Video Monday 2: What’s a story?

My second Video Monday post about what a blog story means to me.

Video is shaky at the beginning of this one. Video Mondays are a work in progress.

Transcription:
Hey everybody, this is my second video post so, so far so good on the this becoming a thing front, so that’s cool.

I’ve been on the storytelling kick on my blog for the last little while so I figured I’d kind of expand a little bit more on what I mean by stories. A lot of the comments asked specifically what I meant by your blog needs to have a story, so I thought I’d provide a little bit more information on that. Basically it can mean a lot of things, I wasn’t being necessarily intentionally vague on that, it’s just that story can mean a lot of things. Mostly it means context, I think, to me at least.

When talking about say, a novel, not a blog, but a novel like, I read a lot of William Gibson books, Sci-fi author. And the people that I’ve tried to convince to read William Gibson will often tell me, well, “It seemed like a good book, it was written well, but nothing happened.” And of course I always reply with everything’s happened, you’re learning about the characters. There might not be a lot of events, but something’s happening, you’re getting closer to the characters, you’re caring, caring a bit more then you did about them as the pages go on.

So I think you can kind of do the same thing with your blog. You can talk about certain events, you can talk about subjects, but by layering in a bit of context, a little bit about yourself, or insights you might have about your industry, whatever your blog subject is on. By layering in that extra information even if it’s subtle people will learn a bit more about you, and suddenly your blog is more interesting than a similarly-subjected blog.

So that’s really what I mean about storytelling, it’s crafting a context or revealing a context more specifically about what it is that you’re talking about. It’s giving people more information then they might have just by reading your information, just your content.

And yeah, so a blog that comes along and talks about the exact same things that you do, if you give people context, you’ve given them a story, you’ve given them a bigger reason to care about you and your blog — that other blog just isn’t going to take all your readership away. So I hope that helps, and posts to follow throughout the week! Bye everybody.