Thank you to everyone who commented on last week's blog and gave some constructive feedback. For various reason, I decided not to include the photos because they portrayed their perspective authors. Now having said that, photos allow the reader to "truly" imagine the person, place, setting, and emotions presented.
Now let us expound upon the ideas of story telling and start off with the beginning. The first thing we need to keep in mind and really the key principle, if any, that you should take away from this is topic. The topic is really the sole reason why you are telling a story, and yet, at times, people forget this and that is why you find a story with multiple ideas running through them. The topic is the what/who you are writing about. What are going to tell us a story about? Simple, yet it gets missed quite frequently.
Next you move onward to expounding upon the topic. This includes the when, where, and possibly, the why. When deals with time. People want to know when things happened. Where has to do with the setting (place, location, area). Where were you? Where was this? Next is the why. Why deals with an issue you are trying to resolve or posing information and then a question in order for the reader to come up with their own answer to the why.
Now some authors will tell you to end all posts with a question to continue making your readers thinking. Personally, I think it depends on what kind of blog you are writing. If you want your reader(s) to come up with their own answer or to probe them for a more thought-provoking response, then leaving a question(s) at the end of a post, is very effective.
Something I want to encourage you with is that you should only write about one topic per blog. Otherwise, it becomes to confusing and interest is lost in a split second. If you have multiple ideas, write multiple posts; this is fine. Also it shouldn't be excessive in length. If it is over a page type on a Word document, considershortening it or splitting it into multiple blogs.
So that I am not just giving loads of information without participation (you can tell I was a teacher), let's practice some of these ideas. Oh, yes an assignment! Let's come up with a topic, and so that it is not something that will be useless, why did you chose this trip? People are going to ask you (surprised if they have not already) until you leave in June, why are you going to _______? Let's develop a who, where, when, and why model, and post them here. Try to make it something you can write about on your own blog or something you could share with someone or a church for 2-5 minutes. I would like to see what we come up with.
The question again is why are you going to ___________?
