1. Story as Bloodsport
Battling to Craft Narrative
By Melissa Lion
www.melissalion.com

2. What Narrative Does
• Creates connection
• Adds humanity
• Nurtures an engaged audience

3. Where Narrative Works
Twitter: Narrative is the sum of our
tweets.
Blogs: Daily posts must have a
narrative arc. The archive tells the
broader story.
Social Networking Sites: Narrative tells
the story of your characters.

4. Narrative is Entertainment
Entertainment is It’s a chance, a
what people seek delight.
in the day, stuck in
their cubicles I’m feeling lucky,
staring at their right?
computer screen.
Entertainment is
It’s what they look
for late in the night. voice.

5. Entertainment for Fancy People
“The original sense of the word entertainment is a lovely one of
mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown
together, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests
a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like
the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely
bridgeheads. I can't think of a better approximation of the
relation between reader and writer. Derived senses of fruitful
exchange, of reciprocal sustenance, of welcome offered, of
grasp and interrelationship, of a slender span of bilateral
attention along which things are given and received, still
animate the word in its verb form: we entertain visitors, guests,
ideas, prospects, theories, doubts, and grudges.” -- Pulitzer
Prize Winner, Michael Chabon

6. Five Elements of Narrative
• Setting
• Character
• Point of View
• Dialog and Exposition
• Plot

7. Setting
Sense of place
grounds the
reader.
Fine details create
trust.
People love pictures:
Shiny!

8. A Thought on Shiny
• Shiny things are links, polls, pictures,
videos.
• Anything someone can do something to.
• Shiny things make your pages pretty, but
be sure to change them often. They lose
their luster after a day or so.

9. Character
“Know a person by his Add people who
friends.”
reflect you because
when others add
Your cast of characters
are your followers, you, it’s your
your commentors, the friends at whom
people you befriend. they’re looking.

10. Point of View
• Narrator as a character
• Who’s telling this story?
• About me page
• Picture: Shiny!
• It’s the role we play on the internet

11. Dialog and Exposition
• Exposition is another word for
broadcasting.
• Dialog is the conversation we have with
our characters in comments, @replies,
writing on someone’s wall.
• Shout-outs, blog rolls, links
• Balance the exposition with dialog to
engage readers.
• Everyone likes to read about themselves,
even your readers.

12. Plot is Conflict
• The reader says, Conflict creates
“What’s next?” vulnerability and
• The narrator says, humanity.
“Now what?”

13. Plot
Climax
Rising Action
Denouement

14. Plot
Elliptical Structure

15. Sex
Sex also creates
vulnerability.

16. 2/3 Mark
That last slide was here.

17. Humor
• The Pluto of the Narrative Elements
• Humor is entertainment, pure and
simple.
• Try being funny.
• People will like you better.

18. Add it Up
Setting
+ Character
+ Point of View
+ Dialog and Exposition
+ Plot
=
Voice

19. Moral of the Story
Voice is what separates your narrative
from the slush pile of the internet.

20. Fin
Melissa Lion
www.melissalion.com
www.longlunchpdx.com
www.backfencepdx.com
Twitter: @melissalion
Thank you to @mediachick and Zappos.com for
making me look good.