thoughts on storytelling

For the previous parts in the story rules series: Story Rules Part 1: Kill Your Ego Story Rules Part 2: Don't Reinvent the Wheel Story Rules Part 3: Story Is Character & Character Is Story Story Rules Part 4: Lacuna - Create Space the Audience People often confuse lack of clarity and being hard to understand with being deep and intellectual. Nothing is further from the truth. If you have a message that you want to communicate, you need to make yourself understood. To make yourself understood you first need to make your audience want to listen. To make your audience want to listen you need to make it clear for them what they have to gain by listening to you. Remember that your audience never owes you anything. They have already invested either time or money or both to listen to you. If you don't repay their investment it is your own fault if they get bored and don't want to listen.

For the previous parts in the story rules series: Story Rules Part 1: Kill Your Ego Story Rules Part 2: Don't Reinvent the Wheel Story Rules Part 3: Story Is Character & Character Is Story Every storyteller loves subtext. Subtext is what takes a story to a new level, and does so by creating a synergy that lets 1+1=3. I believe it does so by adding a hidden number to the equation 1+1(+1)=3. This hidden number is the audience. Or with other words: Subtext is the part of the story told in the audiences imagination. To let the audience participate in the story they need to have room to do so. A gap needs to be created. I like to call this gap " Lacuna ".

For the previous parts in the story rules series: Story Rules Part 1: Kill Your Ego Story Rules Part 2: Don't Reinvent the Wheel The story, and its message, is revealed through character choices. The characters choices reveal who she is, her strengths and weaknesses and her weaknesses is what creates the struggle, what reveals the solution, the message.

(You can find " Story Rules Part 1: Kill your ego " here) Storytelling should be easy. It is something we do everyday. It is something we've taken part of since we where born. It is something that comes naturally when we speak. So why then is storytelling so hard? Some how we start "unlearning" what we know when we start over-thinking on a subject. Just as when we try to walk perfect and natural we end up walking stiff and unnaturally, when we try to tell a story perfectly the story often ends up being stiff and unnatural. Often the reason we do this is because we try to reinvent the wheel as a cube.

While walking the path of improving my storytelling, walking down several paths that led to a dead-ends, I've today have a few rules I try to follow as my main strategy. Always trying to improve, some of these rules probably will change in time, but I feel that they are fairly universal and apply to other areas than just storytelling. First of: Kill Your Ego Everybody wants to be successful in what they do, but we focus more on ourselves and on how we will be perceived rather on what our goal and the quality of our work. What we seem to forget is that it is only by being good at our craft that we will be seen as being good at what we do.

In the previous parts of this series I have first written about how animation isn't about creating movement but about creating life , how as an animator you achieve this by using only three tools and the basics of how these three tools, the pose , the timing and the spacing , work. But knowledge is worth nothing without experience. It is by combining knowledge and experience that we get the wisdom that we need to be able to start to master the basics of our craft. As always, saying this is one thing, doing it another. Although the animator only uses three tools, the usage of these tools gets complex. Not only can they be used in several ways on their own, they also always influence each other. Change one and you chance the rest.