Everyone loves being able to tell a great story. Whether you’re an acclaimed novelist, an amateur poet, or just the jokester of your friend group, you probably thrive off of being able to articulate a series of events in a captivating way.
In high school, my best friend and I competed in improv competitions where we would have two minutes to plan out a five-minute skit with characters and objects we’d only just been assigned.
“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” — Brandon Sanderson, fantasy and science fiction writer
That was probably the greatest crash course on storytelling you ever could have given me — because slowly but surely we caught on to the formula, the series of rules, that seems to work every time. Here are a few simple truths that made our short stories work: