How these simple storytelling hacks hook readers
Not everyone is a good storyteller but everyone can write a good story
How do you hook your reader into your story? asked a reader.
Good stories are gripping.
They cause your heart to race, your palms to sweat and your eyes to pop.
They have simple plots and are easy to follow. Your plot can start in ancient times and transcend into 2050, but you must keep it simple. Convoluted plots lose the reader.
Always have the reader in mind. You can jump from antiquity into perpetuity but keep it simple. Your reader must follow what’s happening.
So how do you write a beautiful story?
“There are seven elements to every story,” Said my gangly, wispy passionate professor. “Every creative writer must be a maestro at artfully stringing them together” he would say wistfully.
“Creative writers are maestros — conductors of an orchestra!” he would repeat his voice distantly mysterious. “Use these elements to play beautiful music!” he would whisper in a crescendo.
1. Believable characters carry your story
Create believable characters. Your characters will carry your story. Authentic characters live in a world we can relate to. It’s beautiful, crazy and tough.
Your characters must define the story events. They must respond to every conflict live through every trauma; struggle through every trial and overcome tribulations.
They must bleed, cry, and hurt, even as they breathe life and defy death.
Every character of your story,- the protagonist, the antagonist, the secondary and tertiary characters — should be alive — breathing, spitting, shitting, sweating, smacking, and sauntering all over your pages.
2. Why point of view is important
My creative writing professor wispy and leery, his creased ill-fitting tweed coat flapping like a character out of Albert Einstein’s laboratory couldn’t emphasize enough, why your point of view matters.
He would say your POV will dispel or turn your readers into raging fanatics, willing to howl their heads off in the streets, just because you led them through searing barbs of pain, prejudice, disdain, and injustice.
You have five points of view:
First Person, (Me)
First Person Peripheral (“I”),
Second Person (“You”),
Third Person Limited (“He/She/They”), — sticks closely to one character in the story
Third Person Omniscient (“He/She/They”) — shows what many characters in the story are thinking and feeling;
No one is stopping you from switching to a POV that has the greatest impact on the reader.
You can run through all five of them, to wring out your reader’s emotions.
3. Overcome stereotypes and prejudice with the right setting
Characters are defined by their setting. Your characters come from somewhere, your story takes place in these settings.
The relationship between your characters and their setting influences the story’s pace, plot, conflict, theme, dialogue, and action.
Setting builds symbolism, — a slender African boy living in a mud, grass-thatched hut, portrays a picture of poverty, but he might not be poor, that’s because his father owns a thousand heads of cattle worth thousands of dollars if he were to sell them.
Be careful not to stereotype, setting is just one of many influences on a character’s psyche and worldview.
4. Your Style and Word Choice matters
Style is not forced it grows naturally defining each individual writer like a personal signature.
Word choice colors the writers’ prose in a distinctively unique style. Style is an intangible storytelling element that distinguishes how different writers tell their stories.
It occurs at two levels: Line and Global.
At the line level, — style is influenced by word choice, syntax, sentence structure, sentence length, and observational details.
At the global level — Style affects the story’s pace. It’s the presentation of information, the length of scenes, paragraphs, and chapters.
5. An impossibly hard to resolve conflict:
Every story must have conflict.
An insurmountable life-and-death obstacle. A fast-paced teeth-gritting race to the impossible — a heartless killer hot in pursuit. A flood, a disaster, a hurricane, something, anything that seeks to destroy your character.
Conflict causes your pulse to race, your heart to pound, your palms to sweat, and your spine to shiver.
Great conflicts are seemingly hard to resolve; they however transport the reader into the heart of your story.
6. What is it all about?
Theme seeks to answer the question, — What is the story all about?
A boy, a goat herder in the scrub lands of Africa, teaching himself to read, getting a scholarship and coming to America, getting married, and becoming a father to a son who becomes America’s 44th President is a great theme.
And that’s not fiction it’s a narration from former President Barack Obama’s book — Dreams From My Father.
Final word:
These seven elements will help you to write a great story, interwoven with the facts, data, and strong research and presented in palatable phrases and words, that capture the imagination of your audience who will keep reading your articles and coming back for more.
