How to Use Prompts to Help You Learn the Art of Storytelling
If you’ve ever tried to write a fiction or even a nonfiction personal piece of writing in the past, such as a diary or journal, you may have used a story prompt to get the ball rolling.
These can be questions or phrases that people use to help them begin to put together a story that will have a strong emotional pull on their audience. You can find hundreds or thousands of story prompts online or you can purchase journals that have story props built into them at the top of the page so that you can fill in the lines below it with something that is relevant to that starting point.
If you want to come up with a non-fiction story, you might search for something like “memoir creative writing story prompts.” You can also take a look inside story prompt journals and get ideas for your own storytelling journey.
You’ll find everything from generic concepts such as, “Tell me something about yourself,” to more specific concepts such as, “What is one fear you have faced in life and how did you overcome it?”
Sometimes, these prompts can be enough to help you begin learning how to create stories from your memories, hopes, and dreams. You’ll be able to pull from your own experiences and turn your story into some thing that is motivational and inspiring to your target audience.
The idea is not to answer in a brief, generic and short way because you already know the memory, but to practice writing or saying it as if someone who has never heard it before is hearing it for the first time – with details and descriptions designed to pull them in emotionally.
You will often see these kinds of prompts being used in the real world. For example, if you are applying to college you may see a question in the application process that is built on a story prompt like these.
Or, you may have a job interview and the person who is talking to you may ask you one of these questions that you have to answer on the fly with a story of your own. The storytelling prompts are a great way to help you practice being able to tap in to your memories and experiences so that you can present an idea with a goal in mind.
Once you have that goal in your head, you want to select a story that is relevant to it and that can support your main points that you want to make with your audience. You can file these prompts away and refer to them again with the story written out to help you learn how to better present them to your audience.