Category: Craft Of Storytelling

When I started writing online, I didn’t want to share my personal life too much.

I wrote about what I was learning.

I wrote about the interesting things I read.

I wrote about the challenges I set myself to make life interesting.

All that sounded harmless and had just enough detail about me without exposing my dirty laundry in public. I thought I was protecting myself. And sparing my readers from the ugly side of my life.

But I was wrong.

I wasn’t protecting myself, I was hiding. My readers were not connecting with me because they were not seeing the whole of my story.

I am researching storytelling. This week I immersed myself in storytelling books. I read three books and made countless notes in “my personal knowledge management system (my second brain).

What I am trying to figure out, is how can I tell stories from my everyday life that educate, entertain, and inspire. As an online writer, I can’t escape from writing about myself. Both good and bad.

Two reasons for that:

One: nothing educates, entertains, and inspires more than stories.

Two: the stories are much more impactful if the writer features in them.

What I thought of as dirty laundry was in fact my vulnerabilities.

Without revealing my vulnerabilities, I can’t make a trusting connection with my readers. My vulnerabilities shape me. They made me the person I am today. I wouldn’t have been the purpose-driven, challenge-seeker, productivity-junkie, I am today, had I not gone through all that I have.

At its core, stories are all about making tough decisions to overcome one’s fears or obstacles.

And that’s what online writing is all about. Sharing stories of our triumphs and failures to educate, entertain and inspire.

I hate writing long articles.

I used to think articles should be long, well-researched, and packed with a lot of helpful information. But that isn’t true.

When I started writing on Medium, I spent 7–8 hours researching and writing an article only to find that nobody was engaging with it.

Then on certain days, due to lack of time, I would write something offhand, and it would get a lot of engagement.

I realized that researched articles were not well-received because I didn’t sound authentic. They sounded more like academic papers, and people don’t engage with academic content.

I also realized that it is much easier to write from my right brain than from my left brain. This is because the right brain relies on personal experiences rather than researched material.

I wrote a 100-page book in seven days. I could do that because I was writing from my right brain.

I have been writing a short article a day on LinkedIn for the past 30 days in 10–20 minutes flat.

After writing 30+ posts, I realized I could cover a lot of ground, even short articles. 

Short articles are fast-paced, easy to write, and could be information-dense.

They are an excellent way to experiment with new topics and get you in the habit of writing every day. 

They could also be a lot of fun. 

I used to waffle in my articles but not anymore. I learned a lot from writing on LinkedIn.

A simple 5 step formula I am using to write short posts can also be applied to writing articles. 

Here is how it goes. 

Five steps to writing a good short form article.

1. Punch line 

2. Old belief

3. Story 

4. New belief

5. Message. 

Punchline

Your first line is the first bite of an unknown dish. Medium readers are fickle eaters, and if your first sentence is chewy or bland, they’ll quickly look for better treats elsewhere. So, set the tone of your article with a punchy sentence with a promise of more tasty ones to come next. 

A punchline is a short snappy opening, preferably less than six words. It grabs the reader by the collar and says, pay attention.

The way to write a good punchline is to have it ooze out emotion. 

Here are some examples

• I hate interviews.
• Who am I to give your advice? 
• I make writing mistakes every day.
• Busyness in business isn’t a badge of honor.
• Your boss “isn’t” your friend.
• I don’t want to be a digital nomad anymore.

I have started this article with a punchline.

I hate long articles.

Old Belief

The second thing to do is to explain an old belief that should run counter to your current belief. In this article, I stated the old belief as follows.

I used to think articles should be well researched and packed with a lot of useful information. But that isn’t true.

Story

The third part is to tell a story that bridges the gap between your old belief to your new belief. I told my story in the next five short paragraphs

New belief

Following the story, I reinforced my new belief in a few short sentences.

Short articles are fast-paced, easy to write, and could be information-dense.

They are an excellent way to experiment with new topics and get you in the habit of writing every day.

They could also be a lot of fun.

Message

For a LinkedIn post, my message would be short. But for this article, I chose to share my 5 step formula to give you something concrete. 

That could be done in a line or two or a paragraph. In this article, I choose to give you my template to write short articles.

That’s it. 

Now you too can write short but helpful articles.

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We tell stories all the time.

At the dinner table, around the watercooler, in the cafes, on the phone. We talk in the form of stories. But we don’t notice that. We think we are having a conversation, but in fact, we are sharing stories.

Don’t believe me? Think of the conversation you had at the dinner table last night and you will see what I mean.

This is what happened at my dinner table last night.

Yesterday I made a special pumpkin dish that my mother-in-law used to make. It smelled devine and looked delicious. Rather than enjoying it, my husband went to the fridge and brought out leftovers.

That was enough for me to lose my temper. I had spent an hour making the dish that I thought he would enjoy, and he didn’t even try it.

“Why do you have to go for left-overs every time? Why can’t you eat fresh food? Don’t you like my cooking?”

I was furious. The questions came out like bullets. Yet they were unnecessary. I already knew the answer. Coming from a large family, he was brought up not to waste food.

But that was not the point. The point was, forty years of living in an affluent country where fresh food is abundant; he still couldn’t change his habit.

Did you notice? How a simple routine dinner table conversation is, in fact, a story.

It is easy to tell stories verbally.

When we tell stories, we have the advantage of facial expressions, body language, and verbal cues from the listeners. The listener might ask a question. Which might prompt us to expand that story or add the details we missed. We can use broken sentences and may repeat ourselves to make a point.

But when it comes to telling the same story on paper, we don’t have all these luxuries. Most of us get stuck when it comes to using personal stories in our writing.

If writing stories is so hard, why should we bother?

The skill to incorporate stories in your writing is valuable not only for writers but for everyone. Just like we tell stories in our conversations, we tell stories in our everyday writing. A report, a discussion paper, a resume, or even an email encrusted with stories makes a much lasting impression than just facts and figures.

The way we tell stories matter.

Ever noticed that some people have the knack of telling stories. The ones with a group of people around them at a party. They are the storytellers. They have figured out how to tell their stories in a way that people gather around them to hear them out.

What do they know about storytelling that others don’t?

What can we learn from them?

Three things:

1. Follow the structure. Every story has a structure — a beginning, a middle, and an end. Written stories need to follow the structure even more stringently than a verbal story. Even a four-lines story, should have the first as the beginning, the last line as the ending, and two lines forming the middle of the story.
2. Bring in drama. Drama draws in the audience. Any story can have drama in it. Conflict is a great way to introduce drama. My dinner table story wouldn’t be a story if there was no conflict in it. Drama can also be introduced by using anticipation, exaggeration, and detail.
3. Make it short. No one has time to read long-winded personal stories. Shorter and punchier stories make more impact than lengthy anecdotes. Make sure it is tight, has no unfinished sentences, repetition, or unnecessary details. Otherwise, it stops being a story and becomes a ramble.

A well written personal story is a great way to connect with the readers and to make a point. Learn to write them. And write them well.

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

Scott Harrison was sitting in the restaurant of an Ethiopian inn with a few people when the innkeeper walked in and started telling him the story of a woman who lived in his village, unprompted.

His was a small remote village, where all women used to walk for water for eight hours a day. They would carry heavy clay pots on their backs and one day, on the way back, this woman, Latticur slips and falls. The clay pot breaks and all the water is spilled on the ground.

At this point, the restaurant owner took a pause making sure they were listening. Then he said, we found her body swinging from the tree in the village. They all stared at him. Stunned. “The work you are doing is important, keep it up,” and he disappeared back in the kitchen.”

Scott Harrison is the founder of a charity called Water. He has been able to raise over 100 million dollars by telling stories like that of Latticur.

When I heard Scott telling this story in a YouTube video I was as stunned as Scott and his friends were when they first heard it from the innkeeper. Not only because the story is powerful but the way it is told.

There are 663 million people in this world who live without clean water. Scott has been telling the stories of these people, and in the process discovered three important principles of telling more engaging stories in any environment.

The first principle of storytelling is to take the listener on the emotional journey.

While telling the story Scott sets the scene describing how innkeeper walks in on him and his friends and starts telling them the story, uninvited.

He then mentions the innkeeper’s pause, so that we can get his attention just like the innkeeper waited for his. We get to absorb what he says just as he did when he heard the story for the first time.

The temptation while telling a personal story is to jump ahead and tell the listener what you learned as quickly as possible. Do not do that.

If you slow down you take people on the same winding journey you went on and the story connects much more.

As he continues he also talks about his emotional response, that he doubted the truth of this story just as we might.

I remember we said “What!” It felt as we were hit by a ton of bricks. And then we starting doubting it. Is that story really true? Can we tell this to the international donors? But I just couldn’t shake the idea or the picture of a woman that slipped and fallen, like all of us have done, and was in such despair on her living conditions that she tied a rope around her neck climbed a tree and jumped.

So I sent one of my partners to the village to find out if anyone by that name of Latticur lived in the village and whether what happened to her was true. A couple of weeks later I got an email from him saying, yes the story was true. He saw her grave. He met her family.

Then I asked my wife, I want to go there and live there for a week.

The second principle is that every story needs a near-constant element of mystery to keep the listener engaged.

You need to constantly raise questions in the listeners’ minds if you want to keep their attention. Every time you answer one, you need to plant a new one.

Scott hints on a bit of mystery right at the beginning of the story by asking whether the story is true. When he finds out that it is, he immediately raises another question – what happens when he goes to Ethiopia himself?

So I went to the village, I lived there for a week. I met the priest who gave her the funeral. I saw the pile of rocks behind the church that was her grave, I met her mom, I met her friend who was with her that day. I went on writing about it on Medium about the experience and seeing the tree.

It is a frail tree. And I didn’t know until I went to the village that she was thirteen.

That was a huge shock for me. I was expecting an old lady. This hunched back mature woman who has walked water all her life.

She was thirteen years old girl. A teenager.

I remember asking her friend, through translater, why she thought she hanged herself. Her best friend said, she would have been overcome with shame because she had broken the clay pot and she spilled the water.

So that is the main action of the story but it doesn’t end here because there is a third principle.

The third principle is that the best stories have a lesson in the end, like Aesop’s fable.

It doesn’t have to be explicit, but it needs to be there like an overarching point. When you get to this point you need to know your purpose of sharing the story.

What is the audience supposed to take away from your story?

Here is what Scott thinks what we should learn from Letticur’s story.

This is an emergency. Something has to be done where thirteen-years-old are not hanging themselves on trees for breaking clay pot and spilling water.

I found this story while researching storytelling for my book.

I learned three principles of storytelling and they are powerful but what is more powerful is the lesson of the story.

It has inspired me to tell the stories of people like Latticur who have no voice. People like George Floyd whose life has been cut short by racism, a plague more dangerous and widespread than the coronavirus.

Credit: The full credit of this story and the whole post goes to Charlie who runs the YouTube channel Charisma on Command.

Photo by Johann Siemens on Unsplash

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If you have been following me on the intranet you would have noticed that I have been creating a cartoon every day for about eight months.

When I joined the cartoon drawing course I couldn’t even draw a decent circle. The course started with drawing circles. For one whole week, I drew nothing but circles. Lots of circles. Circles for seven days straight. Big circles, medium circles, small circles, tiny circles, circly circles. Most of those circles were no good. But I drew them anyway.

That circle drawing exercise was equivalent to creating rubbish. All that practice led to develop muscle memory. By the end of the week, I was able to draw almost round circle, of any size.

All artists create a lot of rubbish.

Take any photographer, or a painter or a writer. They all generate a lot of rubbish all the time. They do so knowingly.

Stephen King writes 2000 words every day, without fail. Do you think all those words go into his books? Let’s do the maths. At 2000 words a day, he is writing 90,000 words in three months. Which means he should be churning out at least three books a year. Yet he comes up one or at the most two books a year. Which means only a fraction of his daily words makes it to his books.

What about the rest of the words? They were rubbish. They went straight to the bin.

Creating rubbish is part of the deal. Here are three reasons for that.

1. Creating Rubbish gives practice.

Learning a new skill takes a lot of practice. Initially, when we start we know our work is no good. We are learning the craft. We are trying to be good. We have potential but we are not there yet.

Creating rubbish frustrates. We think we have no talent and we want to give up. Many people do. They never get past creating rubbish phase. They quit. They give up because they think they don’t have the special thing that they want.

If you are just starting or you are going through this phase you got to know that it is normal. You need to keep reminding yourself that you must do a lot of practice in order to get to the level you want to be at. It is only by creating a lot of rubbish that you will develop enough muscle memory to become good.

2. In that rubbish, you will find nuggets.

When I started writing for this site, I struggled to come up with ideas to write about. My posts were tiny, just a few paragraphs, and they were not fluent at all. But now an then I would write a post which would stand out. Even now, when I read my old posts I wonder and ask myself, did I write it.

The same thing happens with my diary writing. Most of the stuff is straight rubbish but some of the insights and thoughts I have come up there are priceless.

They are nuggets that justify all those unnecessary words. They helped figure out what I really wanted to say.

Julia Cameron the writer of The Artist’s Way advises to highlight those nuggets and keep them to use in your other writing.

3. Creating rubbish helps learning stick to memory.

Daniel Coyle tells the story of a thirteen-years-old Clarissa(not her real name) in his book The Talent Code. Clarissa is a mediocre music student. Her only reason to learn to play clarinet is “because I’m supposed to.”

Clarissa’s practice is captured in a video for the music psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick who were flabbergasted by what they learned from a six-minute clip.

Clarissa is working on a new song, “Golden Wedding.” She listens to the song a few minutes then draws a breath and plays two notes. Then she stops. She pulls the clarinet from her lips and stares at the paper. Her eyes narrow. She plays seven notes, the song’s opening phrase. She misses the last note. She immediately stops. She squints again at the music and sings the phrase softly. She starts over and plays the riff from the beginning makes a few notes further into the song.

She continues to do that, stopping at each mistake, correcting it, starting from the beginning, and moving a bit further into the song. What Clarissa is doing is learning from her mistakes and making the learning stick to memory.

In the beginning, when I was able to draw my first few cartoons, I was ecstatic. I thought they were great. But as I drew more and more I discovered my earlier attempts were not just bad but pathetic.

My brain learned to spot the rubbish.

Now, eight months into the course, I know that most of my work will be no good. But I must continue to create if I want to become good at them. And in there, there will be some nuggets worth saving.

That gives me the reason to keep on creating more rubbish.

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