Words are a powerful medium to express. Though written words are a beauty in itself but when given a voice they become more powerful. The emotions and characters come to life when stories get a voice.
Have you ever tried to be a storyteller in a get together with your family or friends or while travelling in a train with strangers? Being able to tell an entertaining story is a terrific way to utilise time and to create a powerful impact on your audience. Even if you have attempted to be a storyteller, it is not necessary that you end up telling an impressive story. You may have a fantastic story to tell but it seems that for most of us, the art of telling a story seems to be just beyond our capacity.
Storytelling associates us and gets us in contact with our audience which may be more profound than ourselves. It’s nothing unexpected that new talents are utilising narrating, to convey their very own vision for quite a long time and also to build a brand image out of it.
However, one of the important questions is what makes a delightful story? And how can we become good storytellers? And if we are not a good story teller then how can we become one.
Storytelling is not only about creating images for a new talent or branding of a new product in the market so that it should reach the target audience. Storytelling is also important to writers and content creators of all kinds, communicating fiction and nonfiction stories.
However, storytelling is something which we are altogether inclined towards to some extent. Everybody has a fantasy of publishing their own book, and everybody has stories which are fantastic and unique in their own way, that characterizes their lives. Believe it or not but it’s true, everyone has a story.
One must consider the following points while venturing into the art of storytelling:
· Identify your audience:
We must identify the appropriate audience for whom we have created the story. This is important in light of the fact that it will decide the impact of your story. It’s no point providing water to the person who is not thirsty as he won’t realise it’s worth. In the same way, if you identify the wrong audience your storytelling would be a futile effort. If you identify your audience well, then it will be much easier to reach out to them with your stories and messages.
· Identify the context and elaborate:
Being a storyteller, we are aware about the story, we know where our story is heading towards and how it’s going to end. It’s very important for us to set the context and elaborate more about the characters, its physical appearance, habits etc. Strong characterisation always helps to attract the interest of the audience.
· Don’t lose the grip:
If you are not good at editing and filtering your thoughts real time, in your mind then it’s obvious that you will get into unwanted details which are not relevant to the story. Such mistakes will distract your audience and you will end up losing the grip of your audience.
· Avoid adding unnecessary details while narrating real incidents:
The more frequently we narrate the same story, the little addition we will in general include. If we add unnecessary add up, those accounts float further and further far from the events that really occurred. Inevitably, you may finish up depicting something that never happened by any means.
· Notice your audience:
Make sure to monitor your audience (by making eye contacts, if they are in front of you) and stay connected with them (by seeking feedback, if they are away). Keep the session interactive, if you are in front of an audience. If you have a sad story to narrate, be sure that you don’t go for so long that you’re putting stress on the audience. Take your audience on an emotional journey. Make them feel your story.
· Story should have unpredictable ending:
If you want your readers or listener to spend some quality time on your story then you better come up with a most unpredictable ending, does not matter if it’s a little weird. A Story is good because it has a great ending not because it has an unexpected beginning. Give enough space to your audience to build an ending in their minds but make sure that your ending is different than what they can think of.
Cheers!
Subrat Saurabh
Writing - A never ending journey 