Industry Insights by Level Up Development
Overview
In this edition of Industry Insights, Yoh, a music journalist, writer, and storyteller discusses the essentials of storytelling, emphasizing the importance of a knowing the audience, strong beginning, finding one's voice, and having a powerful ending.
He likens storytelling to a puzzle, where having the right pieces allows you to tell any story. Yoh highlights that storytelling in hip hop is unique because it allows for breaking rules and finding one's own voice. He encourages storytellers to believe in the worth of their stories and to find their unique style through consistent practice. Yoh concludes that storytelling is about self-discovery and expression, with no limits or rules.
What Is Industry Insights?
Industry Insights is a content series providing step-by-step approaches to practically addressing professional objectives. In this series, industry professionals break down their approach to effectively tackling relatable professional objectives in a few steps.
The Approach
Step 1: Have A Strong Beginning
Step 2: Know Who The Story Is For
Step 3: Find Your Voice
Step 4: Have A Strong Ending
Opening
Yoh: I want people to take away that we're all storytellers. That's not the complicated part. The complicated part is believing that you're a storyteller and getting the rules to storytelling so that you can empower yourself to tell your story.
Yoh: In this edition, we will cover the essentials of storytelling. You will learn how to put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, because that's all stories are of puzzles, and if you have the right pieces, you can tell any story.
Step 1: Have A Strong Beginning
Yoh: The opening is everything. Before you go into any door, you see a welcome mat. You have to welcome the people into your world, and that's essential. If you don't have a strong beginning, you don't know they're gonna make it to the end, and the goal is to always get them from the start to the finish. So start strong.
Step 2: Know Who The Story Is For
Yoh: Once you have your opening, you have to take this person somewhere right like a GPS, right before you get in the car and go somewhere. You have to add the address in. You've got to know where you're going.
Yoh: I think for storytelling, that direction is the person. It could be for anyone. It could be for someone that's alive. It could be for someone that's dead. It could be for your mother, your grandmother, your best friend. It could be for a lot of people. It could be for a few people. It could be for you. It could be a vanity project.
Yoh: But you have to know who is for you're gonna eventually have to ask yourself that question. I think the sooner you ask yourself that the sooner you have that answer, the easier it is to tell the story.
Step 3: Find Your Voice
Yoh: I had a lot of influences when I was trying to find my style. Had all these writers that I would copy the way they would style their words, and it got me closer to my own personal style. I was able to find my most authentic self in the process of learning how to tell stories. So you have to tell more stories.
Yoh: You have to write as much as possible, sing as much as possible, rap as much as possible, constantly trying to find yourself once you can look at that page or listen to a song or hear your beat and see yourself in it, that means that you're finding your voice, and that voice is what's going to make you stand out.
Yoh: It's going to make what people see when they hear you, they're gonna be like, Oh, that's that's a your article. That's probably the most rewarding thing someone can tell you is that before they see the byline that they knew you wrote it because it's in your style, it's in your voice, it's in your perspective. So find your voice and they'll never forget.
Step 4: Have A Strong Ending
Yoh: Stories are like math. It's an equation. You gotta think about how you're gonna take two plus two and get four. Whatever you do, you don't wanna go off the rails with your story.
Yoh: That strong opening is supposed to set the scene. It sets the pace. It gives you a rhythm. It hooks them. But that ending, the ending is the thing that makes it all make sense, because you took them somewhere, you allow them to arrive with you to a place that they maybe didn't see coming.
Yoh: It's always great to have an ending that is a little bit of a surprise. It has to have something that makes them think back to the story, the entire story. You want them to think about how they got to where you took them.
Yoh: All the greatest stories in the world are the ones we remember, not just the beginning, not just the middle, but the entire thing, front to back, beginning to end. So in strong
Closing
Yoh: Why is storytelling in hip hop important? I believe that any storyteller can look at rap music or look at hip hop as a whole and see that you can break the rules. You don't have to follow any guidelines, you don't have to follow any steps.
Yoh: All you have to do is decide what the story is, decide the rhythm, decide the beat, decide the opening and decide the closing. You put all those pieces together, and you're gonna end up finding yourself. You're gonna find your story, and you're gonna be able to tell that story in a way that no one else can.
Yoh: That's one thing about rap, man. You can find someone in hip hop right now who's doing it unlike anything you've ever seen. You can find the same thing with painters. You can find it with music video directors.
Yoh: It's always about finding who you are and telling your story. And we have to believe that every story is worth telling. If you don't tell your story, no one else will.
Yoh: Figure out the medium, you figure out the way to say it, you find your language, your words, your verbiage, your colors, you'll end up with something that no one else can do. There's no limits, there's no rules.
Yoh: All you have to do is tell your story, and you can't tell your story unless you have the rules. These are the rules.
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