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Storytelling: An ancient and abiding human impulse
• Humans making sense of their experience• Sharing the sense that they make
Every moment, every experience, contains the seed of a story.
• Great stories can be short or long• Your first assignment as a storyteller is to live
deeply • You can only describe an experience as deeply
and richly as you have lived it
The Art of Storytelling: Focus
• Fundamental importance of details• Details are building blocks of story
Your second assignment is to give your experience a larger context.
Ask yourself: • What’s this all about?• What’s the meaning here?
The Art of Storytelling: Extracting meaning from the everyday
• Each of you has a truth, a profound truth, to share and that truth is the bridge to a larger human truth• All great travel stories are the record of two
corresponding journeys: a journey in the outer world and a journey in the inner world• Travel writer’s story is the interplay between these
worlds, between these journeys
Travel writing is not a license for self-indulgence.
• Your anecdotes and examples always have to be in the service of your point• And your story always has to have a point, a lesson• Your writing should evoke the steps that led to that
lesson—what did I learn? And how did I learn it?
The Heart of Storytelling
• Cultivate the fine art of vulnerability—open yourself up to a place• You can only absorb a place as richly and deeply
as you open yourself up to it
The Heart of Storytelling
• When you do so, you enable and forge connections• These connections are ultimately the subject of
great storytelling—and the effect of great storytelling
As that brave, open-hearted soldier said, this is the
potential of great travel storytelling: to make us all think how big the world is,
and give us all a kind of hope.
I look forward to connecting with you!• Website: www.don-george.com• Twitter: @don_george • FB: www.facebook.com/don.george.travels • Books: Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing
and The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George