Dicks: Multi-decade stories work best framed within a short present-day timeline
Matthew Dicks · Matthew Dicks: The Storytelling Expert · Sep 3, 2024 · at 1:23:23
Storyteller Matthew Dicks breaks down the non-linear BABC narrative structure, explaining how to convey multi-decade events without losing audience engagement.
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“Nobody wants to hear a forty-year story. A forty-year story sucks, right? So what we do is we turn the forty-year story into a week-long story, which is, my son is getting ready to go to camp And I don't want him to make the same mistake I made, so I'm gonna tell him a story. So I start in the middle at the B. The next part of the story, the next scene, is the A, which is, 40 years earlier, I'm at camp and I do this thing, right? So that's, I'm bringing us back in time, but I've started us in sort of the present. So it's a story that takes place in the present, but I yank the past into the present for a moment, and that way the story doesn't feel like it's taken 40 years. It feels like it takes a week. A guy tells a boy a story, and then he waits to see how the story plays out.”
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