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…
EXSM 3989 - Digital Storytelling Class Blog 