Seven Steps of Digital Storytelling
The storytelling process is a journey. Here are Seven steps for authors wishing to learn how to write compelling, successful ‘digital stories’.
Step 1 — Owning Your Insights:
The first step expands on the importance of the author expressing his or her viewpoints fully and expanding upon how certain events have changed the author’s life. More importantly, Lambert focuses on the importance of the author’s writing without any concern for fame or publicity.
“If you burden the beginning of your process with the external expectations, you can easily interrupt or edit the little voice inside your head that is working through why the story has great personal meaning for you” — Joe Lambert
Step 2 — Owning Your Emotions:
The second step is the author retaining ownership of his or her emotions. The emotional part of the story is vital in establishing a connection with the readers. In the first step, storytellers find and clarify the meaning contained within their stories, but in this step, they become aware of how the story feels. That way, meaning, and emotion are intertwined.
Step 3 — Finding The Moment:
In the third step, the author’s story must highlight a pivotal moment when things changed significantly in the author’s life. The more details the digital author can produce, the better the reader will be able to “see” the significance of the moment.
“A story isn’t about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time.” — W.D. Wetherell
How much of a scene you build around the moment of change, how you integrate that scene into the story, and the total number of scenes depends on how much information the audience needs to know in order to understand. (Lambert, pg.60).
This concept is critical in the fourth step of creating a visual narrative.
Step 4 — Seeing Your Story:
Storytellers consider how the use of images will shape their stories. To “see” their story, storytellers describe images that come to mind, understand what those images mean, find or create those images, and then determine how best to use them to convey their intended meaning.
Once the storyteller is clear about the meaning they want to convey with their visuals, they decide how they will create these images, and how they will use them.
Step 5 — Hearing Your Story:
“The recorded voice of the storyteller telling their own story is what makes what we call a “digital story” a digital story — not a music video or a narrated slideshow.” (Lambert, pg.64).
The fifth step in digital storytelling is creating audio elements. The emotional tone of the story has already been identified by this point, and sound is one of the best ways to convey that tone. In digital stories, voice not only tells a vital narrative, but it also captures the essence of the narrator, their unique character, and their connection to the lived experience.
Step 6 — Assembling Your Story:
Editing the visual and audio elements together is the sixth step, where the author determines what elements of the story will be included and when those elements will appear. This step requires answering two questions: “How are you structuring your story?” and, “How are the layers of visual and audio narrative working together?”
The process of telling stories and reading the audience’s reaction is crucial to understanding story structure. “Knowing which pieces of information are necessary to include allows us to then determine the best way to order those pieces and keep our audience engaged.” (Lambert, pg.66).
“In digital stories, the way we combine the layers to convey meaning allows us to economize the presentation of information and lets our audience make the connections” — Joe Lambert
Step 7 — Sharing Your Story:
The last step. All the layers have been assembled, and the final step is sharing the story with the audience.
An author must consider his audience, and considering it at this point in the production can change how they complete their final edits. If the author knows who the audience will be and what they know, it will help determine how much context the author provides about the story.
“Being clear about your purpose in creating the story and how it may have shifted during the process of creating the piece will help you determine how you present and share your story” (Lambert, pg. 69).
Lambert, J., & Hessler, B. (2018). Digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community (5th ed.). New York: Routledge.
Ron, Shlomi. “Shlomi Ron.” Visual Storytelling Institute, 20 Jan. 2020, www.visualstorytell.com/blog/the-role-of-emotions-in-visual-storytelling.
