Apocalypses from Story

My storytelling ability was terrible without arguments. One of my teachers in China told me once that I didn’t have any advantages in storytelling so I needed to choose good themes to write about. And that was not the only negative comment about my storytelling ability during my academic life in both China and the U.S. And these experiences made me believe that I am always the underdog in writing and storytelling. When I noticed that I have Writing and Story classes in my college, I subconsciously thought that I am going to be screwed in these classes with no doubt. But I understood why I must try my very best in the Story class because I am going to become an interaction designer who needs to express thoughts and ideas freely for jobs. It was at that point, I decided to use all the skills I have to deal with this Story class; I wanted to learn and I wanted to become a skillful storyteller. After dedicating efforts to the Story class, I have gone through lots of valuable lessons and I realized a few things that are very significant to me as an interaction designer and a storyteller.

Thinking with a different mindset is significant. During the semester, I emerged with lots of negative thoughts about myself and my storytelling abilities. I thought that I was uncreative and uninspired. I thought that I have never been able to create something innovative and completely original. Whenever I was picturing something in my mind, I could never get rid of the influences from other people’s works, and I thought I might fail in the future as a designer if I don’t learn to create innovative works. So, I set barriers for myself deep in my mind to keep myself away from using elements from other people’s stories. One day, I was asked to create an interactive game for an original story. I started the project very excitingly in the beginning. I started to plan my story arc first, and unsurprisingly, I got stuck in the first step of the project. After six hours of brainstorming, I still couldn’t come up with an original and rational story. I was too afraid of touching the ideas that appeared in my mind and I couldn’t rationalize my ideas. I tried pulling myself together from the stress but I was quickly struck down by my empty mind again. I laid down on my bed and started to memorize what I learned from the past. I remembered that in one of the discussions before, I discussed the definition of creativity with my classmates. I believed that creativity is the ability to create something new, original, and innovative while some of my classmates claimed that creativity is not just about innovating but it is also about extracting and combining things.

I suddenly realized that the ability to arrange, extract, and combine things also requires a certain amount of creativity. I shouldn’t reject the ideas that appeared in my mind before. I started to use some outstanding elements of the horror and R-rated stories to make up a piece of conversation between characters and I extended the conversation into an entire story. After that, I settled the story arc down and finished creating the game based on the dialogue and story arc I had. My game earned some positive feedback from my friends and I realized how silly I was when I was limited by a certain mindset.

Shortening a vivid story is crucial for me as an interaction designer. This happened at the end of the semester. I was asked to write a purpose story for a product and shorten the story into a length for a 1-minute talk. I thought this was supposed to be easy so I quickly wrote my story down and then I realized that this task was pretty difficult. My story is made up of some important sentences that support the structure and flow of the story and some vivid sentences that describe the scenes and changes in emotion. I had to make the hard decisions to cut off the beautiful and descriptive sentences. I first tried to cut the descriptive sentences down but I realized that my story became very plain and boring. So, I undid all my deleting and found everything back. I put my hands down from the keyboard and stared at my writing. I wondered how people tell their stories succinctly but also kept their glaring points. I searched for some references and I decided to combine the important structural sentences and vivid sentences. I took out some good phrases from the vivid sentences and connected them with the structure supporting sentences with commas and connective phrases such as ‘with.’ In the end, I successfully delivered the speech within a minute and my group mates thought that the story turned out very well after shortening. This was a rewarding experience for me, I learned something skillful and this method can be widely used in all kinds of assignments and discussions such as presenting slide shows. This was one of the ultimate goals I set for myself in the Story class and I felt happy about making development on it.

And the last experience I wanted to share has to do with communication. When I received an assignment that asked me to create a comic for an original story of a product I chose, I became very interested in the project and I wanted to try very hard on it. I planned out the story arc and GMC first and when I came up with the storyboard for the comic, I started to lose confidence again. Because I remembered that my visual skills are just disappointing to people. I drafted a rough storyboard and I stopped to think about what I could do differently this time to improve my visual skills. A friend of mine sent me a text about how he had finished and submitted the assignment. I texted him back and asked him about how he did his assignment. He showed me his working process and I was surprised by what he did. He used the method that the professor suggested in class which is to gather image references together in one comic box and create a sophisticated and collective view in that box. I was surprised by how he used that method and enhanced it to the next level. I learned a lot after communicating with him and I acquired more inspiration than I thought at that time. I then decided on my way to visually display the story and it worked out very well. I also received some positive feedback this time and I realized the long-forgotten value of communicating with others since the pandemic time. I have been isolated from this world for too long and I need to use this resource of the class well even if this is an online class.

To sum it up, the three things I learned are being open-minded, delivering ideas succinctly, and communicating more with others. These three things are very important for me as an interaction designer when I am communicating my ideas with teammates and audiences. And of course, persistence is what made all of these possible. If I didn’t spend time thinking, implementing changes, and talking, then I would never be able to do anything that was mentioned above. I have now gained some confidence back, I believe I will do better in the future if I keep on trying and executing my thoughts.

Link to Process Post: https://brainiac6868.wixsite.com/website/post/process-of-creating-learning-story-post