Are you the type of person that thinks telling a compelling story is just something you can’t do? Believe me when I say you tell stories every day.
As humans, we are inherent storytellers. Think about the last time you had a great conversation with someone. I’d be willing to bet you told a story of some sort, no matter the length. Was the person interested? I’d also be willing to bet yes. If you meet all these criteria, then congratulations! You have the capacity to tell an entertaining story.
In 1944, a study was conducted by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel on 34 college students in Massachusetts. They were shown a short video.
The video is nothing more than a few inanimate objects being animated to move around across a screen. After the video, they were asked what happened in the video. If you watch it yourself, you’d know what they saw – nothing more than a few shapes colliding with each other and moving around. However, all of the 34 test subjects gave the shapes personalities and developed a story based on how the shapes interacted with one another.
If you were a part of that test, you would more than likely have created an entire story around nothing more than shapes moving around erratically. I say all this to make a point: storytelling is easier for you than you might think.
Now granted, telling a complex, dynamic story with an exposition, climax and resolution is never 100% easy, but storytelling starts at the beginning. You can flesh out the simplest concepts into a well-rounded compelling narrative. Allow me to provide you with a personal example!
One of the first stories I created for my Screenwriting class was a story about a girl pacing a house. It started with the bare bones concept of a girl doing laps around a house multiple times. Now that in itself is not very interesting, but if you add some backstory and tone, it immediately becomes more interesting. I decided to turn it into a dreamscape.
I fleshed out the story to make it so that the girl was a 30-year-old woman with kids and an entire social life who grew up in the foster care system. She lived in a house stuffed to the brim with foster children and did not experience a loving childhood; her experiences in the house haunt her dreams – literally. She spent 11 years in the house, so in order to wake up each day, she must do 11 laps around the house in her dreams, reliving the 11 years of torment in the foster home.
That example just goes to show that even the simplest concepts can become an intriguing plot. It’s always my advice to people who are looking for story ideas that you have to start from the ground floor and work your way up. Creating a simple concept and then adding layers, development, and complexity is the greatest way to create an enthralling narrative. Happy writing!
readreaming 
