Cut! Cut Cut!

This is part four of our five part series: don't take this advice. But, if you're going to take one piece of advice, make it this one: cut, cut, cut. Basically: edit, edit, edit.

This might seem very obvious. Every piece of advice usually seems obvious but people don't do it. People just don't do it. When people don't edit, they don't fully understand what their story is about. And so they think they need to include a whole bunch of other information that doesn't necessarily relate to their actual story. And so they include a lot of parts at the beginning getting the audience all caught up, when a lot of those details might not matter. It really comes down to knowing what your story actually is about.

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Context!

This is part 3 of our five part series: don't take this advice. In this episode we're talking about context and setting the scene.

We think it can it can take different forms. First, you want to place people in the environment with you. It depends on what kind of story you're telling, what kind of tone it is, what the theme is and what you're trying to accomplish with it. Remember that you are guiding an audience to go along with you in the story - whether emotionally or you just want them to enjoy the story or whatever. We think it is important to place yourself or whatever the story is about in some type of context. Where it is or what we're talking about here.

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Find your moment.

Welcome to the Stories We Don't Tell Podcast and our mini-series about 'not taking our advice'. The idea here is you can write a great story without this advice. But if you get stuck maybe this helps.

So, you've got a whole bunch of words written down and you're trying to figure out where the story is. Today we're looking at finding your moment and slowing things down. First you define the moment. Finding that thing that happens - the one moment that really matters to you and inspired you to write the story in the first place.

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Write it all out.

This is a five part series to open up Season 3 of the podcast and we're calling it 'don't take this advice'. So it's five pieces of advice that you don't have to follow but that if you're feeling stuck these are some things you can do.

These are also just some tricks and tips that we've learned after doing this for years and participating in a lot of workshops and helping guide a lot of people through their stories. These are just things that we either keep coming back to or that just seemed to be helpful.

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