Strategies in Storytelling

Storytelling uses specific strategies to amplify the tension, or convey emotions, develop themes and create meaningful characters with fully developed character arc. There are numerous books out there that discuss these techniques, but these how-to books require a lot of writing and literature experience in order to make any sense of them. As you may know, I didn’t start out as a writing or literature person, so I struggled with these books. My only option was to develop my own strategies which I used in my 24 novels. 

This talk with introduce students, at a high level, to character development, how to name them, how to describe them without getting too verbose, as well as to talk about the most important part; the Character Arc. 

Also discussed are strategies to keep increasing the tension so that we can keep the reader turning the page. These strategies will involve verb choice, sentence structure, and sentence length to name a few. The talk with also talk about plot at a very high level, as that can be a long discussion on its own. 

Many online resources will be presented to the young writers as well as my own writing tutorials which deal with these strategies.

Some slides from the presention are below.