Creating A Good Beginning, When Telling A Story:

Creating a good beginning, when telling a story:

Stephanie Raff, one of our professional story tellers who is a member of timp tellers storytelling group did a great presentation on how you can do good beginnings for stories. She says that she studied different patterns of different stories, and has come up with some ideas what makes good stories.

You need to capture your audience in the first 40 seconds. The advantages of having different types of beginnings is that you might be able to cater one beginning to one audience the beginning to the depending upon the circumstances.
A good beginning is one that can take the audience someplace. When you arrive at that place you want to use all the sensory details to make Place to the listener can envision themselves from this.
Another type is to start somewhere in time. For example, Stephanie has a beginning that says: there was a time before blue jeans where fairytales were happening and not being told.
Introduce me, makes a great beginning. This is where you introduce the character. Here’s an example. There was once a mischievous girl who liked playing jokes on other people.
Try beginning with, “what are you talking about?” This is where you start a story with dialogue. A wonderful example might be. Don’t eat the bubblegum. Another way to approach this is you might ask the audience a question. Have you ever blah blah blah.
You might begin a story by singing a song or have a song in the story. You might have your audience sing a song along with you in the story. Alternatives to this is to make a sound that may surprise your audience. One storyteller started their story with the barking of a dog.
Start a story with a general statement that you direct that statement to your personal experience. For example, most people dream of being president me, I dreamed of being on a school football team. Another way to implement this might be “everyone has heard about the big bad Wolf. This story is about the big bad monkey. “
Surprise us by a sound or word that captures the listener, such as”all nuts.” You might use a story to define a word. My personal example. This is my short story of fiddlesticks serenade.
Try framing your story. A story might be within another story. You might tell a story about how you came up with the story. You might tell why you tell the story because of a personal experience. You might tell the story behind the story.
You can also start a story by tradition beginnings, such as once upon a time. I just of a story called déjà vu with things keep happening more than once. Await alter this is about beginning, it was a normal day, but and then have the story. Take a twist
Stephanie had some good suggestions. If you have some ideas on how to start a good audio story or written, please feel free to share it in the comment section this blog.