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 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.

The pyramids of Giza of which Cheops, the largest, is known as one of the seven wonders of the world, have stood the tests of time and still impress us with their magnificence. Well, this is only partially true. There are several pyramids in Egypt other than the famous ones in Giza, but most of them have fallen and are in ruins. Why? I’m no expert on the subject but I believe it lies in the superiority of the structure of the pyramids in Giza, where each side is of equal size to all the others and is of no more importance, and where each stone holding up the pyramids are equally important as the pyramids themselves.