I’m not sure how good I am at telling visual stories.
I probably have SOME things I could tell you, about visual story-telling. For example, it’s good* to:
- Have visuals people can see, clearly enough.
- Make chronological or other connections among the visuals, in a credible way.
- Put yourself (and other compelling characters) into the story, as best you can.
- Show growth or other development, in the characters or other elements.
- Have conflict, tension, or suspense, which resolves in some way.
- Don’t try to show everything.
I have no idea how well I’m going to meet those criteria. I’m just going to do what I decided to do when I started writing this post: (1) show you photos I’ve taken since my last blog post and (2) try to make some sort of story out of them.
Before the visual story-telling commences, I shall express this concern (thus letting go of it): I hope that my indulging so gleefully in non sequiturs, two posts ago, hasn’t weakened my story-telling skills.
Spoiler (which-isn’t-a-spoiler-if-you’ve-been-reading-recent-blog-posts) alert!
(Yesterday, I returned to work after being out for over a month with pneumonia.)
I’ve never done a spoiler alert before, so I did the best I could, making the alert more obvious and the spoiler less obvious.
Are we ready to begin?
Wait! First, I’d like to balance the warning tone of the spoiler alert with a note of safety. For example, I could say, “No animals were harmed in the making of this story” and that’s certainly true, but that seems a little … I don’t know …. long-winded, clichéd, over-used, and not so much in-the-moment* (even though animal welfare is important to me).
I’ve got it!
This story is 100% gluten-free.
Okay! It’s time to begin.
A Visual Story
by Ann
Hmmm. I think I can make this story more focused if I have a more specific title.
Work: A visual story
by Ann
When I go to work, I park my car near an iconic baseball park. Then, I pay respect to an old hero, as I walk by.
Yesterday was no different. I hat-less-ly returned the hat tip to Mr. Yastrzemski — with a little hand-to-head salute.
Moments later, I saw this:
Arrgghh! There are TWO problems with that photo: (1) Inexplicably, it’s showing up on its side and (2) it’s violating my first rule, above, regarding good visual story telling: “Have visuals people can see, clearly enough.”
Let’s see if I can fix all that:
Better.*
Best.*
Then, I had a meeting with Employee Health, saw people I haven’t seen in over a month, sat at my desk, made phone calls, and left after a few hours. I could go into more details, but I don’t have any photos for any of that.
Later, I saw these interesting* things:
The End
How do you think I did, with that visual story-telling? I think I did well enough, despite some challenges.
Now that I’ve written “The End,” though, I’m aware of what I have NOT included, such as:
- letting my regular readers know that I successfully* used the waterpik before I left for work,
- reassuring people that I felt okay enough, in my shorter work day, yesterday, and
- this photo, which was going to be an example of “Things I’m not good at making work”
… which is okay, because that’s a terrible* title, and photo, too.
One more thing: In case people are wondering whether my story truly was 100% gluten-free, as guaranteed, I did some fact-checking, and found this, on Facebook:
Hi, Heather! I’m excited to tell you that we have quite a few gluten free options! The list below are all of my gluten free products:
Caramel Truffle Bars
Chocolate Truffle Bars…See More
And that’s all I needed to see.
Thanks to Skinny Cow, Heather, Carl Yastrzemski, the guy wearing the “Excellence” t-shirt, Goodwill Industries, story-tellers everywhere, people who do their best (letting go of judgment and otherwise), and to you — of course! — for looking here, today.
______________
* In my humble opinion.
