Today’s Most Popular Articles
- The False Narrative
- Writing Stories About Hopes and Dreams
- Identifying Your Main Character
- The Four Throughlines in To Kill A Mockingbird
- Spin a Tale, Weave a Story
- Storytelling Tip: Trapped in a Routine
- How do you create a main character who is an antagonist?
- Letting Go of Characters
- Psychology, Personality, Persona & Perception - The 4 P's Revisited
- Narrative Structure, Game Theory and Crowd Control
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Category Archives: Storytelling Tips
Do You Want to Change Your Audience?
Do you want your story to bring your audience to a point of change or to reinforce its current view? Oddly enough, choosing a steadfast Main Character may bring an audience to change and choosing a change character may influence … Continue reading
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Writing Con Men, Shady Businessmen, and Seedy Politicians
Characters, as with real people such as con men, shady businessmen, and seedy politicians, will often use statistics to paint a false, yet plausible, picture. For example, one such character might state that 12% of all high-school dropouts were beaten … Continue reading
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Storytelling Tip 8 of 50 – Flashbacks and Flash Forwards
By Melanie Anne Phillips This tip is excerpted from my book, 50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks! Trick 8 Flashbacks and Flash Forwards There is a big difference between flashbacks where a character reminisces and flashbacks that simply transport an audience to … Continue reading
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Storytelling Tip 7 of 50 – “Out of Sequence Experiences”
By Melanie Anne Phillips This tip is excerpted from my book, 50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks! Trick 7 Out of Sequence Experiences (Changing Temporal Relationships) With this technique, the audience is unaware they are being presented things out of order. Such a … Continue reading
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Storytelling Tip 6 of 50 – “Non-Causality”
By Melanie Anne Phillips This tip is excerpted from my book, 50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks! Trick 6 Non-Causality (Out of Context Experiences) There is often a difference between what an audience expects and what logically must happen. A prime example occurs … Continue reading
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Today’s Writing Tip: “Building Size”
Today’s writing tip: You can hold your reader’s or audience’s interest by revealing the true size of something over the course of the story until it can be seen to be either larger or smaller than it originally appeared. This … Continue reading
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Drop Exposition through Arguments
Here’s a short one… A person talking is often boring. People arguing are often compelling. If you have to drop exposition, try to do it in the back and forth barbs of an argument. Let the characters use the information … Continue reading
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Revealing Your Goal
While the structural nature of a story’s goal is crucial to developing a plot that makes sense, the storytelling manner in which the goal is revealed can determine whether a plot seems clever or pedestrian. In this tip, we’ll explore … Continue reading
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Multi-Appreciation Moments
The great masters of plot create dramatic moments that multi-task. For example, a novice writer might reveal the story’s goal in a line of dialog, but a master storyteller might reveal it in such a way as to also add … Continue reading
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Writing with Flashbacks and Flash Forwards
There is a big difference between flashbacks where a character reminisces and flashbacks that simply transport an audience to an earlier time. If the characters are aware of the time shift, it affects their thinking, and is therefore part of … Continue reading
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