where everyone breathing will one day lay to rest.
The world we live in now is pretty much a chaos. From the rising of the sun to its setting down, we all have too many things to do and time is always not on our side. My twitter story is a short 10 tweet long about how my daily grind looks like. To some of you, it may be boring, some may find it interesting and to others, you find it resonates to yours. But whatever the case maybe, its my story.
My day starts with me waking up early, and preparing breakfast for us three. Followed by a tug-of-war with my kids over pillows and blankets when I try to wake them up and get them ready for school and day care. Oh, I’m not complaining, it’s something I look forward to! How can anyone not love these 2 angels? Even if I need to work harder than most people would to be a good provider, I would for these two. They are my source of strength and I love them to the moon and back.
As soon as these angels are out and about, it’s time for me to go to work. I love my job and all the people I work with. I am a professional bookkeeper and I work for Preferred Client Services. I am nothing but thankful to PCS for giving me the opportunity to belong in this family.
And of course, my day pretty much ends with me doing the household chores like preparing dinner for my angels and getting them ready for bed. Oh, by the way, I most often cook for them. Seldom order food because I only want what’s best and of course healthy for my kids. I make sure they know how Filipino food tastes like, too. Its their roots and I want them to know and love it.
When I look at the details of my daily in and out, its less on me and more on my kids. For many, they would probably tell me “give yourself a break!” “Go out, have fun, party!”
Boring, right?
But when I read the whole twitter story thread that I posted, I found myself smiling and felt a surge of happiness and thankfulness in my heart. I realized that the mundane routine I do day in and day out are the very details of my life where I am blessed.
I started my live Twitter story-telling from the moment I woke up at 5:30 AM of a Wednesday morning and each tweet is a highlight of the day. The story comes to full circle with a picture of my family before I tuck my kids to bed.
To all busy working moms who can barely find time to breath, Twitter is a platform for you to tell the world your story. Your story matters!
I just moved to downtown Toronto from the acreage I grew up on in Edmonton. 36 hours in the car and then talk about a shock to the system! My story is a live-tweet of my first impressions of downtown and some of the little things that stressed me out because of everything going on.
This has been a particularly hard week for me. And because of that, I haven’t been sleeping well. My puppy Tiberius got stolen on Monday night and I was heartbroken so I haven’t been sleeping well. Plus, work has been a tad stressful with my tight deadlines this week. So because of all this, I decided on Wednesday night that I’d take a prescribed sleeping pill (which I don’t normally take).
Usually doesn’t knock me out like it did…
Thursday morning comes around and I didn’t hear any of my 4 alarms between 6:15 and 7:30. They just kept going and going and going like some crazy, sleep deprived Energizer Bunny.
Until finally, at 8:10am, I woke up. At first I thought it was the weekend because it was daylight in my room which it usually isn’t at this time of year. Then I realized my alarms were all going off still and I don’t use an alarm on the weekend. Yikes!
Pretty sure this is actual footage of me waking up Thursday morning.
So thankfully, I shower at night so when I woke up, I just had to get dressed, get ready and run out the door.
So here’s my live tweets of my Thursday morning sleep in. Oh no! I slept in…
I wrote my storytelling Twitter thread about the top 7 most random, weirdest, and in some cases grossest things I have in my home. It was inspired a material culture challenge where people go through some of their possessions and without giving the context of what it is, other people must guess what the item is and what it is used for. The professor in this material culture class had collected many things and you can imagine almost no one could guess what the objects were. This class exercise taught me a lot about why material culture is important and the key role this discipline plays in different cultures and societie’s.
After searching through my house with a motive to find what I would perceive as the strangest things, I manage to gather 7 items that I felt made the list. I hope this story was interesting, fun and engaging. I tried to add a little suspense and sense of danger knowing that one item in particular probably should have been red flagged at the Canadian border, but at the time for all I knew it was a typical souvenir.
My twitter thread began with the #7 item and counted up to #1 to once again add a sense of anticipation and excitement. Although most of the time I would skip to the #1 thing as I do not like being in suspense. Fun Fact: I can never sit through a movie without reading the plot summary prior and I will never watch scary movies.
I begin with a nostalgic childhood possession that created an entire collection of rocks and shells collected from every place I’ve explored.
Then I thought the gift my friend brought me from Portugal was interesting given that I don’t even know what is specifically in it. For some reason because it’s says 2020 on it and was given to me a day before the quarantine lock down. I have some crazy belief that if I open it, I will literally and metaphorically open up a can of worms and I just can’t deal with that.
I also own this finger stretching device that is supposed to enhance your grip strength. If you know me you know that I pretty much abbreviate every word I possibly can, so I usually call it the fingy stresser.
My thrifted Mexican souvenir I can’t even describe my thought process when I think about how it was constructed. In my mind, it was 100% carved from a chunk of wood and I can’t wrap my brain around how they carved the different rings without them falling off like beads on a string.
The next item I do admit that I was hesitant about sharing just because of the dead silk moth that attempted to break free, and quite honestly might have suffocated. I feel bad for the little guy but it was for the best. I did not want to be responsible for a full on invasive silk moth takeover that could of killed all Canada’s native bugs and ate entire crops of grain, what a nightmare that would be.
The second top item I think to this day is super random but it is cool. To think that’s how the locals got their daily undercover news and gossip back in the day, its clever. It does actually still work but with the advancement of technology I can only pick up on local truck driver lingo that I can’t even translate.
And finally, the top item that made the #1 spot. The Cow Ball. It is truly one of a kind, and remarkable that I even found this in over 100 acres of pasture land. I picked it up thinking it was a rock (blame my crazy rock obsession for noticing it) only to discover it was a super compact ball of cow hair when my dad threw it against the ground.
Please share the strangest thing you have in your home. I hope you enjoyed my twitter story.
EXSM 3989 - Digital Storytelling Class Blog 