Dumb Little Man | Tips for Life

This article is an addition to A Formula For Telling A Good Story.

The art of telling a story is something that can be learned. If you look back at A Formula For Telling A Good Story, you’ll see how to create an effective arc of a story. However, the idea of “The Button”, or ending, can be confusing to some. How do you end the story on a high note? These are the 4 most common and effective sorry endings.

1. Lesson Learned - In the story, you encountered a conflict that you had not encountered before. The ending to this story might be the the lesson you learned from solving the conflict.


2. “From Now On” - This is similar to “Lesson earned”, but is less specific. “From Now On” is more about how to avoid a certain conflict in the future.
   


3. Full Circle - This one includes a callback, where and important detail in the beginning of the story appears in the end. This allows the story to feel more like a unit, rather than a scattered collection of events.
   


4. A Pun - This can include or exclude the previous three endings, but ends the story with a joke.
   

Using these will allow the story to have a strong ending and have a high chance of creating a reaction, which will allow for an easy
transition!

This is Taylor Sternberg's second article with Dumb Little Man. Taylor blogs about using improve skills in everyday life at ImprovLifestyle.com. Other articles at ImprovLifestyle include What I Do When I Hit A Plateau and 10 Ways to Stop Thinking and Live In The Moment.