Saturday, April 19, 2008

As you know, one of the Three Most Important Things I Teach is how to refine your story by simply telling it out loud.

I was mentioning that advice to someone I might story edit, and she mentioned recording it.

I think telling your story to someone is still probably the best way to do it. If you tell your story to a tape recorder, you may get hung up on how stupid you sound to yourself, or how you're phrasing things. It might be easier to simply tell it out loud to yourself without recording it.

But this is a blog about writing tools, and this is a variation on the tool. Try telling your story to people you know. Try telling it to yourself. And try telling it to a tape recorder and then listening to it. (No doubt there's some way you can use your computer, right, Hive Mind?) See which works best for you!

And then do it.

Labels: craft

10:41 AM

2 Comments:

I refined my stories by telling them even before I read your book, but I did it more consciously after. I've found it useful too -- thanks for validating the idea with the book.

I haven't tried the variations, because I hadn't thought of them (or read them), but maybe I'll give them a try too.

By  Unknown, at 8:54 AM  

Having read your book first, I started telling people script and for me at least, it was important to see their body language and hear what they were saying as well as what they were not. "I looked for glossed over looks on their faces, anytime they looked unsure or bored as well as listened for the "Uhhhs or and?""I found a few holes in the script and also where I needed to turn the dial up to "eleven." Still working and re-writing. M

By  Matt, at 11:30 AM  

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