In a new post, Tiffany Yates Martin says that the art of storytelling elevates the story. “The chances of an author inventing an utterly original story to tell are vanishingly small,” she says. “But what you bring to story that makes it original and engaging is the way you tell it.”
That’s why craft is so important. The writing “rules” aren’t arbitrary, but guidelines that have arisen from multiple analyses of what makes a story effective and engaging. Yates Martin encourages writers to analyze story. “It helps authors figure out how the sausage is made, what makes it work and not work, so you can internalize those storytelling concepts and incorporate them into your own,” she writes. Even something as simple as a news feature about a local community event can be filled with tension and conflict.
“When I was a features journalist, many years ago, one of the frequent challenges of the job was to find a way to tell what might feel like potentially dull stories—pieces about cabinet handles, Christmas trees, dragonflies, chandeliers, community events like this one—and make them engaging enough to draw readers in even if they thought the subject matter wasn’t among their interests,” Yates Martin notes.
Analyzing someone else’s writing is potentially both easier and more educational, because we can approach their work objectively, she adds. We can see what’s working or what’s missing, because we are experiencing the story for the first time, rather than through the lens of what we intended. “Dissecting and analyzing story is your writing residency,” Yates Martin says. “You don’t have to analyze this minutely with every single story, or pick out every single craft element one by one (although you can, and it’s a wonderful teaching tool). But you can train yourself to notice what jumps out at you.”
