Writing Notes

More Similes and Metaphors

Below is an article I actually got off a video editing website. But I thought it applied.

Build a narrative

You may have heard the saying that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end — but not necessarily in that order.

Here's a common narrative arc and key questions to answer that will help you develop your own story.

Our hero needs something, and it's important

Who is the hero of the story?What do they want and why do they want it?What happens if they don't get it?

The stakes should be as high as possible to connect with your audience.

Our hero encounters an obstacle

What's the obstacle?Why is it there?Can they overcome it?If so, how?If not, why? And what must they do instead?

Overcoming the obstacle

How do they approach the obstacle?Is this plan going to work?How do they succeed?

Even if you're working on a project with no clear narrative, you'll probably still find those key storytelling stages to be relevant and helpful to review.

For example, if you're creating a marketing video for a new product that solves a common problem, you can think of the audience as your protagonist. Their story begins with them facing a challenge, unaware of your product and how it can help. From there, your audience takes a journey from discovering and learning about your product to using it to solve their problem — the middle and end of this narrative.

Connect with your audience

The most important way to engage your audience is to add human emotion to the story. You may be showing the origins of a company, the transformation of a character, or your own story of personal discovery — if you can find the human emotions that drive the events in the story, your audience will have a powerful reason to engage.

The characters that your audience will care most about will be the ones that seem most human. Pixar demonstrated this with their famous animated lamp playing with a ball. If characters respond to events with human emotion, audiences will connect with them.

Be clear

Avoid presuming that your audience knows anything that you haven't explicitly shared with them. If there are gaps, you will need to fill them because audiences disconnect when they don't understand what is going on.

Inform, educate, and entertain

The goal of the storyteller is to give to the audience — and the audience needs to feel it. If your audience learns something new, gains a deeper understanding, or is engaged and entertained by your project, they will feel it was time well spent and perhaps they'll come back for more.

Below are my notes from writing class on Wednesday. We were working on similes and metaphors again. This time, we worked more on implementing them into our writing. Enjoy!

Hair

Her hair is a bright, neon, bloody red. Curled as tight as a spring, it bled. A beaded blaze of glowing red. Flames of fire on a power-hungry head.

Name

My name is good. I have lived up to its meaning my whole life. Born a dragon, I was taught from the beginning of my life that we were designed to be a despicable class. Like a brainwashed puppy, I was told we existed only to cause devastation, death, and war on every other species alive. But years later, when I heard the meaning of my name, I determined to change that.

My name means "good war". And so, my whole life, I have striven to prove to the world that I can be good. I can hold in my urgings of violence. Like a mother bear protecting its cubs, I fight only for the right. Only for what I most believe in. Only for what I know to be true. That, I will fight for.

My name is Ardith, and I will fight the good war.

Neighborhood

I don't have a neighborhood. My family lives in a very rural area. If we walk outside to the front yard, we can't see another house. We can see the road, but it is a ways in front of our house. If I go out to the back yard, I can barely see a small shack far beyond our fence. No one lives there. But besides these signs of life and the telephone poles, we live completely in the country.

Once, when I was eleven or twelve, I took a walk to the mailbox that lives a little while away from our house. Up the road and over a hill like a snail's shell. When you get to the mailbox, you can't see the house from there. I took our family dog, who's hair is black, sleek, and sharp like swords. He is a big dog. Friendly, but his bark is a foghorn in the night. Or day.

When we got to the mailbox, there was an old man there with his own little dog. The man looked like a grandpa. I can't remember what the dog looked like, but I remember that it was small. As soon as me and Titan, my dog, got to the mailbox, the old man looked frightened. He started walking away as fast as he could. I yelled after him that my dog was friendly and wouldn't bite, but I don't think he believed me, because he didn't come back. I haven't seen him since.

That is, as hard as it is to believe, the only story about my neighborhood I have from my seven years of living in my house.

My little house, all by itself. All alone, like an island in a large sea of trees. I love it.

Laughter

One time, when I was twelve, I went to a youth conference for my church. It was my first one, so I was a bit nervous. When I got there, though, I found a girl I had met at a short week-long camp for girls in our church (the week before). We had just met, but she was friendly, so we had a good time. Until the closing speaker at the end of the day.

We sat down on the bench and started listening in earnest to the opening song. Then, out of nowhere, I started laughing. Then she started laughing. We started laughing so hard we almost couldn't breathe, and I knew I, for one, was getting a headache from trying to hold the sound from the laughter in and to not start snorting all over the room in the middle of the talk.

That speech was pure torture. It was like trying to hold a thought in your mind when people are talking all around you. It felt so long, and I am sad to say that I remember absolutely nothing from it. Except that.

The time I died of laughter.