Story Writing Tips
Sometimes the hardest part of telling (especially writing) a personal story can be simply getting started. Here’s a few tips to help you jump in.
Picking a topic for your story:
- You DO have something to say
- Start by thinking of thing things you’ve done online. Do you use twitter to get answers to questions? Do you engage in an hobby community? Have you reached out for medical support to an online support group?
- Think about a particularly emotional or exciting or engaging experience you’ve had in an online space.
Here are some stories I’ve seen or heard about over the years:
- A woman suffering from infertility issues makes it through multiple rounds of drugs and disappointment, but turns to blogging and the support of her reads to get through it.
- Hobbyists who only know each other online meetup in person once a year and interact as though they see each other every day.
- Parents whose children have rare medical issues turn to community groups to find more information and vet their doctors.
- Business professionals change the nature of their work by connecting to colleagues around the world via community spaces.
- Through the use of social networks, adopted children find and then meet their birth parents.
Writing your story:
- Just start writing.
- Seriously, just start writing. It’s easier to get something ugly down and edit it than it is to make it perfect as you write.
- Talk through the story you want to tell with someone. Hearing it out loud and hearing yourself trying to explain it to someone else helps to focus you.
- Use your own voice.
- Have a conversation with the reader.
- There are no “correct” storytelling styles, just tell it like you see best.
- The best submissions balance two goals: personal storytelling and emotional reflection. Don’t just tell us a story, tell us why it’s important and how it affected you.
- Like {fray} once told it’s users: the site is “about personal storytelling. That means you should take us back to a moment that mattered to you and tell us all about it, from beginning to end, as if we were going through it ourselves. Your job is to make a stranger feel what you felt.”
Formatting your story:
- Choose a title that makes sense for others – you might want to include your name or the main theme of your story.
