Putting Stories Together to Make a Show

Somewhere along the way, I have realized that people are more interested in buying a show, than in buying Kelly Swanson the storyteller. Especially if you give your show a cute and catchy title like “It’s all fun and games ’til the hair gets messed up.” Please don’t use that title for your show. I’m already using it.

With the holiday season quickly approaching, it makes sense to talk about how to put stories together to form a holiday show. Christmas is usually my biggest season with the number of holiday parties (churches, businesses, private parties, etc) that are looking for entertainment. So I’m going to show you how I put together a Christmas show. You will find that this process can be easily applied no matter where you take your storytelling.

I’ve made a list of the process that I go through to put a show together. I am using Christmas as an example, but you can see how it would work no matter what your theme.

Start by thinking where you plan on taking your show, and what kind of audience you want to target. For the sake of example, let’s say that you want to do a show for kids. You will probably have to be more specific than that because performing for toddlers requires something different than performing for fifth graders. Let’s say that you want to reach a wide span of ages. So we’ll focus on first through fifth grades.

Then think about what kind of message or theme you would like to have. In this case we have already decided that it’s Christmas. I can tell you right now, that you may have trouble selling that to the schools so you might want to call it a holiday program. Or call it a Christmas program and sell it to churches. It’s up to you.