Find your Storytelling Medium

Before one can begin the search for the ideal medium or format to tell their story, they must first decide what that story is in the first place. Perhaps you already have a full-fledged story that you’ve written out several times only to find yourself completely stuck, or maybe you just have an idea and nothing more. Either will suffice, so long as you have a story in mind that you want to tell. Once you have that figured out, use the space below to explain what your story is. You can do this via pictures, a synopsis or just a list of words explaining what you want your story to be. All that matters is that it embodies your story

Now that you have written down what your story is, it’s time to further define it so as to make our work later easier. No matter what format you elect to use, there will always be some sort of structure to your story, even if you are writing a “slice of life” piece or something where nobody changes, there is still a general arc to your story. With that in mind, it’s time to divide your story into three key pieces: the beginning, the middle, and the end. Sometimes you’ll see these pieces referred to as acts, but for the sake of transparency between all forms we will just refer to them with their more general titles for now.

The Beginning

This is where things first start, providing background information, posing questions, showcasing main themes, as well as introducing the main plot. Perhaps you don’t know how to start your story yet - that’s why you’re here maybe. If that’s the case, don’t worry. Use the space below to list off what themes you want to cover, characters to introduce or any other information you’ll want people to know in the beginning of your piece.

The Middle

Often considered the most tricky part, the middle is actually where the majority of the story happens. If you are short for ideas, try listing off tasks your character will need to do in order to achieve their goal or brainstorm in other ways. It’s just important that you have a tangible middle of your story to work with, as it makes up most of every piece. Stories can be without beginnings, but they certainly cannot be without the middle.

The End

The grand finale, what everyone has been waiting for and the real reason you’ve been writing - the end. Maybe you haven’t figured this part out yet and that’s okay. It’s more important to know what you are saying with your story, what message you are trying to say or moral you’re trying to teach, or if even that trips you up, what mood or feeling you want to evoke, than knowing the exact logistics for your plot. While it may seem like you want to know more going forward about your own story, the truth is it’s far more important to know what you want to say when choosing your format.

Even if you claim that you have no experience with prose and are not a "gifted writer," you still use prose nearly everyday, though perhaps not as beautifully as you would like. But this is not an exercise to write beautifully. Nobody writes like that until many revisions have been made. This is instead an exercise in thinking about your story as a novel or short story. More than likely, this is where you first began with your idea. When people think of writers, they usually imagine the novelists and poets and forget the rest. Sometimes the playwrights make it in there, but the other two are often long forgotten. As a result, ideas are you usually considered first as books for most writers because it's the avenue we were taught to follow. And that's okay. We just need to get that way of thinking onto the paper and out of our heads first and foremost. We will begin the exercise by asking ourselves:

"What does my story look like as a novel?" It's a seemingly simple question - at first

Maybe after writing that out, your story looks exactly as it did before. Thinking about the specifics and what it brings to your story is something difficult to get used to. We are going to try our very best to imagine what makes our stories unique. So with that in mind, let's dive deeper into what about turning your story into a novel or short story would make it unique.

· What insights can we gain from reading the story to ourselves?

· What is a way you can play with the narration and who is narrating? Remember, even third-person narrators have a voice?

· What are some new subplots or side characters you can introduce without worrying about the length of your story?

Now that you’ve considered all of the above questions, ask yourself one more time: "What does my story look like as a novel?”

Many of us let ideas just sit in our minds without ever actually executing them. But if you are to become a storyteller in any format, you must put pen to paper. It seems obvious, but ideas are cheap. And you just spent a very long time working with one idea. So do yourself a favor and pledge to not only tell your story, but to give yourself a deadline to finish the first draft and a reward!

prose is written language in the original form, without meter or other formatting restrictions. It can exist in various storytelling forms, whether it's a novel, short story or even a tiny story. It is incredibly flexible in how it can be used and often incorporated into other storytelling formats. However, more often than not, prose is a type of story that is consumed via reading, be it individually or out loud to an audience. Additionally, when we write prose, we are writing it as the final piece, so in this way prose offers the most artistic possession because it is not being passed forward to become a film or a play.