Tell stories

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.


The Philosophy


The performance

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. 


The Content

At the beginning: Catch people’s attention

There are multiple ways to do this. 


Details


Callback


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.

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.

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.

References

21 March 2019