storytelling 1 - the key questions to answer

Storytelling is a much abused buzz word. In journalism people bandy it about all the time without really sitting down and defining it (a bit like "journalism" itself).

I'm going to try to capture some good and bad examples of the art from the real journalistic world as I add posts to this blog.

Meanwhile it's probably worth setting out a simple set of rules for telling stories:

You need to ask yourself these 4 questions every time you try to tell a story:

1. what is the story really? - keep asking yourself this question, as you gather more information and as you try to tell the story.
2. who is your audience? As accurately as possible - to the nearest person, or small group - who are you trying to tell the story to?
3. where do you start? (Opening lines are the key - get them right and the rest usually follows)
4. how do you stop? (Not only where do you stop telling, but what do you need to leave out?)