Today’s prompt for 31 Days to Telling Your Story is: CAPTURE.

Each post in this series has been written in five minutes flat as part of the 31 Days of Five Minute Free Writes writing challenge.

Want to read more posts in this series? Click here for the Table of Contents.

On Day 23 of this series, I encouraged you to brainstorm and jot down as many Story ideas that you could think of that relate to the overall story of your life that you feel compelled to share. Did you do that yet? If not, make a mental note to go back to Day 23’s post and tackle that exercise before you move on to this step. 

In yesterday’s post, I encouraged you to craft your “elevator pitch” — your one-paragraph or 30-second summary of the main message of your story. 

Today, I have a slightly bigger assignment to add on to the previous two exercises: I want you to brainstorm ten to twelve chapter titles that you could possibly incorporate into a book.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you’re actually going to write a whole book someday. But I do think that organizing your Story Ideas in this way and breaking the overall story into ten to twelve main points, sections, or themes can go a long way toward helping you develop your story as a whole. 

By the way, don’t worry about the order of the chapters necessarily, at least not at this stage. That can always get shifted around later in the process.

After you’ve brainstormed ten to twelve chapter titles, now I want you to go back and write one paragraph summaries for each chapter. I know, I know — I’m making you work! But imagine how useful this exercise could be someday as you seek to share your story in various settings!

Feel free to spread this task over several days, but don’t get too caught up with perfecting the titles or paragraph summaries. Just get something down on paper that you’ll be able to revise or re-work later. 

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That’s all I’ve got for today, but I do want to make sure that you know about Scrivener, because it could come in really handy if you plan on developing your story further in writing. 

Scrivener is a writing program that revolutionized my writing life. Especially if you’re considering taking on a larger writing project, I highly recommend that you check it out. (It even has SUPER easy ways to move chapters around — like, think “digital index cards” easy . . . .)

Here’s a post about why I love Scrivener, including a brief video demo:

WHY I LOVE SCRIVENER FOR WRITING

Find more posts in this series here.

The post Capture Your Story Ideas {Day 25 :: Capture} appeared first on Five Minute Friday.