Context

When thinking about telling a story to connect with your audience, you need to think about the contextually / context / contextual of your audience and the outcome you’re trying to achieved / achieving / achieve. Who is your audience? Will feel excited about your story? How would you like them to feel when they read it? Thinking about your audience’s context will help you pick a story that will connect with them emotionally. It will enable you to capture their attention in the first few seconds.

Outcome

And what do you want to be the outcome? Do you want the audience to open their minds, to change a behaviour or to think about a problem in another way? Use the context of your audience and the outcome that you’re looking for to decide the kind of story you’ll need and the idea you want the audience to take away with them once they have finished reading.

Create the experience

When setting the scene at the beginning of your story, think about how you will put people in the time and place of the setting. You can achieve this by describing time-specific / unspecified / specifically fashions and music to denote the time, describing the weather conditions and mentioning street names to denote the specific place.

Brevity

We’ve all endured a story that is too long and rambles on. Humans are storytellers by nature, but it is important to keep in mind that a story can quickly become very boring. Be sure to keep it brief – deploying only the detail that is pertinent. What to include and not to include is a big question, but a general rule of thumb is to only include whatever drives the narrative forward. If possible, reveal character within or through an action. For absolute beginners some good advice is to cut and keep cutting until you have bare bones only. That’s your story!

Use conflict

Compelling stories always contain some kind of conflict or challenge. These can be people against people, against circumstantial / circumstance / circumstantially or against nature. It is through conflict, errors / erroneous / erred and challenges that you learn, so be sure to include some kind of conflict that your audience can appreciate. Your audience wants to understand and relate to the conflict that your characters experience and discover how they resolve it.