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How to hold the listener’s attention – Free Story Teller Course

Hello friends!

This is our 2nd Lesson of the Free Storyteller Course. In this lesson, we have a very specific goal, which is to help you hold your listener’s or reader’s attention by telling a story. And, incredible as it may seem, many, many people don’t know how to do this! Fortunately, it is not such a difficult task. Follow our text and, at the end, you will know how to capture, attract and maintain attention in storytelling.

Didn’t you read Lesson 1?

See here – What is a story?

Let’s start by talking about written stories. A book or a text (like this one) starts to call attention by its title. A well-constructed title can arouse the reader’s attention to start reading.

Let’s look at some examples of famous books:

– How to make friends and influence people

– Rich dad and poor dad

– The interpretation of dreams

– The 7 Habits of Really Effective People

– The myth of freedom

All these books are bestsellers in psychology and literature called Self-Help.

See the difference here – Difference Between Psychology and Self Help

Regardless of the content – ​​we could use examples from other areas – we see that there is a certain pattern to awaken the reader’s interest. In the first book, “How to win friends and influence people”, we have a problem and the title already implies that, after reading it, you will be able to make more friends. It is similar to the title of the text you are reading now – “How to capture the listener’s attention” – the word how brings the idea of ​​method. The title is therefore a proposal whose center is the promise to solve a problem.

In the second book, we established two types of parents, one who is rich and one who is poor. It is similar to putting a number (we will see in the fourth book). The title also creates a dichotomy, a polarity between being rich and being poor and immediately draws our attention to what it would be like to be raised by each of the characters.

The third title, The Interpretation of Dreams, presents a proposal for solving a problem that is elliptical, that is, it is hidden. By the title, we can already see that the author defends the thesis that dreams can be interpreted. It also arouses our curiosity to know how to interpret dreams.

The fourth book – “7 Habits of Really Effective People” – is a classic example of lists. People love lists like the top 5 or top 10. The number 7 is also considered by many to be an important number and we are already curious to know which of these 7 habits we have or can acquire.

And Skinner’s Myth of Freedom is also an excellent example of behavioral psychology on a specific problem, freedom. The word myth refers to a doubt. Is freedom a myth? Are we trapped? Are we conditioned? Does the outside world limit us in our decisions?

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What we have in common in all these titles is the attempt to arouse the readers’ interest, attention and curiosity. Self-help books are better at creating curiosity, aren’t they? The need to attract attention quickly is clear, both in titles and in texts, articles, subjects.

Well, the title is just the beginning. So far we were talking about written history, okay? The next step is the same for both oral history and written history, which are the first sentences, which should arouse curiosity as soon as possible. First impression remains.

Every good story starts to show from the beginning how someone (the protagonist) has to deal with a problem that he can’t get away from. Since the problem cannot be ruled out, the person has to deal with it and in this process he changes, transforms and learns.

For example, in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, after a brief introduction, chapter 1 begins as follows:

“For some time I hesitated whether to open these memories at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether to put my birth or my death first. Assuming that common usage is to begin at birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a dead author, but a dead author, for whom the grave was another cradle; the second is that the writing would thus be more gallant and newer. Moses, who also told of his death, did not put it in the entrance, but in the cape; radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.

That said, I expired at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon in the month of August, 1869, at my beautiful farm in Catumbi. I was about sixty-four years old, solid and prosperous, I was single, I had about three hundred contos and I was accompanied to the cemetery by eleven friends. Eleven friends!” 🇧🇷

Right from the start, we have an unusual situation that the protagonist, Brás Cubas, will have to deal with: death itself! We were immediately drawn to find out more, curious as to how the story continues.

If we are writing a story or telling it orally we have to instigate our listener or reader right away, with the following question in mind: “What problem will the protagonist have to deal with?”

We have to pass the story with surprise elements (we’ll talk more about it in later Lessons), but always keeping coherence and internal logic, even if the story can be fantastic. With that, we have to take into account three basic rules:

– Whose story is it? I mean, who are we talking about?

– What’s up? It could also be, in certain types, why is this happening?

– What is at stake?

The tendency of all of us when listening to a story is to connect with the protagonist. We can feel sympathy for the hero or heroine or we can feel dislike for the villain. Whether by approaching or moving away, we will instantly pay attention to the protagonist or the central characters of the plot.

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We will see in a later Lesson that the reader and listener tend to feel what the protagonist feels. Even if the experience is completely foreign to us, we connect with the story through the character.

Think of a horror movie where the protagonist goes to a haunted house. Although the experience may never have happened, that is, seeing ghosts, poltergeists, hauntings, we are being led and without realizing it we are inside the film, feeling as much fear as the character who is about to open a door…

It is also interesting to observe how movies and novels build the character by presenting specific elements. Thus, the story can start with the character in a classroom, or talking to his family, or wearing an outfit that will guide us to know who is who in the narrative.

What’s happening?

For us to be left wanting to know what will happen next, we have to know what is happening now. Time is fundamental in the narrative and human creativity is limitless to place the past, present and future in alternative orders.

For example, Homer’s Odyssey tells the story of Ulysses’s return from the Trojan War to his home and how this return is troubled and full of adventures. The beginning of history is not linear, it does not start at the beginning. It shows Ulysses already halfway there, on the island of Calypso. What is happening is already the middle of the story… but that doesn’t matter: something is happening! Something that will capture our attention. Nothing worse than a story where nothing happens, right?

Another magnificent example is One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Marquez:

“MANY years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that long-ago afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Macondo was then a village of twenty mud and bamboo houses, built on the bank of a river with clear waters that rushed through a bed of polished stones, white and huge as prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked a name and to mention them one had to point with a finger. Every year, around the month of March, a family of ragged gypsies would plant their tent near the village and, with a great uproar of whistles and drums, would make known their new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A corpulent gypsy, with a rough beard and hands like a sparrow, who introduced himself by the name of Melquíades, gave a truculent public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the wise alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metallic ingots, and everyone was amazed to see that the cauldrons, the pots, the tongs and the stoves fell from their places, and the wood creaked with the desperation of nails and screws trying to free themselves, and even long-lost objects appeared where they had been most sought, and dragged themselves in turbulent rout behind Melquíades’s magical irons. “Things have a life of their own”, proclaimed the gypsy with a rough accent, “everything is a matter of awakening your soul.” José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went further than the ingenuity of nature, and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it was possible to use that useless invention to extract gold from the earth” (…)(

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Right at the beginning of the novel, one of the most fantastic books ever written, we see that Gabriel Garcia Marquez shows that a lot is happening to the character Aureliano Buendía and his father José Arcadio Buendía. Both what will happen years later (being in front of the firing squad) and remote events from the past like discovering ice and seeing his father try to find gold with the magnet.

– What is at stake?

Many years ago, I was making up a story from scratch for a nine-year-old cousin. I was already studying these issues of narrative in college, however, everything was new to me. In my new children’s story, I improvised and made a fatal mistake: in the story everything worked out, everything fit together and there wasn’t a problem to be solved. This made my cousin not so interested in listening to me anymore.

This mistake I made cannot happen! A story has to have a problem, a difficulty, a risk, an element that gets in the way. If we were to analyze all the romantic comedy films that have been released without a doubt, we would see the following progress:

1) The couple knows each other

2) The couple falls in love

3) There is a problem that makes the relationship difficult, such as having to move to another city, a third person appearing, an illness

And it is at this point 3 that we can understand that what is at stake is the risk of the couple not continuing together.

4) Most of the time, the couple manages to solve the problem and live happily ever after

Now, imagine a story that doesn’t have a problem. This will make sure nothing happens. Or at the very least, nothing interesting will happen.

Conclusion and Exercise

All stories have an objective, a meaning, a point (as they say in English, “What is your point?”). With that in mind, if you want to write a new story or if you want to retell a story, you should already know why, the purpose, the objective. This way you can put things…

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