Podcast #25: The Essence of Storytelling

Start with a strong character. The true essence of a good story line is a strong central character. That character begins in your mind. Before you ever put pen to paper, you really need to think about how it is that that character is going to live in whatever world you’re going to create. What I mean is that who is that character as a person? For reference you may want to check out my podcast dealing with character sheets.

Remember that it has to be believable. There’s a little bit of confusion when writing fiction that you can just write something and your audience is going to believe it. Storytelling 101 really should include a short discussion on the importance of building believable fiction.

Don't forget your minor characters. So we understand the importance and storytelling of having compelling characters, but what about the minor characters. I’d argue that your minor characters play a very important role in that they help build the framework around which stories being told.

A good example of this is characters that people interact with in cases like stores, movie theaters, gas stations, and other places where they have to be in their world. Don’t ever underestimate the power of tangential characters to your story. It may just be that those characters provide some witty dialogue and interesting insight into your story.

World building is also very important in storytelling. Remember the five senses rule. Essentially, the rule states that we have five senses. Congratulations, now you know the five senses rule. What is your character smell, see, taste, or feel. How about the sounds going on around them. Perhaps your Romeo type character just came in off the street. If you go from a hot street in a city into an air-conditioned building what does that feel like?

Be relatable to your target audience. I recently read a movie script which was written by somebody who is not an American. The problem with the movie script is that it uses a lot of comparisons that American audience just isn’t going understand. You need to make sure that you are using metaphors which were target audience is going understand. Your descriptions need to be able to resonate with your target audience as well.

The ending. You’ve got to be careful not to rush from climax resolution to quickly in your storytelling. It’s critically important that you don’t abandon the basic principles of keeping this story believable at this point.

It is true, this is fiction, and you do have the ability to make things up but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should. That is it for this week’s podcast, thank you very much for joining me.

Next week, make sure you definitely tune in as I am going to be interviewing author Liam Bradley who I got to know when we work together on the anthology Bizarre: 14 Horror Stories.  

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