Describe the setting of your story

During the development of this session, we will be delving into one of the most useful elements when constructing a story. Describing the setting of your story can dramatically increase the impact it will have on your listeners. The description adds a powerful factor to provoke empathy in your audience, allowing you to visualize the facts with greater precision, thus transmitting the greatest possible content of the feelings and sensations you have experienced.

Without overflowing our message with unnecessary decorative complements, a concise description will move the listener into a more harmonious and enjoyable narrative thread. In order for you to make effective use of this technique, we will be addressing three of the elements you should take into account during your description.

Contextualization of the facts: Contextualizing the narrated facts will allow the listener to place himself in time and space accurately. When we contextualize, we provide a load of elements that place the audience in the moment in which the events took place. This makes it easier to understand what the situation was at the time and what stage of development the authors of the story were in.

If you tell your audience about a time when you lost control of your emotions and ended up taking violent actions, adding your age, state of mind or the problems you were going through will give your listeners the context in which these events took place. This context is what adds value to your message, since you are now a different person and it is precisely these experiences, in past situations, that have contributed to form the person you are today.

The use of context is essential to understand a story. An inadequate contextualization can lead to contradictions and misinterpretations that damage the essence of the message.

Mood: Mood can reflect a range of relevant information within the story. If you make an effort to let your audience know how you felt when the events took place, they will be able to empathize with you and gain a greater experience of the message you are trying to convey. It is not the same to say: "When I was young I was a bad student"; to say: "When I was young I was a bad student and today I feel bad about it, because I did not value the effort my parents made so that I could study".

In the first assumption, it seems that there were no consequences for being a bad student, the attitude is not reproached and no constructive message is transmitted. When we add the state of mind to the second assumption, we are closing with the message that it is not right to waste the support and effort that other people put into us.

Avoid unnecessary descriptive elements: By adding some degree of description to our stories, we improve our audience's perception of the facts. The most common mistake when describing situations is to overuse unnecessary descriptive elements. Too many descriptive elements, which do not add value or strengthen the message, only generate an atmosphere of filler that is perceived as a deterrent to the listener's attention. Try to focus the description towards a concise transmission of the central message of the story. Keep in mind that this is only a complement to your speech, not the central axis of it.

By making a balanced use of descriptive elements we retain and direct the listener's attention through our narrative thread. Practice this resource with brief descriptions that embellish your story and allow you to contextualize it so that the message is better perceived.