SMART Volunteering-Storytelling Guide

Rhythm your story BREATHE IN! If your storytelling is done orally, be aware that pauses and silences are as important as the words you use. These pauses must be thought out and marked at the right time: silence can rekindle the interest of your audience, arouse fear, sadness, suspense... Ventilating your story will also allow you to keep your audience attentive: it is essential to give them time to understand and interpret your story. Try also to use the dialogue with the public rather than the simple narrative way, and try to build events scene by scene, always in this dynamic of keeping a breath-taking rhythm. At the end, give it a strong closing: An emotional conclusion can have a powerful, long-lasting impact on audiences. Briefly review your main take-home message and tell those to whom you’re speaking what they can think about next. Show emotions instead of describing them Make sure that the reader, the spectator or the listener experiences what you’ve done or lived, not just hear what you have actually been through. You have to immerse yourself in the described situation at a level, as if you were living it again. It is necessary to describe what we have seen, heard and felt. To ensure this, we carefully avoid explaining. We often give to see, feel, feel what the characters see, hear or feel, and let the listener draw his conclusions... A closed fist? A rising anger... A shiver on the skin? The bitter cold. It is at this price that the audience itself does the work of understanding what is at stake, and plunges into history, with its whole body. The narrative practitioners also know how to question or invoke the sensations at the service of the stories brought to the surface: the smell of fat and homemade beer in Justin’s grandfather’s workshop. For example, it would be more attractive to say, instead of «Everyone was tens”, «We were all afraid of breathing too hard. No one was making any noise”. Little tips : If you choose to make a video, you should know that the video tool is very interesting because it allows you to put images and writing on words. Visual representation of information 30 times more likely to be read/seen than a text alone 90% of the information transmitted to the brain would be visual... If you do this way, you give more chance to your story to be shared in social media for example. People remember 80% of those they see and 20% of what they read. Hence the interest in creating mental images. Indeed, storytelling is a powerful marketing tool; however, for it to have a real impact through video, it is necessary to focus on the emotional. In this perspective, video storytelling requires quality visuals. Therefore, pay particular attention to the aesthetics and meaning of the images that you will select carefully. -11-