Category → Writing - Speaking
How to Develop a Dynamic Story
Story telling is a very effective way to get your point across. Here are some tips to help you develop a dynamic powerful story.
• Decide on the purpose for the story. What is the main point you want to make? Slant the telling of the story so that that point is clear.
• Create the backdrop. Describe the scene so that the audience can picture it in their minds. What is the time, location, weather? What is going on emotionally, physically, or spiritually?
• Introduce the main characters. Help your audience to picture the important characters through detailed descriptions. Become them; describe their relationships, quirks and personality. Add character voices or mannerisms to make them different from your own.
• Begin the Journey. What is the task, the goal, and the journey to take? What are the challenges that need to be faced?
• Meet the obstacle. To avoid boredom something must happen to get in your way and make it interesting. This could be a person, a self limiting belief, or a challenge to overcome. Exaggeration will add humour.
• Overcome the obstacles. What had to be done to overcome the obstacle? What inner resources did you have to summon? Did someone help you? A hero? Or you? Be specific. Break your solution down into a few steps in sequence. This is where the teaching happens.
• Resolve the story. How did everything turn out? Tie up the loose ends-what happened to the other people? To your hero?
• Make the point. A story needs one clear point to have more points confuses the issue. Write out and memorize the point, work on the words to make it simple and easy to remember. Find “the phrase that pays”.
• Ask the question. Make your story personal to the audience. “Has that ever happened to you?” Turn the main point into a question. Push their buttons!
• Practice, practice, practice. Tell your stories to anyone who is willing to listen. Get feedback, make adjustments, and tell it again. These steps will ignite the WOW in your audience.
Remember the best story you will ever tell is your next story!
A Career From Anywhere
An island in the Mediterranean. A beach in Africa. The east coast of New Zealand. What do these locations have in common? A recent call for assistance from freelance writers elicited replies from every one of these locations. In each of these and in many other remote places, I know of writers who are freelancing with a fair degree of success.
Indeed it is possible for freelance writers to work from anywhere.
Consider my own recent experience. As the editor of the Worldwide Freelance Writer web site, I publish a newsletter that goes out to thousands of freelance writers around the world. I can recall one particular issue in the middle of 2002. I started planning the newsletter in the heat and humidity of Hong Kong. When the first draft came together I was in Indianapolis, in the United States. And by the time I completed the final copy and pushed the send button I was at a lakeside cottage in Ontario, Canada, with snow lightly falling outside.
Maybe you are interested in a freelance writing career but you worry about whether you live in a suitable location. Well, think again. Freelance writing is a job you can do from anywhere. It is true that if your home is near New York’s editorial offices you may be able to use your proximity to some advantage. But many, many freelance writers are working successfully from more distant locations, and in many cases enjoying a better lifestyle in the places where they live.
Take Ron Irwin, for example. An American, Ron freelances from a small house on the beach in Cape Town, South Africa. The majority of his work is still for North American markets. Consider Vella Corinne, a native of Malta in the center of the Mediterranean Sea. From this island steeped in history – the Order of St John was based here and the temples are thought to be older than the pyramids – she writes travel and lifestyle features.
Writers in locations such as these, far from being at a serious disadvantage, can actually enjoy a number of benefits. For a start, these writers are in an excellent position to write about their own locations, the people and the culture. Also, the living costs are often less expensive than for writers in major cities. And if that is not enough, how about fresh, clean air?
Writers working from remote locations usually live in a cleaner, more peaceful environment, and may live closer to outdoor and recreational activities. Vella reveals how she enjoys the warmer days: “Once I pack up my computer, I just head to the beach. Distances are short and, the island being small, I’m always close to the center of whatever’s happening here. I can control my own time in a way that I could not if I lived in a busy city.”
Twenty years ago writers in remote locations were often frustrated by the slowness of communicating with editors on the other side of the world. It would always take months to receive a reply from an editor. Waiting for a response to a query was about as exciting as watching grass grow!
In recent years the availability of the Internet has made it easier than ever before for freelancers to communicate almost instantly with anyone, anywhere in the world. In my own example above I traveled through a few countries over a three-week period and managed to conduct my freelance work at the same time. Many of my clients didn’t even know I was ‘on the move’. Little did they know that between receiving and replying to their messages, I was fishing in the lake and hiking through the woods. I could easily keep in touch with important contacts, as well as write and send out my newsletter.
But do you know what was even more exciting? While I was traveling my web site was hard at work, the entire time, ‘day and night’. Even while I was flying at thirty thousand feet, taking a nap, I was effectively selling a bunch of writing-related books and products. Now if that isn’t a freelancer’s dream becoming reality, I don’t know what is! Such accomplishments were definitely not so attainable before the advent of email and the World Wide Web.
Kathy Crockett freelances from Gisborne, New Zealand, on the east coast of the North Island. She commented to me on the difference technology makes when working from such a location. “It’s a city of 35,000″, she explains, “the closest to the international dateline, and the first city in the world to see the sun each day. Its closest city-size neighbors are three hours drive on windy roads…the internet, mobile phones…technology lets me be wherever I want to be… and fool others into thinking I’m where they’d like me to be!”
Of course working remotely is not always easy and there are a number of challenges that writers typically face. Isolation is a common issue. Vella explained to me she has a way of dealing with it. “At times it feels like I have a totally atomized existence. I balance that by scheduling some ‘face time’ each day”, she explains. I agree with her. Sometimes you must make a conscious effort to spend time with family, friends, or other writers.
Another challenge may be difficulties with technology. Finding a PC repair shop may be next to impossible. Internet access may be unavailable or unreliable. There are many, many places in the world that don’t even have telephone lines yet, not to mention email access. You can still work as a freelance writer from these locations, but it will not be as convenient. If you have any choice where you live, always try to choose a town that has telephone lines with reliable Internet access.
And that goes for working while you are on holiday too. Check the available technology in advance. In the example of my trip above, I received a surprise. There was no telephone line or email access in the cottage. My initial panic subsided when I discovered a telephone not too far away. In freezing temperatures, I trudged up the road. When I pushed the button to send out my newsletter my notebook computer was plugged into a payphone.
Are writers in remote locations at a serious disadvantage? No way! I am sold on the concept that you can work as a freelance writer from anywhere. And while you will face some challenges, none of them will be insurmountable.
So if you’re looking for a career you can do from anywhere, look no further. The writers I referred to and many others are working successfully right where they are. And so can you. Open up your notebook. Start writing. You can begin to build a rewarding career as a freelance writer today.
Get Your Book Done … Now!
I don’t believe in writer’s block. (I can hear the gasps of disbelief already.) Listen: If you hire a plumber to come to your house and fix a problem, do you expect him to say, “Sorry, I can’t figure out what your problem is. I think I have plumber’s block”? Probably not, and if he did, you’d toss him out and call another guy faster than you can say Drano. Not that plumbing can be compared to writing, but if we follow the proper steps to get the job done, I find that writer’s block melts away, the drains are unclogged, and the words start flowing like water from a faucet. But what are these “steps”? Well, a big part of my job as a book marketing specialist is to help people create something they can actually market: a finished book. Many of us have ideas aplenty but not a clue how to get them down on paper.
Unlike other professions, authors operate under a whole different set of rules. We often can’t just sit down and pound out a story, and those who do have created their own formula for doing so. We see this huge story with all sorts of directions we want to take it, we see the cover, we see the characters, we see the market potential. Then we see Katie Couric or Oprah smiling and holding up our book for the whole world to see. Then we glance back down at our monitor and see a tormenting blinking cursor and blank screen. And we are again reminded of what a failure we are. We have all these stories and nothing on paper. We are idea generators. We have zillions of them running through our minds, but none of them on paper. Unless you make your money in a think tank, operating this way probably isn’t getting you any closer to your goals.
When a project looms before us, it’s like this big elephant — huge, overwhelming and ready to stomp us flat any minute. There’s an old saying: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” The same is true for writing. You finish a book, one step at a time. But to create these steps, you first have to break down your book into manageable, bite-size pieces. This can be accomplished by creating a TOC (table of contents) that can guide you through the book. My reasoning behind this is as follows: You’d never think of driving from California to New York without a map, right? Well, how can you expect to finish your book without one? Your TOC is your roadmap, guiding you through your book. If your chapters don’t have individual headings, then write a 2-3 sentence description of what the chapter encompasses. Don’t get too elaborate on this. Remember, it’s not going in your book; it’s just a brief descriptor. Once the TOC is outlined, you’ll have a vision of your book from start to finish.
A few things that creating this TOC will do for you: It will show you any gaps in your story that might need to be fleshed out, and it will give you a sense of completion, of seeing the book or project actually done, and this is a serious psychological turn-on for most authors, because we often live in a world of half-completed projects. Sometimes this step alone can propel an author enough to get their book done, or at the very least give it a darned good kick-start.
Once you’ve developed your TOC, you’ll want to go through it and create a “to do” list. Regardless of what genre your book is, you will always have a to-do list. Whether it’s getting endorsements, doing research, or getting approvals for quotes or excerpts for your book, this to-do list will become yet another item that will help propel your book toward completion.
Once the to-do list is done, set it aside. Now you should have your completed TOC with a vision of the entire book and a growing list of items that will need to be handled for the book to get done. Now the real fun begins.
Some books on writing will tell you to set aside a day or two a week, or an evening here and there to get your book completed. I disagree with this theory, and here’s why: You need to stay dialed into your topic. When I was working on an upcoming book, I would often put the project aside for days or weeks at a time, promising myself to schedule time “as soon as I could.” Well, that rarely happened. What I found is that if I set aside some time every day to do something on the book, I got it completed a lot quicker.
The more you keep your hands in your project, the more it will stay at the front of your mind and on your radar screen, and the more energy you will invest to finish it. I won’t tell you to set aside hours of your time each day — in fact, you don’t even have to set aside an hour. Take 15 minutes, or even five — whatever your schedule permits. If this seems like a ridiculously short amount of time, consider this: You now have your to-do list and your outlined TOC! . If you are short on time one day, pick a quickie item from your to-do list and get it done. If you have more time, then pound out a chapter or two. The idea behind creating the to-do lists and a TOC is to not only give your project a structure, but to also eliminate any and all excuses for getting it done. Don’t feel like writing today? No problem. There’s probably a mountain of research just waiting to be traversed. Get the picture?
But let’s say you can’t even get through the TOC. “My book has too many layers,” you lament. “Too many back stories, tons of stuff going on. I can’t possibly be expected to filter it down into a neat little TOC.” Yes, you can, and you must. If your book has no focus, your book will have no focus. It’s as simple as that. But it doesn’t stop there — if your book is all over the place and you do actually manage to get it done, you’ll never be able to keep a reader interested because you will be the only one who will get it, and what’s the point of that? What you’ll need to do in this case is find the “core” of your book or the focus of your story. Ask yourself this: What’s the one thing this book cannot do without? What’s the one thing this story circles around? That’s your core. If you’re still coming up with three or four things that your story circles around, you aren’t focused enough and neither is your book. Find that one thing and build your story or book around it.
If you follow these steps, your book will get finished quicker than you could have ever imagined. And the once-dreaded writer’s block will go from a stumbling block to a building block.
