Beyond the Pyramid

Usually my writing style screams feature so let me tell you I was pretty excited to read this chapter about narraration and telling a story to build a climax instead of giving it all away in the FIRST sentence. I know there's a need for it to save reader's and listener's time but its simply not entertaining to alwaysss use the inverted pyramid!!

One of my favorite things to do is to help the reader "see." I think it so important to write a scene by capturing the five senses. Throughout the chapter I learned the most important things to move a story along. You must create vivid scenes, let the actors speak to each other through dialogue, foreshadow important events and relate memorable anecdotes. And let me say that doing all of those things successfully is not easy but its what makes a story.

Foreshadowing is the technique of giving hints about whats coming. Just like in a movie, its a tease. It's so crucial to a story that it often determines if the reader will read on and its usually the most inticing. The ultimate "treats" are the anecdotes or the stories embedded in the stories. As the book says you are most likely to remember the anecdotes more than anything else in the story. However often they are sometimes hard to draw out of a source. The best tip I got was to phrase your questions to get stories.

When you use all of these elements you usually move out of the structure of the inverted pyramid. One way to use it is service journalism- MY FAVORITE! It refers to the "news you can use" and are usually sections like travel, food, and entertainment. Another really cool way to write is using the focus structure which "offeres the writer a powerful method of reducing statistics to a level readers can relate to and understand." To me this is also something I like to do because as a reader myself, I know that ten million deaths dont mean anything to me unless I'm emotionally connected somehow.

Writing the set up can be tricky because there are so many components. It consists of the transition to the theme paragraph, the theme paragraph, foreshadowing, the "so what" and the to-be-sure. If you dont present them efficiently you risk losing your reader early on. The "so what" tells the readers exactly why they should care, its the impact, its the relevance. The to-be-sure is also to be added to a story. Writers should acknowledge that there are two or more sides to a story. Then you must move onto the body.

When writing the body I learned its essential to maintain your readers interest with frequent examples to support your main points. By mixing the facts and the story line together you can keep your readers paying attention. I thought it was pretty clever to think of your story infrastructure as an interstate highway. Its a thread that moves you from one location to another and if you have to exit to introduce other ideas and information, they should be smooth just like transitions!

Lastly, I hadn't thought about it this way but stories should end, not just stop. Tie backs help complete the story and make it go full circle. Anecdotes, dialogues, scenes and good quotes all can wrap up a story quite well so I am hoping to learn to take advantage of that technique in my stories.

After reading this chapter I'm really excited because I know there are a lot more uniqe ways to write besides the inverted pyramid which can be stiffling for writers like me!