Authentic Narrative

These five elements are the building blocks of story, and they are:

Action. What are your characters doing?

Dialogue. What are they saying?

Description. What are they seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling?

Inner Monologue. ...

Exposition / Narrative. ...

Points of a Good Story

If you don't like what you are doing, it will show in the work and no one else will like it either. Use your own life. Nothing can quite replace personal experience to infuse a scene or a short.

Constructing Identity: There is no better source of story than you: what you like; what you don't like; and what you know. Since story is driven by emotion, start with that.

What makes you happy, mad, sad, glad, frustrated, surprised, or hopeful?

What is the one thing you would change about the world if you could?

If you could plan the perfect day, what would it be?

What is your biggest wish? What is your biggest secret?

What is something you've always wanted to do but haven't?

What is the one thing you always wanted to do, but your body type wouldn't allow you to be good at?

Spend 10-15 minutes jotting down answers to the above questions.

Observation is one of a storyteller's greatest tools. The world is full of people in conflict--from the simple choice of paper or plastic, to climbing Mt. Everest. And people do the craziest things for the silliest reasons. The human race is full of emotions, logic, faults, quirks, and fallacies, which all make great fodder for stories. They have great movements, expressions, walks, and weight shifts. Something as simple as an interesting walk can reveal a character and launch a story.

The moments we expect—or are expected—to remember, the events and ceremonies we feel obliged to record in our photo albums and scrapbooks, are not always those that affect the largest number of people. Often the most memorable experience occur when we least expect them or are difficult to capture in a picture frame on a mantel. Becoming blood sisters with a childhood friend; nervously finding a seat in your first college lecture class, only to find that you’re in the wrong room; struggling through a complex artistic problem and finally getting it; receiving the news that a loved on has died.

Telling stories about the most memorable moments in our lives often includes explaining how they have become etched in our minds. In fact, private moments, like public ones are inextricably linked to the technologies with which we record them. Most of our special occasions involve cameras; in fact, it is often the video camera at a wedding, rather than the bride and groom that command everyone’s attention and cooperation.

However it is that we capture our experiences whether we take photos, create scrapbooks, use video, keep journals, describe our experience in emails, or simply replay memories in our minds, we are framing our experiences-for ourselves and often for others. As those memorable events drift into the past, we often revise and embellish our stories about them. Indeed, we continually reshape the nature and tone of our stories each time we recall them. List 5 memorable experiences that quickly come to your mind.

Choose a photograph from your personal life, a picture that is part of a memory close to you. What is important is that you have in your mind a picture that is framed--isolated if you will--from everything else. This frame serves as the structure of the story; you are bound to what lies within. And yet, there is so much more within than meets the eye. You can describe what is there, but you also have the power to imagine what happened just prior to this event. How did this image come to be? And you have the power to project what might happen next. The focus is still on the particular present and yet, doors and windows fly open on either side, broadening the history and knowledge.