Day 505: How to tell a visual story

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:

Skinny Cow 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.