In college, I competed in college forensics, a weird word for debate and not a competition to figure out blood splatter patterns.
But to travel with the team, you needed to have other events you competed on. I did after-dinner speeches and impromptu speaking. When you watch an Impromptu competition, something about it seems like magic.
Someone is handed a quotation, and then in two minutes, they have to prepare a five-minute speech. Of course, there is no magic; instead, there is a simple little trick that helps competitors look like politicians able to put speeches at the drop of a hat. That trick is structure, the structure of an impromptu speech.
An impromptu speech has an icebreaker, a thesis around the quotation, then three or two points to build a case to support the thesis; it closes with a call back to the icebreaker, a question, or a statement.
These structures can be useful to storytellers because they prevent them from thinking that each story they write has a unique structure to be discovered.
A story structure is not meant to be unearthed; the impromptu structure can get you writing quickly.
So, instead of unearthing the story structure, you can use a simple structure to write a story quickly and surrender to the peace of honoring limits. You can always write more; you can always tell more. But it is more helpful to limit yourself to only telling so much this one time.
It also helps for editing purposes because once the story is written,, they can quickly spot where to cut down points that are overdeveloped or add to ones that aren't.
Once you have that structure in your head, you have to wonder, well, how do you write a paragraph, and for that, I tend to think of the structure used in debate itself.
In debate, the most common structure used was designed by the communication scholar Stephen Toulmin.
The Toulmin structure for an argument is simply a thesis, date, and conclusion.
Obviously, my writing is not that complicated. I'm not writing research or expert pieces. So I turn Toulmin's argument structure into ‘Carlos' Yarnspinning Structure’ and it is composed of a main transitional event, the events of the event, and my voice. If you don't add voice to your events, then your story is not yet a story; it is an anecdote.
Voice is the secret sauce of who you are; it can be the funny thing you say, your internal struggle, or a twist or hidden detail the audience doesn't know.
That's where people find out who you are.
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