Storytelling
Stories are a tool we use to make sense of the world and a method of spreading thoughts and ideas. A tale draws in our attention while the characters within help us live out scenarios and even see something in ourselves to a degree.
A part from my journaling that accounts my life as a log book and my blogging which helps me reflect on my day-to-day through a metaphorical lens, storytelling seems to feel the most limitless form of writing. Without limitations, the characters and scenes don’t have any motivation for being mentioned unless they truly effect the characters within the story.
A good stories have to have a sense of trajectory. The writer should know where it is going before they begin. Mystery stories have been known to be best written from the end to the beginning which is also trajectory. Don’t focus all your effort into devising individual elements that are interesting and then piece them together. You have to invent the material and its trajectory simultaneously. As if a flashlight that reveals the dark space in front of it, you too must reveal the story and its details as you move your ‘pen of light’ across the page.
Ask yourself deep questions about the characters you create. Ask as if these are people sitting across from you who you truly want the answer from and wait for a reply. It is you who asks the questions and it is you who replies, but those two you’s are not the same. You won’t know what the answer will be. You just wait for the words to appear out of the void and into the story of your imagination.
Where do new thoughts come from? A number of sources and methods can be sited, but for me personally, I find most of my stories from meeting people both personally and in passing. Observing unique circumstances, features, traits and corks that make any character feel grounded because they are dimensional and therefor believable. Once I know something particular about a character, just like a cartoonist, I can think stretch and exaggerate certain features to build a new existence.
How may you tell a story? Amongst the obvious ways of telling a story such as chronologically, cadence and tone are crucial elements for building a universe. In your own life, notice how certain parts seem to last forever and others you can’t even recall doing. Your experience of time speeds up and slows down from the level of information coming in. The more new information, the longer something will seem to be because you mind is noting and planting more flags to analyze when compared to your routine drive to the grocery store.
-Busy Brain