3 Tactical Approaches for Non-Fiction Writers to Level Up Their Storytelling Skills
Storytelling, like most skills, is something you get better at by sharing stories — not by reading.
As a beginner, I’ve wasted a lot of time — consuming information to avoid wasting time.
It’s the irony I was in for more than 4 years! I had been consuming more information (on how to accelerate my progress as a writer), instead of putting more effort into writing and publishing. Information is cheap; application of it is expensive.
Today, it’s the opposite — I write more often than learning how to write more often.
The following are the tactics I used to improve my storytelling skills…
Approach it like a stand-up comedian
Stand-up comedians are known to test their jokes on a smaller crowd. Whichever works best are the ones they will tell in a bigger crowd. So how do you approach it the same way they do?
You talk about it with other people (online or offline) or publish the first draft version of your story online. Don’t overthink it. Don’t over-edit.
If no one is engaging, then you know that the idea is a flop.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing because now, you know what to avoid next time. What’s good about this is that it pushes you to learn how to reflect and validate your work (as opposed to hiring others to do it for you). Every result you get leaves clues of what to avoid or what you should do more often.
It’s an iterative approach.
You’re probably doing it already (without realizing it).
I’m sure you have one of those stories that you have told many many times because it gained the reaction you were expecting from your audience. And every time you tell that story, it’s slightly better than the last time. Legends exist because they’ve been told and shared with others millions of times (meaning they’ve been iterated millions of times). The point?
The only way to find and refine a good story is by sharing it with others.
Be your favourite’s doppelganger
Do you know why you are so drawn to the work of your favourite writer?
Whatever it is, you can learn to get your audience to get a similar effect from your content. There’s a proven trick to help you understand how your favourite writer writes their content and then apply their approach to improve your content. Plus, it’s free and very simple to apply.
It’s called “Copywork”.
Here’s how I do it:
- Find content that makes you go, “Dang! This is awesome!” in written text.
- Copy it by hand — word for word. Period per period as well as its format. Copy it by hand exactly how it was written.
- Rewrite it again on Google Docs.
- Add comments on the Google Doc version to break down each sentence: its flow, the words, and whatever it is that I observed that makes the content awesome.
- Create a summary of the structure (as if I’m creating a template out of that one content).
- Do that at least 5 times — not every day, not every week either. The frequency depends on how much time I have to study a single content. It takes me 1 hour to copy and 1 hour to break things down.
Now, the magic only happens if you do this intentionally.
It takes me an hour to copy a 1,300-word story/content. Also, expect your hand to hurt. This is why it’s best if you do it intentionally — meaning, take your time. Analyze the sentence as you are copying it.
But the moment you see yourself copying for the sake of copying, then the whole exercise is a waste.
Teach it to ChatGPT like an elementary teacher
Generative AI makes a beginner storyteller like me write like a pro!
This is not so good for seasoned writers because it evens out the market for attention. Now, there’s a lot more competition, and more content to sift through (as an audience) to find good quality content. It clogs the internet even more with regurgitated robot-sounding-like content.
But you see, what I just wrote is exactly what 90% of the internet is complaining about.
What most don’t realize is how ChatGPT also reveals how much you know about a given topic.
You can ask it to do all sorts of things, but its output is highly dependent on the command you are giving it. The more generic the ask is, the more generic its answer will be. “Generic”, in this case, means low-quality output. How do you avoid that? Simple.
Put in the effort to fully understand the topic you are talking about.
Here’s why:
- You’ll be more specific with what you want it to write for you. Don’t just say, “I need you to write me a topic for this article. Make it high-quality”. Instead, you say, “I need you to write about this topic according to the following conditions…”.
- You’re knowledgeable enough to gauge the quality of its output. If you don’t know Math, then you’ll never know if you’re using a faulty calculator. If you don’t know anything about cars, you’ll just agree to whatever the mechanic advises you to fix.
In other words, ChatGPT can test your depth of knowledge on a given topic.
If the output is “meh”, then you know that you have much more to learn about the topic. It’s one thing to generate content on a given topic — gauging whether it’s useful or not is another thing.
Generating content is only half of the battle. Gauging its usefulness is the other half.
Practice in public
Storytelling is just like any other skill — you don’t learn it by consuming content. It requires a lot of publishing your work to be criticized by the public. There isn’t any other way around it.
The more you…
- Test your story by sharing it with others.
- Copywork (to download a good writer’s approach into your brain).
- Get ChatGPT to test how well you know your topic.
…the more likely you’re going to get the kind of feedback that would further improve your storytelling skills.
