Tag: storytelling

How to use brain science to tell be stories: Story Genius

Your novel is only half the story. The other half already happened.

That’s from the 2016 book from literary agent and story consultant Lisa Cron called “Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere).”

I love ‘writing about writing,’ and this book is one of the most commonly cited works among writer groups. Because of that, lots of writers have opinions on the book. For my money, it did just what it aims to do, and I appreciated Lisa’s approach. I’ll recommend it just like it was recommended to me.

This book includes a bigger concept that I found insightful: The reason stories attract so much attention is humans evolved to seek self-awareness and understanding from them. “The purpose of story — of every story — is to help us interpret, and anticipate, the actions of ourselves and others,” Cron wrote. “We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

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Story Shuffle 4: SNOW audio is live

Earlier this month, my friend Brian James Kirk hosted the fourth Story Shuffle, with a theme of SNOW.

Now, the audio from all 11 stories are up. Listen to mine here or find the others here.

My story was on attending a local high school basketball game where I grew up as an excited middle schooler. As a promise to myself, I prepared notes for my story the first time. I was interested to see if I felt it improved my storytelling, which was ultimately my goal in starting the event series.

So, I dashed down 10 bullet points a few hours before the event, gave it a once over and took to telling the story fresh and un-aided later.

One thing I learned in the ‘research’ phase was that the high school gymnasium of my childhood is named for a former coach and ‘the father of wrestling in New Jersey.’

In addition to the RSS feed, you can follow Story Shuffle on Twitter and Facebook.

Story Shuffle on Authority audio live

In June, I introduced Story Shuffle, the themed, first-person storytelling event.

Two months later, we hosted a second, as per our every other month schedule for the friendly story sharing night. We’re shooting to host the third in September. It’s ready to grow, so now is when we invite big shots like Eric Smith.

The theme was AUTHORITY.

Listen to mine here or the others here.

In addition to our RSS feed, you can follow Story Shuffle on Twitter and Facebook.

Story Shuffle: introducing a themed, first-person storytelling event

I like projects.

I enjoy pointing out skills, traits, knowledge sets or the like that I lack and want to develop and finding practical, fun, realistic ways to develop them as best I can — in small, attainable steps.

I love storytelling.

I want to be a better, more captivating, more experienced storyteller. I also bought a house back in December and was hunting a more original way to christen it.

With that in mind, a couple Saturdays ago, I introduced Story Shuffle to a dozen friends, mostly a cohort of former colleagues from my college newspaper days. It’s something of a themed, first-person storytelling event with lots of tasty food.

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