Challenge and Selection

Storytelling is a tool that I’ve come across constantly as a writer and a student. Storytelling as the  meaning of it goes, is a method to tell a story through multiple mediums. In fact, every human being  on the planet has a story to tell. I chose this tool because it is relevant to me in the professional sphere,  as an art that I have to master, but apart from that I chose the tool also to understand the multitude  of ways stories are told. Visualization which is also a key to storytelling, would come secondary, as  imagination is everybody’s game. The art of storytelling comes with its own terms and conditions.  Sometimes not all stories can fit into the nuances of it thus making it tougher to learn and put forth  to the person sitting across you, who’s listening or reading but is engrossed.

As a writer I believe there is always scope for improvement. You strive and work hard to achieve a  goal that you have in sights. Mastering my story to tell others through the way I write and speak was  my challenge. Communicating to someone, whether to words - written or spoken – is not an easy job.  A lot of external factors play a part on the stories apart from the internal turmoil that is usually faced.  Hence I decided to put to test what I had learnt through this course through the social environment I  could reach, digitally, which includes my friends and family.

Application

As I write, I decided to use other tools to aid my thinking when it came to delivering a story. The tools  I used were visualization and mind mapping. What came out in the end was a synergy lead by  storytelling but aided through careful decision making with the other two tools.

I began applying storytelling by creating a mental mind map of what I wanted to show through the  conversation with my friends and family. It might seem a little hard to grasp but bear with me. The  mind map constitutes of simple things that I wanted to keep in mind with my personality tandem with  the conversation I was having. The mind map had thing like eccentric, sass, learning and much more  written down, so as to remind myself to bring forth a part of me in the conversation, hence making it  a story, no matter whether it was digital or natural. While it may seem like a silly thing to do, a lot of  people focus on the doing of the conversation rather than the story of how to fit the information of  the conversation with the story within themselves.

Similarly, with visualization I practiced it with my writing, bringing in a picture of what I wrote. This  helped me bring about many adjectives that I missed out which could enhance the words and truly  bring out the colours of the story. It wasn’t as easy task, but it was fairly much easier to put it to  practice with concentrated hours. I slowly got the hang of visualization and when I compared my  writing to the ones I’d written before, the story I was telling, turned out to be much richer. In the same  way, when telling or being told a story by my friends and family, rather than stoically replying back  like a robot, I started visualizing their responses. The visualization was pretty simple, it was a  conversation that was taking place face-to-face at a café for instance, wherein messages were a story,  an experience that a friend or a family had gone through.

Insight and Approach

The insight that drove the task was phenomenal. On my side, I saw my writing and conversations  improve, pushing forth a story that would have been stuck between words, but through storytelling,  it came out in better flourish than before. The task of incorporating both mind mapping and  visualization helped bring in a depth to stories, its nuances and showed a dearth of improvement in  many ways. However, while I did seem to rely on visualisation and mind mapping, they weren’t two

crutches of support but were rather two pillars of strength that helped me tell stories in a much richer  manner.

My friends and family enjoyed our conversations, which we now look forward to whenever we get  free time. Prior to this it was more of a burden to carry out, but a little storytelling and design thinking  can go a long way. To wrap someone around a verse of thoughts and immerse them into an  experience, it involves careful processes of involving design thinking to carve out the problem, look  into the findings and execute the solution. While this definitely is not a one man’s job, design thinking  and its tools are a great approach that should be propagated, something I will do in the near future. I  also plan to invest into learning more about the tools, including learning launch, as they can help  streamline the creative process.

