You now know some storytelling methods and how to share life stories, so those do’s and don’ts could help you create your narrative and find inspiration.
Do
- Use your personal experience: you do not need a fascinating life to take inspiration from it. It will be more profound if it comes from your emotions and feelings. You are your best inspiration!
- Define a precise central theme: it is good to have many ideas but not always mix them all. To make it clear to the audience, try to build your story around your original concept and stick to it.
- Give life and personality to your protagonist: people want to be able to identify themselves with characters and to do so, you need to give specific strengths and weaknesses to them, some that people can find in themselves.
- Input dialogues: the narration is excellent and essential for the audience’s understanding, but using conversations will give energy to your story and make it look more realistic.
- Create suspense and surprise even in simple and short stories: that is how you will catch people’s attention. Make them want more! In the previous chapters, we have learned some methods you can use to do so.
- Create interactive content: if you use a format and write a story that allows you to, go for it! There is no better way to engage your audience. For example, take inspiration from books where you could choose the protagonist’s path or TV shows where you can decide what the main character is doing after.
Don’t
- Avoid drama: your story or characters should face conflicts to write something interesting. It would be best if you had a S.T.A.R. (Something They’ll Always Remember). It can be a shocking plot twist, a surprising figure or even a “too much” situation. If all your narrative is plain, it risks becoming dull, and you want people to “take away” something from your story.
- Be envious of good storytellers but observe them: you can learn a lot by watching others. Look at their tone, their style,.. and see if they can give you some ideas.
- Ignore your audience: whatever storytelling format you produce, engage the people paying attention to your story through your voice, eye contact or words.
- Drown people with too much information: giving details is essential to captivate your audience, but giving too many details could just do the opposite, and you could lose their attention. So know your start, end, the critical elements of your story and the approximate length you would like.
- Rush the ending of your narrative: the end is often what people will recall the most, so take your time to write it and make it one of the memorable moments of your story.
- Be messy: having a clear frame is the key to not losing your audience! You will be able to discover the story structure in detail in the following chapters.