Here are four videos by Ira Glass on YouTube about Storytelling.
- Building a story
- Making listeners/readers want to keep listening/reading for some reason
- Speak naturally
- Know when to abandon crap
- Get rid of the boring parts
- Failure is a big part of success
- More failure brings a situation where you’ll be super lucky
- Going through the phase of making crap – keep going, don’t give up
- Do a lot of work
- Put yourself on deadlines
- Be accountable to someone who you have to be accountable to for completing work
- In storytelling, be the teller and a listener
Recently for the 4th of July I visited my sister in Minnesota, USA, where, for a few nights, four families gathered around a campfire on a portion of 3 acres of land sprawled out over a hilly and tree-lined backyard. Neighbors separated by 2-3 acres of the same. Deer running through the yards once a day that stopped conversations and demanded everyone’s attention. Idyllic.
Kids under 10 years old, teenagers, boyfriends, girlfriends, adults. All circled around telling tales of present and past, embellishing every step of the way. Favorite stories repeated from uncles and aunts requested by the older kids, wanting to remember and hear it again from years past. Stories that brought new understanding because of time.
There was food and drink non-stop, making it difficult to stick to any kind of a low-fat diet. We played volleyball in the pool and imagined all those bad calories we consumed were going to fall off. Yea right.
The celebration ended with an extra night of fireworks and s’mores around the campfire. Great fun.
Dosh Dosh has written an article on How to Say Nothing in 500 Words (A Lesson on Writing) which is an excellent read on Paul McHenry Roberts’s article HOW TO SAY NOTHING IN FIVE HUNDRED WORDS which provides guidance on how to and how not to write college compositions.
You may want to change your link to the “How to Say Nothing in 500 or Less” article, it is no longer at that location. This is a common problem we find in SEO, and I recently wrote about it on our blog, which you may find interesting.
Portland Search Engine Marketing Blog
Thanks Tyson.