How you raise a toast at a wedding? How do you narrate your colourful life experiences? How do you take over a room and hold court at dinner parties? How do you tell rousing stories, which inspire, bring joy, motivate and exhilerate?
You must become an exceptional storyteller.
Stories are gold. Being a good storyteller is like strapping your personality to a rocket ship and seeing how far it goes. Being a good storyteller is like having a cheat code to connect with anyone in any situation, from dates to interviews, huge parties or even just at a bar with your friends. It not only makes you more charismatic and memorable, it literally throws you into a situation of leadership, especially when in groups. Everyone listens to you.
It’s the end of the year Christmas dinner with all my new coworkers. I’m at the end of the table and talking with some of the other teachers that I work with when I hear “Speech! Speech! Speech!” I turn my head wondering what person is going to have to stand up, not just in front of the 80-foot table but the entire restaurant, and talk. They were all looking at me. Turns out they wanted the new guy to share some words about his experience working in high school. I immediately tense up. My throat feels tight and I get butterflies. I don’t know how it’s possible but in ten seconds my palms have gotten sweaty. I take one last swig of my beer, slowly (so I can think), smile, and start telling a story about one of the PE teachers. In Spanish.
Everyone loved my Dad. He got free invites to the most exclusive dinners and events. I didn’t realize why until high school. He told the best stories. “You’ll never believe this. Back when I was Minnesota, I owned this underground nightclub. We use to…” It would start with three people leaning in to listen. Three would turn to five, then five to ten. Sometimes we’d be at a fancy dinner party of thirty people. They’d all be listening to him. You couldn’t hang out with my Dad and not meet people. IMPOSSIBLE.
Selling is about story telling. I don’t care what culture what country you come from, as human beings, we all share one trait, that is we enjoy stories. Great salespeople and effective leaders know this all too well. We don’t buy products or services, we buy from people. Ultimately we want to be able to relate to one another. There is no better way than to tell stories to reveal the personality of you, your product or services. I am not suggesting you make up some BS story or some canned pitch. It has to be authentic.
Accept whatever your imagination conjures. Don’t exert. The artist only needs to worry about content if he is trying to fake up a personality he doesn’t have, or express views he really isn’t in accord with. An artist has to accept what his imagination gives him, or screw his talent. Do not feel responsible in any way for the material that emerges.
We are natural storytellers. We use stories to make sense in a chaotic world. When we return home and “tell our day,” we are artfully shaping material into story form. (These stories are very often funny, incidentally.) Whether we know it or not, people always communicate through stories. What happened today? How did it go? Anytime we talk about the past, we are essentially talking in story mode. So in a way as word-users we all exist in a literary atmosphere, we live and breathe literature, we are all literary artists, we are constantly employing language to make interesting forms out of experience which perhaps originally seemed dull or incoherent. How far reshaping involves offences against truth is a problem any artist must face. A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble. Stories is how humans make sense of all the events in the world, how they retain memories. “Stories are the data structures with which humans process the world”
You saw a kid spilling her drinks all over the floor and her mum scolded her in public. If you let ideas slip by, you’d just think that this is just a random event in your life. But if you’re observant and reflective, you’d be thinking about how will the little girl feel being reprimanded in public and why does the mum seem to lose control of her temper easily - what are the consequences? Then boom, you have an idea to tell a story.
Let’s say you don’t know what to write about the little girl spilling her drinks, then some weeks later, you happen to see a similar incident just that this time round, the mum of another child handles it differently. Combining both together, you have something to say.
Tell stories now, while you’re still bad at it. Don’t hesitate, don’t second guess, just jump into telling stories. Getting good at anything means trying, failing, learning from failure, and trying again. Go ahead and fail, but keep a journal of your failures, analyzing as best you can why you failed and what you can do better next time. When you start telling stories, you may not be able to do everything. That’s okay. Each ingredient will help. When you’re composing the script, try making multiple passes. “Let’s see if I’ve scripted a clear beginning, middle and end … Okay, now let’s see if I can make the story more sensual … Okay, now let’s see …” Let go. Breathe. Don’t get so technical. Focus on one thing to improve on – maybe talking louder, maybe acting out characters more – and remember to do that for the next story you tell.
You’ll never be good at storytelling. Not you in particular. Anybody! Updike, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare - our greatest storytellers - all knew that the only worthwhile method was to keep trying and failing, trying and failing.
“A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.”
Notice he’s not saying anything factually interesting. Kids are messy. We know that. What’s funny is the way he says it – the freshness of his metaphor and the imagery he brings to the minds eye.
Practice a simple question-delay-answer structure over and over, in all your communications. In emails, text-messages, Quora posts, and so on. You’re not going to become a good storyteller by learning how to go into storytelling mode. Instead, turn yourself into someone who tells stories all the time. Make stories a natural part of the way you communicate. I don’t mean you should start emails with “Once upon a time…” I mean you should always be aware of posing a question, pausing, and then answering.
Avoid: cliché, digression, saying too much, not saying enough, lack of attention to the audience and preachiness.
Determine How the Sound of your Voice Makes you Feel and make improvements. Listen to yourself talk in a recording and pay attention to how you feel when you hear yourself talk. Do you feel positive or negative? Pleasant or irritiated? Energizing or sleep-inducing? There may be a high chance that most people feel the same way when they hear your voice. Can you adjust the general tonality to something more pleasing and stick to that?
“Make sure you write everyday and that will make all the difference”
“Make sure you write everyday… (look in the eyes with 3 seconds silence) and that will make all the difference”
Beginning storytellers tend to get derailed, forgetting important information. When they realize they’ve goofed, they have to awkwardly insert the missing details later, sometimes after the story is over.
“… and so Bob stayed in his room for three days! (Pause.) Oh, shit! I forgot to tell you that his house was being fumigated. Damn! Guess I ruined that story! Jesus! I just can’t tell stories!”
We’ve all heard that happen or it’s happened to us.
Well, you’re no longer allowed to let it happen to you. You can’t stop yourself from forgetting details. But your assignment now is to recover as best you can and go right back into storytelling mode:
“… and so Bob stayed in his room for three days! (Pause.) Oh, shit! I forgot to tell you that his house was being fumigated. That’s right! Workmen had covered his house with one of those giant tarps, and they’d warned him to stay out. His whole house was filled with toxic fumes, but Bob wedged a towel under his door…”
Since you’re learning (and you should always be learning), it’s okay to start over if you have to. That may be embarrassing, but do it anyway.
“Sorry. I screwed up the story. But I really want to tell it. Can I start over?” Your friends will say yes.
You are not allowed to fail.
You are only allowed to fail and try again.
Front-load your stories with key information
“This amazing thing happened to me, yesterday, when I was on my way to the bank – you know, that one Eighth Avenue, by the Starbucks? Anyway, this was at about three o’clock or maybe three-thirty. What time did we meet for drinks? Four? It must have been earlier …”
Arg!
Even if you can’t help spluttering and digressing, try to give your listener some information upfront: who, what, and a question if possible. That way, the derails will build some tension:
“You’re not going to believe who I met, yesterday! Bob! He was carrying this huge, bulky package. I was on my way to the bank – you know, that one on Eighth Avenue…”
Tell it again and again and again
Good storytellers refine their tales. Make sure you’re not trying to tell new stories every time. Stories get better and better through retellings. I can’t always remember who has sat through one of my stories in the past, so I ask:
“This funny thing happened to me when I flew to Oregon. Have I told you this? No? Good…”
Sometimes the listener says,
“Yes, but tell me again!”
Of course, refine this to be appropriate with the story, but if I’m telling a story about my friend that meets a girl on a mountain, it helps if I add important details – things like “he’s a virgin”, or “he got out of a two year relationship a week earlier.”
Another way to make characters interesting is to act them out.
The important physical element of acting your characters out is to get out of your seat and exaggerate. Acting out voices is also incredibly funny. I can understand that someone is joking in another language if they throw on a voice. Pretend to be the actual character, and exaggerate the voice as well. Acting out characters is the easiest form of comedy, but the one that most people inherently “get” or understand. And it’s always funny. The most important part of acting out characters, though, is committing to the character. If you half perform the character – you don’t greatly exaggerate the movements or voice – it feels forced. 100 percent or don’t do it.
Project your voice. You should be capable of talking with enough intensity so that anyone who’s 15-20 feet away can clearly understand you. Practice talking at this intensity so that people can clearly understand you and follow what you’re saying thereby drawing favorable attention to yourself.
Vary your sentence lengths.: Follow long sentences after short sentences and vice versa. If you say 3 or more long sentences in tandem, you may lose people due to the overload of information. My favorite has always been the Gary Provost lesson on varying sentence length to create rhythm and flow
Here’s how a boring write up looks like:
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
And here’s how you make it interesting:
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
At the beginning: Catch people’s attention
There are multiple ways to do this.
One option is to focus on volume. Like it or not, people who talk loudly get listened to more. You don’t have to be obnoxious about it, but usually – especially in group situations – we don’t talk loudly enough. We sabotage ourselves.
Another involves tone of voice. “Guess what happened to me this weekend?” can sound completely different depending on what word you emphasize. But it’s not monotone. If you stress the word “guess”, the question becomes a lot more interesting and engaging.
Third, pauses are incredibly important for drawing in the attention of an audience. You know you have them engaged when there is silence during your pauses. Take the first sentence “This weekend I went to the mountains and I met this girl”. This can be said as “This weekend… I went to the mountains… and I met this girl…” Pauses are especially important at the beginning of telling stories. Pauses hook listeners in to hearing more. You literally leave them hanging on your words.
Beginning Content: You can start with a quote or a teaser illustration, but it often works best to just say what you need to say. If the new topic is deforestation, there’s nothing wrong simply saying,
“Now I’d like to tell you something about deforestation.”
You can spruce this up a bit by saying:
“I’m going to tell you a secret about deforestation”
“Last year, I learned something interesting about deforestation”
“Here’s something you may not know about deforestation.”
You can also simply put up a slide that says DEFORESTATION, pause for a second for that topic to sink in, and then launch into your bullet points.
Details
Details can unlock the emotional truths that until now were never spoken out loud
If you’re going to say “nice car!”, why not make it “wow, a 1979 Volvo Station Wagon!” If we know the Volvo owner is a 21 year old woman, suddenly we can visualize her (well, maybe you can’t, but I can: she has dried blue and white oil paint on her fingers, wears an extra large men’s dress shirt as a smock, and has long, straight, chestnut-brown hair). A more vivid image opens up a rich, new world. Adjectives accelerate scene development.
When answering questions, lead with a specific detail that begs to be asked about. Be graphic, and use extremely descriptive and colorful language. Adding personal details that are interesting and funny will lead your conversation partner to remember you through them. Moreover, it creates a direction for the conversation to follow, and so the conversation is easier to continue for your partner. Most importantly, it creates a personal connection and encourages your conversation partner to reciprocate. People like those who are similar to them, and details are an avenue to that discovery.
“I work in a dentist’s office, keeping the accounts. We only have one bathroom, shared by us and the patients. The other day, I had to go really bad, but a patient was in there for a long time. I mean like twenty minutes! I thought I was going to burst, I had to pee so bad. When the guy finally came out, he rushed past me and left the office without even seeing the dentist. He’d pulled all the toilet paper off the roll and left it all over the bathroom floor. What was that all about?”
Callback
“Are you trying to get us arrested?”
“Like the time we ran naked through the Yale-Princeton lacrosse game?”
In 1859, a Montana rancher discovered all his cattle were dead …. [rest of talk] … Which is why that rancher’s cattle died. We now know it was a rare virus. One day, we’ll discover a cure.”
“The mathematician Jerry Wilber had a problem. He couldn’t figure out how to solve the Karminsky Equation. In 1918, he thought he’d cracked it. Here’s his first attempt [slide].” “When I first came to this company, I thought radios were old fashioned. Then a co-worker said something I’ll never forget …”
“When I first started programming, I was befuddled by unit testing. I felt like a idiot, because all my coworkers got it, but I didn’t. So I …” Mmost stories are based on a conflict of some kind, and that the best stories have a “balanced” conflict. If I know in the first 30 seconds which side will “win” the conflict, I lose interest. If it’s clear who the “good” guy is and who the “bad” guy is in your story, especially in the beginning, I lose interest. Life is not black and white. We struggle to understand the forces at work around us. The best stories reflect that struggle in a personal way, rather than simplify it. You can embrace uncertainty AND tell clear, purposeful, well-structured stories. You already do, every day.
“Take a look at this chart. The x axis is time and the y axis is dollars. Notice the steady increase? With all that extra cash, the company was able to open a new office in Phoenix, but in 1989, someone in the mail room dropped a cigarette lighter on some papers and the office burned down. Let me show you another chart: here’s how the company’s bottom line was affected by the Phoenix disaster. To recover from that, they …”
“Babies. They poop, they cry, they cost their parents an average of $20,000 a year. [Next slide.] Dogs. they crave attention, they bark, but they only cost their owners an average of $2,000 a year…“
Question-Delay-Answer. You bet I’ll come to your party tonight, and I’m going to bring something tasty! My grandma’s snickerdoodles!
What happens next? Withholding: at each point, there should be some tease that makes the listener crave to know “What happens next?” “So we see from the statistics that general public health rose in 2011, but there was one troubling factor …“The number-one ingredient for a story is the tension of an unsolved mystery. Stories set up a questions and delay answering them. The simplest example is a question in the first sentence with the answer delayed until the second sentence:
“You know who Bob’s favorite singer is? Meatloaf!”
That’s not a very interesting story, I know, but compare it to this:
“Bob’s favorite singer is Meatloaf.”
The first version evokes (just a little) tension. The second doesn’t. Now imagine telling the first version but walking out of the room after the first sentence:
“You know who Bob’s favorite singer is? —– “
That agony is what you should strive for. Because the most basic human urge that makes us want to listen to stories is the need to know what happens next. Curiosity is the juggernaut that drives storytelling.
If you immediately tell us what happens next – or if there is no next (“Bob’s favorite singer is Meatloaf”) – then there’s no hook.
“You bet I’ll come to your party tonight, and I’m going to bring something tasty! My grandma’s snickerdoodles!”
Variations
A question needn’t end with a question mark. You goal should be to make the reader or listener ask a question. You can do this by asking for him (as I did above), or you can use mystery to plant a seed in the reader’s mind which will sprout into a question after it’s watered by his natural curiosity.
“Bob doesn’t like the same bands as his friends. He likes Meatloaf!”
Again, imagine saying just “Bob doesn’t like the same bands as his friends” and then walking out of the room. Immediately, I’m wondering “Why not?” and “What bands does Bob like?”
Keep the mystery ball in the air!
If your story is done after “Meatloaf,” you’re set. If there’s more, remember to always engage curiosity. Avoid this:
“Bob doesn’t like the same bands as his friends. He likes Meatloaf! He hates the Beatles and Jennifer Lopez. Actually, he doesn’t listen to much music at all. He’s more into sports. He lives in Chicago, and…”
As I’m reading that, my mind is starting to wander, because there’s no new question–no mystery. Nothing to make me wonder what’s going to happen next.
This is better:
“Bob doesn’t like the same bands his friends liked. He likes Meatloaf! But there’s one Meatloaf song he hates —”
Ah! A new question!
As a storyteller, your job is to keep the sense of mystery afloat. There must be unanswered questions right up until the end, and when all questions are answered–or you’ve left us with a big, exciting, never-to-be-answered question* –the story is over.
Make the plot hot (escalate e.g. with “but”)
One of the biggest mistakes new writers (and professionals) make is not knowing how to properly use plot.
Let’s start with a banal desire: the hero of our story wants a pizza.
How new writers do it:
The hero wants a pizza. His fiancee too. And… He calls his favorite pizza place and orders his favorite pepperoni pizza. And… The pizza guy delivers it to his house. And… The hero and his fiancee eat the pizza. And… End of story… if you consider that thing a story.
How plot should work:
The hero wants a pizza. But his fiancee is not ok with him eating mostly junk food, therefore they have an argument over that. She leaves the house. He calls his favorite pizza place - but the place is under health inspection so they’re temporarily closed. Therefore, The hero then calls his second favorite pizza place - orders a pepperoni pizza. The delivery guy comes to his house, but, before handing him over the pizza, he suffers a heart attack and collapses to the ground, as the pizza falls to the dirty hallway floor. Therefore, The hero rushes to call the ambulance. They go to the hospital. After the doctors begin to take care of the delivery guy, The Hero goes out to eat, in another pizza place, near the hospital. He finally eats the pepperoni pizza, while waiting for an update on the delivery guy’s condition, hoping for some good news. But, the doctor tells our Hero that the delivery guy didn’t make it. “His arteries walls were so thick from eating junk food and fast food and pizza that he had no chance to recover from the fatal heart attack.” The Hero is shocked. He realizes his eating habit is not healthy, he stops eating pizza. The End.
Beginnings, middles, and ends
In my original Meatloaf example, there was just a beginning and an end, which is fine for two-sentence stories.
There are all sorts of ways beginnings, middles and ends function. But a basic job they do is to pose a question (beginning), delay (middle), and give the answer (end). Middles create tension by forcing the listener to wait for the answer to the question.
“Bob doesn’t like the same bands as his friends. They’re all into Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. He likes Meatloaf!”
Middle for diddle
Of course, the middle can’t be arbitrary:
“Bob doesn’t like the same bands as his friends. February is the second month of the year. He likes Meatloaf!”
It must add new information, as it did above when I explained what Bob’s friends like. And if a middle goes on for any significant length of time, it must contain its own questions and answers.
Bad:
“Bob doesn’t like the same bands as his friends. They’re all into Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. One has every Parker album ever released. Another one doesn’t own any Parkers, but he has about half of Miles Davis’s albums. He doesn’t have “Kind of Blue,” because he considers it overplayed. Bob doesn’t care if it’s overplayed or underplayed. He likes Meatloaf!”
Better:
“Bob doesn’t like the same bands as his friends. They’re all into Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. One friend, Jerry, who is out of work and almost destitute, found a rare Miles Davis album on sale for seven-hundred dollars. He sold his car because he had to own every record Miles Davis ever released. Bob wouldn’t have sold a can of beans for it. He likes Meatloaf!”
Because I told a lengthy middle about Bob’s friend, I knew there had to be questions in it. (What’s Jerry going to do to get that record?) Without questions, stories splutter and burn out.
Earn your sidetracks
I’ve been exaggerating to make some points. The truth is, we’ve all heard and read great stories that contain descriptive passages without endless question. If you want to spend five minutes of your story time describing a mountain you saw in Japan, that’s fine. But you have to earn the right. You earn it by - guess what - posing a question before your description. The more enticing the question, the more time you earn for your sidetrack.
Bad:
“There’s this mountain in Japan that’s really high. It takes several hours to climb. I got tired just walking around the base of it. I never wound up climbing it, because I was too scared, but this other guy I met did. He said it was exhausting…”
Better:
After visiting Japan, I went somewhere really exciting. But first I want to tell you about this mountain in Japan. It’s really high. It takes several hours to climb…”
Best:
“I lost my virginity in Italy. Two weeks earlier, in Japan, sex was the furthest thing from my mind. I saw this really high mountain. It takes several hours to climb…”
Because I have a dirty mind, I want to know who you had sex with and how it went. So I’ll stay with you for the Japanese mountain, waiting for you to get to the Italy part.
Of course, you have to somehow tie the mountain into the sex experience, or I’ll wonder what the point was. But the most important thing is for you to experiment with earning sidetracks. How long a sidetrack does a particular unanswered question buy you? You have to practice to learn that sort of thing. (Go back and reread my first paragraph.)
Make sweet, sweet love to me or pee on my face
Make Stories sensual. Make people feel
“When I read your stories, I was right there. I tasted that wine, the sweetness of that wine. I… made love to the girl. I sat in the cafe that morning wondering what the future held for me. Or if it held anything at all for me. I heard… that child cry in the night. And I felt the longing for my home so far away.”
Most people - with a little work - can make their descriptions more sensual, by which I’m referring to “the five senses,” not (necessarily) anything sexual. Your goal, as a storyteller, should be to evoke sensation for the listener. Writers often talk about images, but sounds, smells, tastes, and touches work just as well. Humans experience through their sense organs, so the more you can tie your story to sensation, the more vivid it will be. Sensual descriptions awaken mirror neurons. If you make me really feel how boring your job is, my mirror neurons will make me feel like it’s my job. And being an egoist, I’ll instantly find anything to do with me fascinating.
The trick to sensory description is to be as specific as possible: “My job is boring” is too abstract. “Job” is an abstraction. No one has a “job.” People have specific occupations in which they have to do specific tasks.
“You want to know about my day? I sit in a windowless room with dozens of huge, industrial filing cabinets lining the walls. There’s only one part of the wall not covered by a cabinet, and that’s where the door is. There’s nothing else in the room except a small desk, a chair, and a phone, which doesn’t work. My boss said maybe next year they’ll fix the phone, but there’s no budget for it now. He said the same thing last year. The room’s in the basement, and I can’t get cell reception or wifi. So I sit there all day, in dim light, and a couple of times an hour, someone comes in, hands me a report, and leaves. My job is to put the report in the right cabinet, so that it can be found again if anyone needs to refer to it. Though in my six years at the job, no one has ever asked for an old report. Each document has a client’s name at the top, and I file them alphabetically by client. I could do it in my sleep and I often do. I dream of endless hallways, filled with filing cabinets as far as I can see, with piles of reports on the floor, and I have to file them all.
“She was wearing a red silk dress and my palms got sweaty.”
This does not mean stating an abstraction and then tacking on a sensation:
“Bob loved all Indian food – he would devour tandoori chicken and licked the orange spice off his fingers.”
Sometimes that’s unavoidable, but, if possible, move the sensual to the forefront:
“I’ve seen Bob eat eleven tandoori chicken legs in one sitting, licking the orange spice off his fingers.”
“… which is why the auto-industry collapsed, and by the following year, many car lots had weeds sprouting up between cracks in the asphalt.”
“ … lobbyists hounded the senator. They got to be so loud, he started walking from his car to his office with cotton stuffed in his ears.”
“… you can visualize the function by drawing a circle. Imaging you were peddling around its circumference on a mini-tricycle…”
“If you paced back and forth in your bedroom for a month, you still wouldn’t have walked the distance I’m talking about.”
“The dot-com industry is clutching the economy and strangling it.”
“Each time I breath in and out, millions of microorganisms hitch a ride on the stream of air.”
“It sucks working in a grocery store. It’s so boring! Sometimes I fantasize about pouring vegetable oil up and down the aisles and watching customers fall on their asses. Once, I thought about burying myself under all the apples, and then when a customer reaches for one, thrusting my hand up like a zombie.”
Be tangible. Which one is easier to imagine?
“I crawled to the shoreline.”
“I dragged my knees through the blistering hot sand until my fingertips clipped the shoreline.”
It’s hard to describe a situation with emotional details that evoke your senses without having gone through similar situations yourself. That’s why we’re far better at telling our own stories than others. And everyone has a story. You can even turn a simple part of your routine into a beautiful story. Maybe it’s grocery shopping or something memorable your Mom said to you. Material is everywhere. How do you pull out the little emotional moments from this material? You examine every tiny physical and emotional change, then write about these changes using metaphors, similes, and emotional adjectives. Example:
“The guys loved her smile.” “Her charcoal dark eyelashes fluttered as her dimples pulled forward a smile into a half moon that made each man in the room feel as weightless as an astronaut.”
Sure you can focus on other aspects of storytelling such as the hero’s journey, suspense, and the climax. However, those pieces are irrelevant if your story isn’t tangible.
To help you expand your knowledge base of similes, metaphors, and emotional adjectives, I suggest reading many fiction books, chasing life experiences, and spending a significant amount of time Googling “similes or metaphors to X” and “synonyms of X.”
———
Climax
The reason you’re telling the story. You should always have the climax in mind when starting a story. Climaxes vary story to story. Obviously, all stories have different endings. But a common theme among hilarious and dramatic stories is the contrast between the climax and the buildup. Contrast is what makes a climax crazy. If a story is building up in one direction and then goes completely the other way at the end, we were happy we listened to the whole thing. We got to see the surprise. When starting off with storytelling, it helps to contrast the buildup and the climax.
Always have the climax in mind. Everything you are saying should go in contrast to what happens at the end. If a policeman pulled you over and you thought you were going to get a ticket but you didn’t (and that’s your story), emphasize the details that made you think that you were going to get a ticket. It’s that simple. With the climax in mind, the end of the story, we can build our stories up in one direction only to have a crazy twist at the end. Twists make stories a lot more memorable, and others will sooner listen to your second and third story if they know it’s worth it to listen to the end.
There’s telling stories in conversations and then there’s telling stories as a “teller.” In addition, you can tell stories in research papers and policy analysis white papers and so on. There’s a different formula for each, and different methods for each.
Since you mention Quora and interpersonal conversation, I’m going to focus on conversational story telling, which may be more difficult that other kinds of story telling, because you are interacting with the “audience” in a very different way than when you are on “stage,” so to speak, and you get all the time to yourself. When writing stories, whether fiction or non-fiction, it is similar to being on stage, except you get to edit. When telling a story “live,” what comes out, comes out. There is no “undo” button.
So the first thing to be aware of in conversation is the other people you are talking to. Every conversation has different unstated rules, but I think that generally you can break them down into “shared time” conversations and “competitive” conversations. The most common type of conversation, at least when men are present, is the competitive conversation. In such conversations, you have to compete for talking time. You have to jump in when there is an opening, and if you want to tell your full story, you better not leave an opening for anyone else, because they will jump right in, whether you are finished or not – unless you earn their attention, which is very rare.
Usually, in competitive conversation, there are stars and wannabes. The stars are the older, more educated, and more powerful people. They are the gray heads who automatically are deferred to, usually because they have power over others. Challenge them at your risk. The only way to become a young power is to make a lot of money or be very famous. The new tech entrepreneurs or people like Adrián Lamo are examples of younger people who can hold the floor because they’ve earned the respect by doing something extraordinary.
Anyway, competitive conversation is not good for story telling if you are not a star. If you are a star, then people will listen to you out of politeness, and your skills hardly matter. If you’re not a star, you won’t get enough time to tell a story.
So let’s move on to “shared time” conversations. In these conversations there is a literal (rarely) or metaphorical talking stick, which guarantees that as long as you hold the floor, no one will interrupt you. Unless you go on too long. Some people, however, are allowed to go on longer (by unspoken consensus) because they can tell a better story. I assume this is the role you are most interested in.
There are a few tools I use when telling a story in this situation.
Establish mental milestones. I have a set of story milestones in mind. These are points that I must be sure to include for my story to make sense. They are points that I can head towards, while telling my story, and then turn towards the next milestone when I get there. The conclusion is not necessarily a milestone I have in mind, because I tend to use stories to find out what I am thinking. But my milestones are all things that I have experienced, and I can talk about them easily and string them together to make a coherent whole.
Visualize As I said, I am usually telling a story that will include events from my life. When I tell about those events, I run an interior movie, so I can actually see what happened and then I describe what I am seeing. In this way, I don’t really have to do any work other than watch the interior movie and describe what is going on. Something else takes care of creating that movie. It’s probably something inside my mind that I am not aware of, but it doesn’t necessarily feel that way.
Let the ending find you. Most people seem to have a point they want to get to. While I might have a point, I do not let myself get fixated on the point. The story might lead somewhere else, if I am open to that. I just keep on talking until I find the ending – which is to say, the ending seems to find me. My job is just to recognize when I have spoken the ending and make sure I stop talking at that point. There is nothing to be gained by taking any more of other people’s time, just because you have them in the palm of your hand.
Monitor your audience. While telling your story in conversation, you need to keep an eye on everyone else. Primarily you are trying to sense whether they are with you, or they are getting restless. If you sense restlessness, then you need to cut your story short. Get to the point more quickly. Sometimes just end it before you get to the point if they are really unfocused. It won’t matter. They aren’t paying attention.
In egalitarian conversation, everyone is there voluntarily. They can all break off and go elsewhere whenever they want. Everyone has a sense of how much time each person is entitled to, and if you want more, you have to earn it. If you sense restlessness, then you haven’t earned your extra time, and you better stop, or people will resent you for taking too much of their precious time. They won’t want to talk to you in the future, unless they have to.
Hold the space. The attention of an audience is a sacred thing. People are entrusting their scarce attention to you, and trusting you not to waste it. You need to acknowledge that by symbolically entering into the space, acknowledging their attention, and letting go of the space. One way of entering story space is simply to say, “Let me tell you a story,” or “This is a true story.” While telling the story you should always be respectful of the time and attention others by monitoring their attention. You want to catch various people’s eyes, and ideally, see them nod their heads when they catch your eye. This shows both of you that you are being heard and they want to hear you. Holding the space is a subconscious kind of thing. For me, it feels like we are all sitting in a basket together, weaving the basket collectively as we go. If the basket starts to unravel, I have lost the space, and need to stop. When you do stop, you want to let go of the space, again, in a symbolic way. Think of after the priest reads from the Bible. The Bible is then reverently put away, and when it is gone, it is a sign of release of the sacred space.
You don’t need religion to have a sacred space. But you do need rituals that people will recognize subconsciously as signs of the end, as well as the beginning. Perhaps it can be as simple as saying “the end,” but it also might be a summary and a glance to the center of the space to acknowledge you have given up your ownership of the time. If the group is using a talking stick, it would be the passing of the stick.
Make the audience protagonist
Can the audience imagine themselves as the protagonist?
When you read or listen to a story, the storyteller has hit the bulls-eye when you can picture yourself there.
It’s no longer a forgettable book or an undertone to the crackling fire pit at a campsite. You’re fully engrossed in the protagonist’s shoes. Their story is now your story.
To create this scenario, you must make your storytelling tangible. You do this by touching on the tiny, critical, and emotional details. Then, you want to bring most of the nouns to life through powerful descriptions.
Here are two examples:
“She lifted the shotgun and held it to my face.”
vs.
“Her skinny arms jerked the 12 gauge shotgun up to her shoulder pointing the barrel between my eyes.”
The second example is more tangible. You can actually see yourself there.
Here’s the real secret: Even though you want to make the story tangible, leave enough room for the audience’s imagination to fill in a few blanks.
As the storyteller, you should give the audience the path to immersing themselves in the story, but not hold their hand while they walk down. The audience wants to feel in control.
Give them control, but not too much. After all, it’s your story.
Remove “was like”
The grammar police have arrived: “Was like” is NOT acceptable grammar for any use in quoting people, paraphrasing, imagining/extrapolating, or otherwise. It’s slang, and yes it’s become common, but it does not have any place in English when it is spoken well, so by all means, replace it everywhere. There’s nothing wrong with “and then he said, …” when paraphrasing or imitating. However, it may be a bit dull. So if you’d like to spice it up, you can try something like:
“He made a face as if he smelled a rat, and then he said/yelled/asked me, ‘Jackie, where’s the cork for this bottle?’”
“She always gives the mailman the finger and says, ‘You’re a real dolt, you know it?’”
“They came to the door and made their best snivelling faces, and when I opened the door they whined, all together, ‘Trick or treat!’”
“I’ve watched her a million times with that boyfriend of hers. You can almost hear her thinking, ‘Next guy I date is gonna be shorter than six-four.’”
It’s not the words right before the quotation or paraphrase—said, yelled, asked, whined—that make a sentence spicy. It’s the description of what was going on as things were said. The gestures. The scents. The face-making. The mood. So replace “was like” with anything grammatically correct and suited to what happened. (Really. Please. With anything at all.) Then make the description rock with the colorful details.
He said something like …
She said something to the effect of …
They said (and I’m paraphrasing) …
The elevator-repair man said something like …
These are not her exact words, but the gist is …
I said something along the lines of …
Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 no bullshit rules for writing a good story
Making your audience the hero of the story.
Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont, has done significant research showing that narratives where the audience is appropriately invested stimulate release of a chemical receptor in the brain designed to engender trust and affinity. Triggering that release drives enthusiasm and passion for great narratives. Another researcher, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, outlined the most effective structure to do this in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Hero’s Journey narrative arc helps the audience see the stories protagonist as an avatar for themselves. It’s the storytelling structure used in everything from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz to Harry Potter to every Marvel film. Disney codified the use of this arc in a memo that was sent to writers within their organization. That memo was expanded upon by its writer, Chris Voegler, and became The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers. Dan Harmon, creator of shows like Rick and Morty and Community, created a series of blog posts called “Story Structure” as guidelines for effective television writing, that were based on Campbell and Voegler’s writings. The impact on Star Wars is even more direct: George Lucas consulted on the story of the first film with Campbell directly. Anyone can tell a great story if they have the right tools. Using the powerful template laid out by Campbell, and expanded upon by others, is fundamental in creating great stories and great storytellers. There is no “secret” to great storytelling. The template for great storytelling has been circulating around for decades, used for decades, and waiting to be discovered by great storytellers. If you want to tell your most powerful story, use Campbell’s framework in your next story.
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