Live Literature Mistake #4: When You Tell a Story, Your Friends Get Lost & Confused.
These quick tips will show them the way.
I love the song playing as I write.
“You could really have it all, if you learn to pass the ball.”
-Phony
I’ve been producing storytelling shows in Chicago for over 11 years and boy do people suck at transitions. Moving the plot from one scene to the next. So it must be hard. BUT!
Transitioning a story looks harder to fix than it is.
Tiktok, YouTube, and movies have popularized the jump cut so much that audience’s look forward to them. They can follow from one scene to the next and their brains are quick to latch on to specific details that tell them, “Oh, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.”
Use this to your advantage.
3 Cues to Help Anchor Your Scenes in Time and Place.
1. Tell the audience how old you were and give details that were emblematic of that time.
While you want to have a hook, and jump into the action. You also want to set the time and place within the first paragraph of your story. So, you might open with a quick heart stopping line like, “The headlight shattered as it slammed into the stop sign spinning me out of control.”
After you stop the mental scroll and have the audience’s attention, you need to quickly add details that answer these anticipated audience questions.
- How old is the protagonist? (How long ago was this story?)
- Who are the other characters?
- Where is the setting?
At the beginning of each scene, ask yourself, “What question will the audience immediately have?” Then answer that question. Alternatively, let the audience know, those questions don’t matter for this story.
2. When telling stories out of linear order, use transition phrases like, “Three weeks ago…”
Flashbacks and time jumps are effective at allowing you to start the story inside the inciting incident. After which, you can backfill details via scene changes.
In a movie, they have wipe transitions and dissolves as well as audio cues to help the audience understand that we are moving to a new scene of the story that’s also at a different time. Don’t be afraid to use these terms to help guide a media savvy audience as to what’s going on.
“Flashback to 7 weeks ago, I hadn’t even bought my first car.”
“Four months later, I was still in jail, and hadn’t heard from Susan.”
“Now I’m twenty-two, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and realizing the splendor.”
When you change the scene, make sure you’re following the tips in Mistake #3 which we talked about last week. You’re anchoring the audience in scene, not just once, but every time you move in time or place.
3. Use sensory Cues and repetitive language to help the audience keep track of scenes.
If you are moving back and forth to the same places and times repeatedly throughout a story, you can color code them, to help the audience understand.
Maybe you focus the audience on a specific object in each place. Perhaps it’s a clock, or a woman’s bright red hair, maybe it’s the grating lilt of a professor’s voice in contrast to your father’s husky wisdom bombs.
If you always go back to the same image or sound, and only use it in a specific scene, your audience will catch on, and be able to follow you from place to place.
What’s the number 1 reason new storytellers struggle with transitions?
That’ll be answered in Mistake #5 so hit that follow button and subscribe because this series is going deep with the 101 Easiest Storytelling Mistakes to fix.
