How To Vlog and Be a Better Storyteller

Story telling is super important to be able to create videos that are engaging, so that someone wants to continue watching. Our attention is divided up between all of these different social media accounts and everything else that's going on in the world. So you really don't have a whole lot of time to build and keep them engaged with your content for a long period of time. 

Now storytelling will help you actually keep the viewer engaged and keep them watching. And in this post I'm going to give you five ways that you can actually improve your storytelling instead of just giving you a breakdown of what story is and structure of story. These technique will actually help you become a better storyteller, so that when you approach a situation you're gonna know what is need to do to be able to tell the story and create an engaging video.

Tell more stories

Number one is to actually tell more stories, now this may seem obvious but to become a good storyteller you have to tell more stories and I mean just in everything that you're doing. If you're talking to your friends or your family about a hike that you did last week put it in the context of the story and actually apply all the rules of storytelling to be able to make it engaging and more interesting. Let me give you a quick example from a hike. Here's what you shouldn't do.

Stories Sample 1 :

"last week I did this awesome hike with my buddy we went up to the top of this mountain and it had like the best view ever."

That's not really a story it's not that engaging there's not a whole lot of context there's nothing really going on when it comes to move what you're talking about. You're giving some facts around something cool that happened and you're not really diving into the story element. Let's rephrase that and put it in the context of a story.

Stories Sample 2

"last week I had a super long shoot up in LA it was five days. I was in a studio from morning until like 5:00 o'clock at night and my buddy Jesse was also on the shoot with me. Every night we get done shooting and we'd see this mountain off in the distance. Actually Some mountains surrounding the city and in the location that we are out we could see the peaks off in the distance. And after being in a studio for long days both of us just wanted to get outside and just be in nature"

the story goes on :

"So on lunch during the shoot days, we were looking at all trails and just trying to find some good hikes in the area to go explore and we found a trail that was like 10 minutes away from the studio and this is perfect because you know the time of year that we were shooting. We only had like an hour of daylight left by the time. We're gonna be wrapped, so we had very limited amount of time that we could get out and go hiking before the sunset. Now this wasn't a super easy hike is about 1800 foot elevation gain over the course of a couple miles, so really we were just going straight up this mountain. Both of us were really prepared, we just started the trail and start going up and we're pushing ourselves to try and get to the summit because the sun was setting off in the distance.

We didn't really have that much time but just as the sun was dipping towards the horizon, we made it to the summit and on the top of that mountain was one of the best views that we've seen. This mountain was positioned in the perfect place to be able to see downtown off in the distance and all the way down the valley the other direction. It was an incredible view and we got to see it right at sunset with all the lights turning on city."

 

Now there was definitely a lot more that went into the second story example here. But it's more of an engaging story and that's what you want to create. To be a better storyteller you just need to be telling more stories like this. When you have an experience or you're doing something it's really cool, and you want to tell your friends or your family, trying to put it in the context of story and see how they respond and see how you can tweak that story tell someone else and see if you can make it more engaging with the way that you tell it.

Outline your stories

Number two is build a structure and outline with your stories. And it's easy to craft once you just know what beats you need to hit. Number one is just giving some history and set up. When you're going to tell a story you want to give some context, so the viewer is with you in this moment. You want to put them in the scene, you want them to feel like they know what's going on. Because if you don't give any context you don't give it any history or set up to the story that you're gonna tell. Someone's not gonna be as engaged because they don't really know what's going on. 

The big key here is you want to set the scene and this could be as simple as just giving a quick context of what's going on or it could be something longer where somebody needs a history and they need to know a bunch of different bits of information to be able to follow along on the journey. The second things you need to establish is the challenge. What's your goal and what are you up against reached that goal, that's the easy way to think about it. 

Story Structure :

1. Set the scene and what is the challenge

With my little hiking example we wanted to get to the summit of this mountain but we're up against time because the sun was going to set within an hour. So time is a great way to set a challenge if you only have so much time to do something that easy challenge you only have the time to finish something. And you see this time and time again. Challenges was great if we have 24 hour challenge 48 hour challenge there's so much story built into that structure by the end of the time period and your audience is going to want to know are you gonna be able to finish it in that time period. It pick the curiosity of somebody who's watching your video and they want to see if you actually fall through or make it to your goal. 

Recently I told a story where I was overlanding with my buddy on the pony express and one of the things that I was up against was I only had it three days to do this trip. And instead of just like showing you the trip I set up this time crunch and it became a challenge that was a through line for the entire video every time we ran into a roadblock of some kind it would put us back and we would get further away from our goal which we only had so much time to achieve the key thing here is you want to set a challenge something that you're up against that's gonna make it harder to be able to reach your goal.

2. Roadblocks

Number three is complications. So what are different beats that happen along your journey that push you back away from your goal. So this is just a little story beats throughout the video that push you further away or bring you closer so as you're telling a story you want to have things pop up that will pull you away from actually achieving what you're going out there to get. So as the journey of your story goes through your video you want to show challenges you want to show things that are pushing you away from your goal and that's different complications. Now these can be things that you could set up when you're crafting a story or outlining it but there are also things that naturally will happen and that's the beauty of blogging or creating YouTube videos or adventure films whatever it is that you create is that when you actually go through the process very rarely does everything happen as planned.

And when you're telling a story you'll start noticing that these different complications will happen and you'll spend a little bit of time actually filming them so that they can become elements within your story.

3. What happens?

Number four when it comes to structure is the payoff did you achieve your goal did you not or is it kind of just somewhere in the middle. You want to have a resolution to your story and you want to know what that element is because you setup in the beginning so stories are very structured in that you set everything up in the beginning you go through this journey and then you either achieve your goal or you're dumb.

4. Consequence

And then the fifth part of the structure is how did this change you now when you're watching a film or you're reading a book there's usually a big profound change that happens with the main character. When you're creating YouTube videos or you're vlogging like there's not gonna be these massive changes once in awhile maybe but you still want to look for some sort of change. After you went on this journey and you reached your goal or you didn't reach your goal how did it make you feel. Because your audience is on this journey with you and they want to see how this journey affected you at the end of it or your main character. Now I know this seems like a lot to think about just for a simple blog or YouTube video but when you watch the big creators on the platform you'll see this story structure time and time again.

Watch more stories

Number three to become a better storyteller is consume more stories and less tutorials. Now understanding how your camera works learning how to shoot cinematic B-Roll, all of these things are great in their aspects around creating interesting videos to watch, but really story is more important so if you spend all your time consuming tutorials and how to videos and no time consuming story then you're not really going to be seeing story in action. One of the keys to becoming a better storyteller is to watch more stories consume more stories and see how the structure actually works for that video that podcast wherever you're engaging with the story. 

Stories can come in all forms, so you want to consume more of that kind of content and you want to be more observant you don't want to just sit there and be entertained by it you actually want to think through all the elements that we've been talking about in this video and how they apply to that specific story that you're watching. 

Breakdown stories

And this brings me into step four to be a better storyteller and that is actually go through the process of writing down structure for the stories that you are consuming. So take the five steps that I gave you in step two and actually apply it to the stories that you're watching or reading and write down these different beats. And start doing this more often like when you're watching a video enjoy it watch the video experienced it but then it take a step back and look over what was the challenge? what was the set up how this creator get me into the story and make me want to keep watching? 

You also want to look for when stories don't do this and if they actually fall short. So if you're watching a video and there is no structure to it are you engaged with that story do you want to keep watching it and if you are still interested in watching that video. Why? Is it just because you enjoy the content or is there something else going on that's keeping you engaged. Most of the time you'll find that the stories that keep you the most engaged and the ones that want to keep you watching longer to the end of the video or ones that have story baked into it and the more that you could see this in the more that you can pick out these different elements the easier it's going to be to start crafting your own stories in your videos.

Use visual stories

Now tip number five for being a better storyteller is actually become a visual storyteller. So if you're creating vlogs or you're creating videos here on YouTube it's a visual medium. We're creating videos we're not just telling stories. You want to start applying these different elements that we've been talking about set up challenges complications resolution and pay off and you want to start thinking how can I tell this using visuals. 

And now it vlogs a lot of times we like to just talk to the camera but a lot of times it's better to actually show what's happening rather than just telling an exercise that I do is trying to just tell visual stories and you're not going to have the same like complications and challenges and things like that that you might have a bigger vlog but if you're just doing quick visual stories you want to set up the scene you want to take someone on the journey and then you want to have some sort of payoff.

To become a good storyteller it just takes continual practice it's something that is going to be evolving for you and you're gonna find different strategies or techniques that work better for the content that you're producing. Don't get down on yourself if your story is not super exciting take every opportunity to try and tell more stories and try to infuse this kind of structure into the videos that you're creating if you're just someone who's shooting vlogs of your day, try to set up a goal for that, try to set up some challenges to be able to get you to that goal, and try to set up complications so instead of just turning on the camera and just shooting whatever happens. 

Think through what is the goal what is the objective and what are some things that are going to stand in your way to be able to achieve that goal and even if it's quick and you just do some notes in your notepad putting more emphasis in creating this structure is going to help you make better videos that are more engaging and more people are gonna want to watch that.