How To Get Stories From Work You’ve Already Done

3 Steps For Turning Your Scripts Into Stories

When it comes to growing your audience, consistency is key. But it can be difficult to stay consistent, especially if you publish across more than one medium, be it podcasting and writing, or making YouTube videos and blog posts.

But there is a more efficient way to create content; one that not only will allow you to create more but will also free up your mind to pursue more creative topics and efforts. This method involves using things you’ve already said either in your podcasts or videos or even other stories and turning them into articles or short promotional pieces to publish

Here are 3 steps I use to turn my scripts or articles into stories.

Step 1: Getting a Script

*Skip this step if you are converting a longer article into other shorter pieces

For a lot of my heftier podcast episodes, I write a proper script beforehand to make sure I cover everything. Now, this script is usually written in a very shorthand manner with plenty of grammatical issues, but it is a solid start for what would have been an article I would write from scratch.

For some episodes and videos, though, there is no script beforehand. These episodes are slightly more fiddly, but running it through a program such as otter.ai usually does the trick.

Step 2: Find Your Stories

Now that you have your script, it’s time to find which parts of it you can turn into an article. I’ve outlined my process here, but feel free to experiment and find one that might work better for you.

Start by breaking down the episode into 2 to 3 topics. I’ll quickly skim over the script, finding key themes and topics that run throughout it. A 20-minute episode is usually enough to give me three separate topics, each of which I turn into an article to publish

Next comes highlighting and separating each topic. After identifying my themes or topics, I create a separate page for each over on Notion. I then copy over all the relevant information from my script into the correct pages, essentially splitting up the initial script

Step 3: Writing the Article

You’ve done the preparation and you have everything you need. But articles aren’t written by ideas, they’re written by words, so it’s important not to congratulate yourself just yet.

What you now need to do is turn all your ideas and preparation into a proper story. I find that having all the information in front of me can be quite distracting at this stage, so I tend to read over the parts I have copied over a bit at a time, then move to a separate page and write them as I would any other original story.

This stage essentially works to polish your work and turn it from whatever worked in another format to one that is optimized from a blogging and writing standpoint.

Once you’re done all this and editing, it’s time to hit that publish button! If you’re planning on consistently writing about topics you cover in podcasts or videos, it might even be worth making your own publication to publish all these stories in. Good luck, and have fun writing!