For many years, people have told stories and found ways to share their stories. However, do we ever notice how stories are formed and made? Do you ever just want to see what structure a story has to have for it to be efficient? Well I will give a better understand of how stories are created but more importantly, how audio stories are created. This will give me a better understanding of how I can produce a good audio story and have it sound very great. I also learned great tactics for me to help improve my listener count and viewership ratings.

            One of the tricks of the trade when it comes to making a podcast or audio story, is making sure you put very interesting content within the beginning portions of your show/story. All of the information I am going to supply you with is from training.npr.org and I also watched a video on this as well to help me further understand audio stories. So how do we start a story?

Well there are a ton of different ways you can start a story. Four ways that help the most when it comes to starting your story are: ask a question to the audience, introduce a mystery, establish a concept first and last but not least is the dive right into the story tactic.

            The first way is to ask a question to the audience, and to be quite honest with you it’s very simple. Always starting out with a question that may be relevant to what you are talking about or can connect good with an idea that you are trying to capture. I personally love this tactic and how effective it is and I use this almost all of the time. The second tactic is introducing a mystery. The way this works is you want to persuade the audience of a problem or open a thought for them and the way to finish off the mystery is guiding them along to the end where you reveal your pitch and you can tie it all together. Tactic #3 is Establishing the concept and you can do that by offering background and context to your story and then present the possible options or ideas we may agree or disagree with.

 Finally, this last tactic is straight to the point and doesn’t cut any corners. Diving into the narrative is a very good way t be direct with your story and catching the listener off guard early so they can rebound and channel back into the story. My example from the article I read was from an audio story that was talking about how medication in California is very expensive for people. It jumps into the narrative when the story talks about Michael Lawrence ad how he realized that his medication is very expensive. With all of this now explained, it’s time for you to being your audio story. Find your inspiration to make your story worth listening to, these tactics will help you attract listeners for not just one story, but for many more.

Article Link: https://training.npr.org/2016/07/26/how-audio-stories-begin/

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giLkZsLq9QI