Inspiration

1. Present something horrifying in a funny way.




2. Tell the story of the most challenging thing in your life.

 

 3. Help us understand a political or sociological problem by using a specific story from your own experience.

 

 4. Take a moment in history or a subject you're interested in and illustrate it in an unexpected way.

https://www.makers.com/documentary/womenwhomakeamerica

 5. Surprise the reader with a story that you've never told anyone before.

 

6. Create a story that makes someone laugh, or be scared, or feel in a particular way.

7. Write a profile about a person who has impacted your life.

Video Project Proposal

VIDEO TITLE (working title):

THEME/CONCEPT:


GENRE:
Fiction/Nonfiction


SYNOPSIS/FREE-WRITE: 500 words or less





VIDEO STYLE (what does it look like? What other examples are similar?):





TARGET AUDIENCE (who are you making the video for):




LENGTH OF VIDEO:
5-10 minutes.



OBJECTIVES:




SETTING(S):

Why Your Story is Needed

Chimamanda Adichie and "The danger of a single story." Why multiple stories are necessary for us to "understand the complexity of humanity."

Other points of view in your podcast

The Homecoming podcast tells the story without voice over narration, internal monologues, or first person perspective. Here are some examples of short fictional podcasts that use other methods to tell the story.

1. Limetown, episode 1. This podcast uses radio announcements, emergency phone calls, on-site news reports,  and voice over narration to tell the story.

2. The Truth: a story about an election, using campaign speeches and news stories.

3. "Miracle on the L Train"from The Truth: short piece with internal monologue. Takes place on the train. Uses subway announcement and chatter of others in the train and sound effects. 4. "Sleep Some More" from The Truth: story about a roommate who won't shut up. Sounds come from the unending chatter of the roommate and the internal monologue of the narrator.

Tips for Your Podcast

First, ask yourself what you can reasonably accomplish in seven to 10 minutes. You can capture maybe one long scene or three or four scenes of about two or three minutes in length each. 

If you had to choose seven to 10 minutes from your own life or experiences to illustrate a moment of significance, what would you pick? Can you think of any moments in your life where change occurred, but didn’t end in violence or chaos?

Tell the story of a moment of change. That change should come from the interaction among the characters and not from an external forces (car crash, avalanche, asteroid).

The change can be small. Your listener wants to discover that in the telling of the story, something is slightly different at the end.

Keep it simple.  Do not try to cover too much ground. You don’t have time. 

Know what your characters want. Make it concrete.

Start as close to the end as possible.

Do not try to trick the listener but surprising us with a new piece of information at the end. Stick with the characters first, and the story second. Character determines fate.

Empathize with all of your characters, even the mean ones.

Go slow. Five minutes of authentic, interesting conversation is way more engaging than five minutes of chaotic and confusing shouts and screams.

Use silences and awkward pauses to your advantage.

Write the way that people speak in real life. They interrupt, they mispronounce words, they say the wrong thing, and they almost never say exactly what they mean.

Trust your listener. You don’t have to spell out everything for your audience. Show, don’t tell. Allow us to “listen” between the lines. 

At the same time, keep your listeners in mind. If we don’t understand what is happening, it’s not because we’re dumb, it’s because the writers weren’t thinking about what we need to know to understand the story.

Read the podcast out loud before you bring it in to class. Sentences that looked good on page might sound unnatural when spoken out loud. Better to find that out before the workshop, so you can revise.

Try to enjoy the process.

Write about something that matters to you.

Another example of constructing dialogue effectively

Though this is meant to assist in creating good dialogue for films, much of the content here makes sense for best practices in writing conversations between two or more people--and gives some samples of what not to do.


 

Good dialogue in Homecoming

This dialogue is from season 1, episode 3 of Homecoming. If you skip to 13:07, you'll get an example of Heidi and Walter speaking about their imaginary road trip.


This conversation does a few things at once:

 1. It illustrates their attraction to one another.

 2. It skims around this attraction; neither one of them are ready to admit it (notice how they are talking about staying in a hotel together, but they skip right over that part).

 3. It allows us to see why Heidi might later try to keep Walter in the program.

 4. It illuminates both characters; Walter as having a lively imagination, and Heidi as never really being close to anyone.

 5. It gives us hope that they may some day be together.

 6. It creates conflict. As a therapist, Heidi should not be attracted to her clients, as her job is to help them and the boundaries should be clear. However, previous conversations have shown us that they get along well, and that Walter is a very decent guy. We feel Heidi's desire for him, but we also feel how she has to struggle to keep the relationship professional, but not revealing too much of herself or giving in to this pretend moment.

7. It's funny and entertaining and it seems real.