I’ve heard it’s a very good place to start…

Now that I’ve gotten that stuck in everyone’s head, how about we move on to our topic, today:

32 The art of telling stories

Do you consider yourself a good storyteller?

As bloggers, we tell stories with each post. Simply put, a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Some masterful storytellers can tell a story by starting at the end and working their way back–but that takes a tremendous amount of skill.

Me, I can usually find a pretty good beginning (certainly better than the old dark-and-stormy-night trope), get in all the necessary details for the middle but by the end, I’m usually wrapping things up abruptly. I need to work on my endings.

This is probably why I found the comics for the cookbook more difficult to write and execute compared to my webcomics that can go on as long as they need to.

Even still, comics need a beginning and an end. The middle is fuzzy ground in humor, where the important parts are the set-up and the punchline. Still, a middle can draw out the anticipation a bit, so to overlook it would be doing yourself and your readers a disservice.

When working on longer stories–novel length, for instance–the best advice I’ve ever read was back in my NaNoWriMo days. If you ever get stuck, just ask yourself (or your character): and then what happened?

A fellow blogger that serializes her own stories, Miranda of A Duck in Her Pond, she could probably teach us all a thing or three about writing whimsical stories that keep us, the readers, asking just that question.

But now I have a question for you:

Who do you read when you want a really great story?