We all have stories to tell. They can bring people together and connect us through the way we feel and respond to them. Storytelling happens in many situations ranging from kitchen-table conversation to religious rituals, from stories in the workplace to marketing campaigns. When we tell stories we want our target audience to lean in and listen.
How can you structure your stories to ensure they effectively communicate the main points?
Make sure you use plain English so the audience can understand quickly and easily. Even members of the United States federal government agree with this philosophy. They passed the Plain Writing Act of 2010, designed to promote clear Government communication that the public can understand and use. Also consider other approaches, like flash fiction, where you remove unnecessary detail. Even very short stories using these strategies should communicate the same things as regular short stories. Word selection and use become incredibly important.
How does this work in practice? I learned something from one of my creative writing students this week. During our virtual tutoring session, the middle school student from India told me her family was celebrating Diwali, the Festival of Lights. She very kindly explained the holiday and celebration. I was fascinated, and because I wanted to apply her interest to the focus for this session, I asked her if she wanted to write a story about how her family was planning to celebrate, including all the elements of a good story (i.e., characters, setting, plot, action/challenge/drama, and resolution). In our previous session we started talking about flash fiction. I told her about an adult student I once had that insisted on knowing exactly how many words I expected in an assignment. She had just come from a flash fiction course where the teacher insisted on a specific number of words per story—not one more or one less. On this day, I suggested my young student keep her story about Diwali very short, limiting it to 100 words. She agreed and was determined to meet that challenge.
I watched the student type in her story about Diwali celebrations, changing strategies several times. I suspected she was trying to keep the story very short, while still including the key elements of a good story. When I asked her about it, she said she wanted to do her best to write a short story first, and then she would count the words when she had a complete draft. Her first draft was 131 words.
This middle school student stayed very focused and identified places to cut words from her draft. We discussed various strategies to use when searching for unnecessary words. She also deleted one sentence and merged a couple of others. At one point she had just under 100 words, and found places to put a couple ideas back in. Finally, she had exactly 100 words. I asked her if she thought anything important was missing when she compared the original 131-word draft to the 100-word draft. She seemed very surprised, but pleased, to report nothing important was missing.
I gave my student another challenge. The 100 words focused on the celebration activities but did not give information about the history or meaning of Diwali. The student accepted my challenge to include this information in her 100-word draft, adding no more than 25 words. Again, she stayed focused and worked hard to identify the best place to add the information, blend a couple more sentences, and do some minor editing. This time I asked her how her 125-word draft compared to the original 131-word draft. She was impressed, and pleased, to see that the final draft contained more information than the original draft using fewer words.
When I first learned about the government’s desire to use plain English I was surprised, impressed, and annoyed (as a contractor getting paid to write reports and training guides). When I learned about flash fiction, I wondered why anybody would put such a limit on storytelling, and how hard it would be to tell a complete story in a prespecified number of words. During another delivery of one of my storytelling courses we were talking about flash fiction, and I decided to give it a try. It did not take me long to figure out how difficult (and in my mind, impossible) that was!
What do you think? Will these strategies work for you? Share your best 100 word story about one of your traditional holiday celebrations in the comments below.
