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This page is an abstract from our free storytelling tutorial in PDF.
Table of contents
- 1. What is storytelling?
- 2. Plots
- 3. Characters
- 4. Mixing plots
- 5. Drama effects
Think smart, use tools and techniques
A few basic principles can rule the telling of the final story.
For example:
- Never say, always show! Do not declare it, prove it!
- Build dilemmas / paradoxical situations
- Use two actions rather than one – create a mini-plot action to support the main plot action.
- Manage the balance of forces between opposite teams of characters
- Distribute information among the characters and to the audience
It is one thing to build stories with their plots and characters, it is something else to tell the final story from what we built.
One main difference is that us, authors, have to know everything about the story, whereas we will not fully inform our audience and our characters, so as to stay able to make surprises and dramatic effects.
- Audience is informed, some characters are not
- Character is informed, audience is not
- Some characters are informed, some others are not
Make special drama effects
Some special, dramatic effects, can be added to nearly any plot. One has to know those effects…
- Wrong track
- Time counted / Time lock
- Nearly… but no!
- Repetition…
Drama parameters
The final story involves parameters that the author can closely control, such as:
- The time scale: the duration of events, their rhythm, their density…
- The chronologies: the order of the telling, with some events told in flashback, flash-forward, or in parallel…
- The space: the plots happen in a series of places, and a story with several plots builds a world. This world can be structured as such.
- The media: we are frequently led to use/quote different medias in one work.
- The genre: it is often an advantage to stage a story in a well-known genre that the audience likes.
- The logics: a story can be rational or absurd or crazy or distorted. It can also work as a discourse, and there are tools to help elaborate such works.
- The narrator and focus: often, stories are told by someone to someone. For example, a story is told in a letter from one character to another, or it is told on the phone between 2 friends. A same action can be seen from many different points of view with different focuses.
All of those points are the object of Storytelling 2.Advanced and Storytelling 3.Experts.
Conclusion
We hope this introduction to storytelling got you interested 🙂
It is just a few basics, like starting the study of physics by the fact matter is made of molecules made of atoms.
The best moment is probably when storytelling escapes the normal laws of Newtonian then Einsteinian physics and becomes quantic! With some more knowledge, with some more experience, the storyteller can build stories that, like cathedrals or planes, challenge the usual rules of Mother Nature. Experts in universal rules, we can better find the special cases and weird exceptions that will make our work so special.
We wish you good luck in your next stories and if you want to make a bit of your artistic way in company of Story&Drama, you’re welcome, colleague!
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