The Secret Sauce of Compelling Stories: Unlocking the Flow and Ingredients of Great Fiction

What Makes A Story Compelling?

If you’re a story teller or aspire to be one, remember this. The main reason why stories become classics are because they put a true mirror to the life of a given time period. Great stories are relevant and universal. They show how and why life changes for most of us.

Compelling stories showcase the vulnerability of humans and the fragility of life. They also have these four qualities. Brevity, Honesty, Humor and Courage. These stories must grab you while reading, haunt you after reading and change you forever.

Story Flow Of A Compelling Story

• Life is in balance, nothing new or eventful.
• Inciting incident: Life goes out of balance.
• To restore balance, the hero’s subjective expectations crash into an cruel objective reality. This is the fundamental conflict.
• Call on the protagonist to work harder with less resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite overwhelming risks, and ultimately prevail or fade.

Inciting Incident –> Pole 1: Hero Acquires Burning, Life and Death Intention –> Obstacles –> Compelling Page Turning: Overcoming Obstacles Drama To Reveal Success Or Failure –> Pole 2: Success Or Failure Tension

Be A Great Storyteller © Anna Vital

Be A Great Storyteller © Anna Vital

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Course: The Art of Storytelling by Pixar

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar/start

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules for Writing

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Difference Between Story Reading and Story Telling

Story telling is very different than story reading.

1. When you’re telling a story, you should have a firm grasp on what the story is about.
2. While narrating, you must keep the nature of the crowd in mind. You will have to use the language that will speak to the crowd.
3. No two people read a story alike, and that’s because everyone interprets things differently.
4. Use your language to convey the message, and spark imagination. For example, if you say “imagine the color blue”, everyone will have their own version of blue in their head.

On The Art Of Writing

Here are two books that describe the art of writing in fascinating detail.

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Kinds Of Ironies in Stories

* DRAMATIC IRONY:
In this type of irony, the audience knows more about the immediate or future circumstances than the characters themselves. Ex: A character is going to meet a person that the audience already knows is dead.

* SITUATIONAL IRONY:
The most used form of irony, the irony of situation happens when there’s a discrepancy between the result the character expects to the actual outcome.

Words Of A Compelling Story

• Start With The Setting
• Few words as first sentence, but packed with info.
• Parachute it. Start the story from the middle.
• Show, Don’t Tell. Example: Hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
• Paint A Picture

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POV

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Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

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On How To Write.

Writing Hacks, Compelling Story Telling And Essays On Life

“To me, a short story is a conversation between writer and reader, since only the writer can speak, she must take care to respect the reader, to avoid telling him what to think, to say as little as possible and imply the rest with metaphor, ellipses, allusive dialogue, pauses.” ~ Edith Pearlman on Writing