This document provides examples and guidance for writing narrative stories. It discusses identifying ideas and shaping them into stories with characters, settings, themes, and structured plotlines. It recommends using Freytag's Pyramid as a model for story structure, with exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. The three-act principle for storytelling is also recommended, introducing characters and conflict in Act 1, intensifying complications in Act 2, and resolving the conflict in Act 3. Additional tips include finding external and internal tensions to drive the story, using different points of view, personalizing issues through characters, and focusing on universal themes. Specific storytelling techniques like recovery narratives, life changes, and localizing national problems are

1. After you find your ideas
Examples for writing narratives for a story project.
From Josh Meltzer’s instruction book.

2. You may find ideas but they are not stories
• You need to set up your story, characters, themes, location.
• More importantly, you have to shape or structure your story.
-in a way that allows events to unfold so that audience wants to know
more and more about it.
-tell how your characters, and possibly the audience
are affected.

3. Compare narrative story with reports.
*Freytag’s Pyramid: originally developed to analyzed Greek and Roman plays.
Exposition: Introduction to the characters, the conflict and basic setting.
Rising action: More detail. Reveal the nature of the conflict.
Climax: the moment of greatest tension. Turning point for better or worse.
Falling action: heading to the conclusion. Sometimes continued tension.
Denouement: where complications are resolved and the story comes to end.
*Compare it with the reverse pyramid.

4. Shaping a story (3 act principle)
• Almost all storytellers think of story structure as three act play.
And this is recommended for your project.
• Act 1. Introduce your characters. Let us meet them. Show location
and time. Give a reason why we should care about them.
• Act 2. Reveal the tension/conflict/complication. Usually the
longest part of the story. Let the complication intensify.
• Act 3. Resolve the complication. And finish the story in a satisfying
way. What choices were made in the crisis?

5. Finding out conflict, tension or complication is
the key to turning an idea to a story.
• Tensions can be external and internal
• Example of external tension: Man against fire, Sports team against
odds, women fighting discrimination, police solving mystery,
neighbors battling over property lines and so on.
• Example of internal tension: a person fighting over depression,
tension between desire to connect and to have a safe relationship.

6. How do you identify tension?
1. Asking why questions helps.
2. If tension/conflict/complication is related to wider community
rather than to an individual, the news value increases.
3. Tension does not have to be dramatic nor a matter of life and death.
4. Resolution too. Does not have to be a decisive conclusion.

7. Point of view (POV)
• First-person POV. e.g. Grey’s anatomy. Many of bio videos.
• Second-person POV. Direct address by the actors to the audience.
e.g. Think of on-spot TV anchors.
• Third-person POV. Most common in storytelling. Audience are
detached observers.
• Character POV. One character is dominant in a series of stories. e.g.
sit com Seinfeld.
• Conflicting POV. Mixture of different point of view.

8. Character driven story :Most stories, though
not all, have strong characters.
1. “personalize the issue type”.
Example: The young man with Prader-Willi syndrome is a sympathetic
character that lets you feel his pain. Your character may be someone
who can personalize a complex issue such as health care or
environmental pollution.
Exercise: Note that the following story personalized a rare disease.
Identify the three part acts.
“Hungry: Living with the Prader-Willi Syndrome”
https://vimeo.com/5717103
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5BSpxvqL2A

9. Other examples.
• The day after she died from cancer, Sheila Wessenberg became
eligible for Medicare. That is only one of the many personal ironies
and missed opportunities for proper medical care. - See more at:
http://kobreguide.com/denied/#sthash.A3CDz47B.dpuf
• Tackling homelessness.
‘Sofa’ by Wayne Richard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPrnDD51Y5s&list=PL7AC307C55
35EF045

10. • Example story: Robert Krulwich and Will Hoffman, NPR Online
• To tell the complicated story of health care for NPR Online, Krulwich
and Hoffman zeroed in on the personal tales of a few individuals.
• http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/06/01/121158190/a-
locksmith-s-tale-and-other-health-care-stories

11. 2. Bio story: Second type of character driven
story
There are cases that characters have strong personality that you have
to do a bio story.
• In this case, issues become the backdrop of a bio story.
• So you have to make a decision whether to shape the story around
issue or personality.
• Example: Turtle man of Kentucky.
http://www.davidstephenson.com/2008/12/24/the-turtle-man/

12. In some cases: generalize what you see
around you
• Example story: Age of Uncertainty
• https://vimeo.com/1229405
• Photo by Josh Meltzer, Roanoke Times
• The photographer saw a woman who assists her fellow church
members. A colleague encouraged him to think more broadly about
what this lady did a story on caring for elderly people in general.

13. Universal themes to a story
• Stories about everybody’s common experiences. Love, rivalry, death,
birth, or big events like presidential election.
• By presenting a micro scope type story, you connect Online dating
story can be turned into “What does a relationship in college mean?”

14. 1. Contests & Sports
• Competitions has natural built in story arcs
• Conflict is obvious
• Easy to find narratives
• Example: two men using competitive narratives. Content is about
their resolution to win.
• https://vimeo.com/9865278

15. 2. Recovery
• Also provides natural narrative
• Give the suspense of unknown results. Build up tension.
Remember what you learned from storytelling structure.
• Get inspiring quotes
• http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-jewish-addict-ss-
htmlstory.html

16. 3. Changing a life
• Journey style
• Follow the same subject.
• Getting the natural narrative is the key.
• http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com//2009/06/16/showcase-7/

17. 4. Death or Dying
• Audience are naturally drawn
• Death is a universal experience of all people.
• Powerful as it is. Do not over-dramatize.
• http://www.theconcentra.org/en/nominees/2010/casey-
kauffman-baby-feras/

18. 5. Localizing a national problem
• Use ordinary people for a highly reported cases.
• Often present different cases.
• Sometimes require time and skill
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mFcGJyUxJk