Welcome to the final part of the Storytelling for Beginners series.

Your Greatest Tool

Personal taste is the greatest tool you can have as an storyteller, the trick however is being able to justify why something you like matters to you. It is not about your ability anymore, but about the things that you like. The things that you are passionate about will direct your ability and inform your storytelling process.

Take time to study things that you like and things that you dislike, then take some time to put into word the reason behind your tastes. Why do you like something over something else? Studying the things that you dislike may open the door for a new cool story or for you to learn something interesting that you didn’t know.

How To Sharpen Taste

Take note of the things you react to when consuming content. Ask yourself why it affected you in the way it and start putting your analysis in a notebook. Remember, always ask why. When the time comes to work on something of your own, personalize it as much as possible, let yourself shine through your work, so that your audience can get a glimpse of what you are about.

Be Authentic

You are probably tired of hearing this from many different sources, but in storytelling the most important thing is to always be yourself. Talk like a normal person would talk. You want to be genuine as much as possible because the things that you are creating will be representing you. Being vulnerable is OK because vulnerability is a strength that makes you honest.

How Do I Start?

Sometimes you have a topic that may be uninteresting to people or a message that no one wants to hear. The way to get people’s attention is to create a question in their minds, so that they may start to become engaged in the story, start with a personal story that is related to the topic you want to present.

The following is an example for a suicide prevention campaign speech.

“I went to my room to kill myself and when I was about to do so, God stopped me and talked to me…”

Then the presenter paused for brief moment. Meanwhile the audience was hooked with questions “What did God tell you?”, “Why were you going to kill yourself?”

The Formula

Even if it doesn’t look like it, storytelling is an art that requires careful planning. One doesn’t just speak up and tells stories, there is always a structure to follow, the trick lies in being able to disguise the formula.

Those who don’t use fundamentals are just finger painters - Aaron Sorkin

People want to hear stories about someone’s personal journey. Joseph Campbell called it the Hero’s Journey.

Basically this is an evolutionary path the hero goes through in his journey to rediscover who he is. There are other formulas out there, but the Hero’s Journey is a good starting point.