Elements of a Good Story

How to Tell a Good Story

For your personal essays due next Wednesday, the 24th, your personal story will be the main focus. How you tell that story is up to you, but it should have the basic elements of a plot. Your challenge is to do that within 500 words, the word limit for college application personal essays. You need to find a focus, get to the point, choose very carefully your descriptive, sensory details, and hook the reader in at the beginning. No small feat. We will talk more about how to do this and how to outline how you might choose to tell your story in class tomorrow.

Here is the graph you saw today:

taken from: http://charitywrites.blogspot.com/2011/10/pre-nano-story-structure.html

Again, like in many movies or TV shows, the beginning of your story can start at the climax and flashback to the beginning. How did you get to that predicament? The reader gets hooked in and wants to know the details that led up to the startling climax. Or you can choose to start the story at the beginning and take a more traditional approach building up to the climax and then end with a resolution or reflection of what you learned in the story, or possibly, what you didn’t learn. Those decisions are up to you, the writer!

And here is the advice from Scott Simon about how to tell a good story.

Words from the Wiser…