🥑 your story needs bedrock

Your story needs bedrock—and I’m not talking about spicy scenes.

Every story is built on stuff. For a story to be compelling, the reader needs to care about that stuff to an extent. But that stuff should matter even more to the person communicating the story.

Today, let’s talk about storytellers and listeners.

Here’s John Truby (The Anatomy of Story) on what story is.

You are a storyteller. You’re playing a “verbal game” where the prize is the audience’s attention. Creating a story is more than relaying what happened; it’s “selecting, connecting, and building a series of intense moments” (Truby). Literal truth is for the history books; the storyteller highlights, embellishes, foreshadows, maneuvers, withholds, and executes the stuff we call story.

Now let’s talk about your audience. They want to feel the stuff, the emotions and events that make up the story. They also want to think, to unravel the puzzle you’ve constructed by twisting the stuff into knots and fitting it onto the pages.

And therein lies the relationship: The audience trusts you to help them think and to help them feel.

A practical exercise: as a storyteller, consider these three questions:

“…what someone did…”: What events and actions do you want to show your audience?

“…to get what he wanted…”: What desires do you want to show your audience?

“…and why.”: What motivations do you want to show your audience?

Once you write those answers down, you have your stuff.

Because if you want your audience to care about your stories, you should write stories you care about.

Next time: turn that into a premise.

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^{Avocado Bites is a publication of Avocado Tree Press, LLC, that helps you revise your stories one bite at a time. We love working with indie and traditionally published authors on fiction manuscripts—and if that’s you, welcome to our target audience.}

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