Story Lab: EmpoWord

There were many sections in the chapter I read from this article but if you read below you will see that I pick and chose the ones that I found most applicable to bettering my writing ability and ones that I thought were particularly thought-provoking.

Scope

• refers to the boundaries of your story and plot
• I felt like some of my stories contain too broad of a scope and that makes them have a lot of general information instead of good detailed information about the scenarios.
• This made me think of using the phrase "a mile wide and an inch deep" to describe some of my stories
• they contained a lot of information but lacked a good level of depth

Sequence and Pacing

• refers to the order of events of your story and how quickly different situations progress
• This section talked about a story line pattern called In Medias Res
• this is the style where the beginning of your story starts in the middle of the action of the plot then later circles around to explain why all of the action was happening in the first place
• I thought this would be a great technique to try since I don't believe I have used it for any stories all semester
• This may help with my Scope problem because it allows me to begin with the exciting parts without having to trudge through the set-up information where I feel readers may lose a lot of interest

Building Characters

• this section talks about characterization which is something I would like to improve on
• I feel like I do well with directly describing a character but what I want to work on is indirect descriptions
• ask questions like: How do their actions reflect their traits? What's on their mind that they won't share with the world? What is the tone, inflection, and timbre of their voice?
• I usually have my characters hold a dialogue but I rarely describe the way their voice sounds of their inflection or tone.

Dialogue

• one of the most intriguing ideas I read in this section was that dialogue should be telling more than one thing
• it should convey more than one kind of information such as body language in addition to words
• I think my stories are missing a lot of non-verbal dialogue
• I seem to not think about adding more indirect forms of communication such as body language and that causes me to miss out on a very human aspect of communication

Bibliography

EmpoWord: Telling a Story -- found here

Image Information

Photo of an ancient book -- found on flickr