Be As Elaborate As You Are Allowed

Tell me about your day.  Will you use one sentence or five pages to do it?  You can certainly choose to do it either way.  You could go into incredible depths, giving a full background of each factor that went into each scene within your day.  Or, you could gloss over all the details and simply describe the largest actions that happened to you.  But why should you choose to do one or the other?

Sometimes you need to tell a story in 40 seconds.  You have to cover who, what, where, when, and why (yes, the five W's still matter, even if you're out of grade school).  This leaves no room for anything but the simplest of facts.

Other times, though, you have the luxury of embellishment.  You are in no rush and can thus go into all the detail you want.  You can cover all the bases, but you can also cover all the bases on top of each base.

When you are too rushed with your stories, you can tell the facts quickly,  but it becomes harder for people to care because they are spending all of their energy just trying to absorb what you are having to say,  Having no restraints whatsoever, though, leads to unfocused thoughts that lead from telling a story to going into a bunch of random tangents,

Ideally, you would never be rushed, but also would not ramble with your stories.  Unfortunately, the world is rarely ideal.  You have to make due with whatever constraints you have.  The only thing you can do about that is deal with it.  Learn to be quick on your feet and handle what people want.

Those few times when you do have that ideal situation, be as elaborate as your story allows.  That, though, is something I will tell you about tomorrow.