A story can be as short as explaining why you bought your first car or house or as long as War and Peace. Your own desires in life, the kinds and types of struggles you have faced, and, most importantly, the number and depth of realizations you have taken from your experience all shape your natural abilities as an effective storyteller. Translating those realizations into stories in the form of essays, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, or multimedia scripts, is mainly about time. You need time to put the raw material before you, time to learn procedures and approaches for crafting the story, and time to listen to the feedback and improve upon your efforts.

For some, conceiving an idea for a story is an easy process; for others it is the beginning of a crisis. The issue of how we get from our conversational use of story to crafting a work that stands on its own falls more into the category of a general creative process. Why and how do we remember stories? What affects our ability to retain stories? How do we develop our own sense of voice and story? And what kinds of stories from our personal and work lives are likely to work as multimedia stories?

Cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson was asked in the 1950s if he believed that computer artificial intelligence was possible. He responded that he did not know, but that he believed when you would ask a computer a yes-or-no question and it responded with "…that reminds me of a story," you would be close.

Our understanding of how story is at the core of human activity has been a subject of fascination for academics and experts in the computer age. Educational and artificial intelligence theorist Roger Schank has been arguing for the last decade that the road to understanding human intelligence, and therefore to constructing artificial intelligence, is built on story. In Schank’s 1992 book, Tell Me a Story, he suggests that the cyclical process of developing increasingly complex levels of stories that we apply in increasingly sophisticated ways to specific situations is one way to map the human cognitive development process. Stories are the large and small instruments of meaning, of explanation, that we store in our memories. We cannot live without them.

So why is it that when many of us are asked to construct a story as a formal presentation to illustrate a point, we go blank? We informally tell stories all the time, but the conscious construction of story calls up mental blocks. Here are three possible reasons:

For all these reasons and quite a few others, a person’s initial efforts at story making can be frustrating. We have worked with several high-powered communicators who froze up like a deer in the headlights when it came time for them to construct an emotionally compelling personal tale.

The starting point for overcoming a creative block is to start with a small idea. It is a natural tendency to want to make a novel or screenplay out of a portion of our life experiences, to think in terms of getting all the details. But it is exactly that kind of scale that disables our memory. Our emphasis on using photographic imagery in our digital storytelling workshops facilitates the process of taking a potential story, picture by picture. Pedro Meyer, in creating his breathtakingly compelling I Photograph to Remember CD-ROM, recorded the narrative by simply setting up a tape recorder in his living room. He asked his publisher Bob Stein to sit beside him as he recorded his voice as he described each photograph to Bob. That was it. One take and it became the voiceover that was used for the CD-ROM. This process may work for your project.

Perhaps your project does not originate with visual material on hand. Take a look at our example interview questions for various kinds of short personal stories. Have someone interview you, then transcribe the words and see what they tell you about the story you are trying to conceive.

As you are working up your raw material for a story, you are also working up your storytelling, or narrative, voice. Everyone has a unique style of expressing himself or herself that can jump off the page or resonate in a storytelling presentation. Realizing that voice, making it as rich and textured as you are as a person, takes time and practice.

For many professional communicators, the process of moving from a journalistic or technical, official voice to an organic, natural voice is often difficult. It is as if we are trying to merge the two different parts of our brains, the analytical and the emotive, and most of us cannot switch back and forth without getting dizzy. The official voice is the voice of our expository writing class, of our essays and term papers, or our formal memos and letters to our professional colleagues. We have been taught that this voice carries dispassionate authority, useful perhaps in avoiding misunderstandings, but absolutely deadly as a story.

Getting feedback also helps us identify our narrative voice. Reading material to someone who knows us well, and asking him or her to identify which part is true to your voice, is a useful practice. Of course, the crafting of the language, moving away from cliche, eliminating redundancy, and getting out the thesaurus to substitute your overused verbs and adjectives, is also imperative.

Take your time, though, and let the ideas and meanings sink in before you edit. If something feels overwhelmingly right, do not polish it too much. We have had lots of scripts that started out fresh and authentic but by the time the authors and collaborators got through with it, it was filled with succinct, gorgeous–yet empty–prose. The narrative voice had been polished away.

There are all kinds of stories in our lives that we can develop into multimedia pieces. Many of these stories have existing images or video to illustrate our texts.

How we love, are inspired by, want to recognize, finding meaning in our relationship to, another person or even pet, is deeply important to us. Perhaps the majority of the stories created in our workshops are about a relationship with a singular other. And in the best of stories they tell us more about ourselves than the details of our own life story.

Honoring and remembering people who have passed is an essential part of the process of grieving. While these stories are often the most difficult and painful to produce, the results are the most powerful.

One of the reasons we travel is that the break from the norm of our lives helps to create vivid memories. All of us who travel, or go on serious adventures, know that the experience is usually an invitation to challenge ourselves, to change our perspective about our lives, to reassess. We often return from these experiences with personal realizations, and the process of recounting our travel stories is as much about sharing those realizations as sharing the sense of beauty or interest in the place visited.

But strangely enough, while almost everyone tells good travel stories, it is often difficult to make an effective multimedia piece. We rarely think about constructing a story with our photographs or videos in advance of a trip. And we do not want to take ourselves out of the most exhilarating moments by taking out a camera and recording. Before your next trip, think about creating a story outline based on an archetype prior to your visit, and what sorts of images, video, or sounds would be useful to establish the story. That way you can gather some story-related shots at your leisure.

There are accomplishment stories about achieving a goal, like graduating from school, landing a major contract, or being on the winning team in a sporting event. These stories easily fit into the desire-struggle-realization structure of a classic story. They also tend to be documented, so you might find it easy to construct a multimedia story. Television sports has taken up the accomplishment story as a staple, and it might be helpful for you to look at and deconstruct an "Olympic moment" to see how they balance establishing information, interviews, and voiceover.

Up until this century, 90% of the world’s population was born, lived, and died without ever leaving a ten-mile radius of their homes. While this is difficult for us to imagine, our sense of place is the basis of many profound stories. One of the earliest interactive storytelling Web sites was a German project, 1,000 Rooms, that invited people to send a single image of their room at home, and to tell a story about their relationship to their room. Hundreds of people responded with their own intimate stories. You may have a story about your home, an ancestral home, a town, a park, mountain, or forest you love, a restaurant, store, or gathering place. Your insights into place give us insight about your sense of values and connection to community.

Life story for many people in professional careers is shaped by their jobs. Author Studs Terkel collected a series of interviews in his book, Working, that demonstrated that we all have unique ways of perceiving and valuing our jobs. For other people, the thing that they do that has most value to them is their hobby or ongoing social commitments. Poignancy often comes from looking at the familiar in a new way, with a new meaning. The details of the tasks, the culture of the characters that inhabit our workplace, our spiritual or philosophical relationship to work, avocational or vocational, lead us into many stories.

Sharing the experience of overcoming a great challenge in life, like a health crisis or a great personal obstacle, is the fundamental archetype in human story making. If you can transmit the range of experience from descent, to crisis, to realization, you can always move an audience.

Romance and partnership, familial or fraternal love, also naturally lend themselves to the desire-struggle-realization formula. We all want to know how someone met their partner, what it was like when the baby was born, or what our relationship is with our siblings and parents. We constantly test everyone’s experience in these fundamental relationships to affirm our own. These are also stories that tend to have plenty of existing documentation.

The process of learning is a rich field to mine for stories. The detective in us gets great pleasure in illustrating how we uncovered the facts to get at the truth, whether it is in fixing a broken bicycle or developing a new product.

As you decide what story would best serve your personal needs, or the needs of your performing or presentation context, keep in mind that these categories are in no way sacrosanct. They cross over in a number of ways. It is also probable that you will come up with your own additional categories or other ways of dissecting the stories in your mind.

The important issue is getting started. Because many of these stories ask us to reveal things about ourselves that make us feel vulnerable, it is a procrastinator’s paradise. Just get up, start answering questions on a tape recorder, writing things down, gathering up the photos, and looking at the old videos.