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Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks

Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks

by Parker · 379 things on Twos

Engage, Tech, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling
Foreword
Storytelling helps you realize that the biggest, scariest, most painful or regretful things in your head get small and surmountable when you share them with two, or three, or twenty, or three thousand people.
Telling stories about your life lets people know they’re not alone; and it lets some of the people closest to you — like family and loved ones — see your life apart from the context of family and without the kind of revisionist hindsight we can sometimes fall into concerning the ones we love most.
Preface
The simplest stories about the smallest moments in our lives are often the most compelling.
We all have stories. You may not believe this yet, but you will. You just need to know how to find them in your everyday life and then capture them for future telling.
Part I: Finding Your Story
“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” - Daniel Kahneman
“Writing myself into existence. I think that’s what I was trying to do. And it’s cool to write a song and then have it come true.” - Ani DiFranco
“It’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.” - Alan Rickman
Chapter One: My Promise to You
Chapter Two: What Is a Story? (and What Is the Dinner Test?)
Change
Your story must reflect change over time. A story cannot simply be a series of remarkable events. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new.
Matt’s Five Rules of Drinking Stories
No one will ever care about your drinking stories as much as you.
Drinking stories never impress the type of people who one wants to impress.
If you have more than three excellent drinking stories from your entire life, you are incorrect in your estimation of an excellent drinking story.
Even the best drinking stories are seriously compromised if told during the daytime and/or at the workplace.
A drinking story about a moment when you were over the age of forty is often sad, pathetic, and even tragic except under the following circumstances:
It is absolutely your best drinking story of all time.
The storyteller is over seventy. Drinking stories about the elderly are acceptable in any form, because they are rare and oftentimes hilarious.
Matt’s Three Rules of Vacation Stories
No one wants to hear about your vacation.
If someone asks to hear about your vacation, they are being polite. See rule #1.
If you had a moment that was actually storyworthy while you were on vacation, that is a story that should be told. But it should not include the quality of the local cuisine or anything related to the beauty or charm of the destination.
You must tell your own story and not the stories of others. People would rather hear the story about what happened to you last night than about what happened to your friend Pete last night, even if Pete’s story is better than your own.
Don’t tell other people’s stories. Tell your own. But feel free to tell your side of other people’s stories, as long as you are the protagonist in these tales.
The dinner test
If you wouldn’t tell your story at dinner that way, for goodness’ sake don’t tell it onstage that way. Storytelling is not theater. It is not poetry. It should be a slightly more crafted version of the story you would tell your buddies over beers.
This is what the audience wants. They want to feel that they are being told a story. They don’t want to see someone perform a story.
The audience and the storyteller find a common space in between the extemporaneous and the memorized, and this is where the best stories ideally reside.
Chapter Three: Homework for Life
These moments are everywhere. They exist in multitudes for all of us. They’re like dander in the wind. They exist all around us. More than you could ever imagine. The problem is that we don’t see these moments. We fail to notice them or recognize their importance, and when we happen to see one, we don’t reach out to catch it. We don’t record it. We don’t save it. We fail to keep these precious moments safe for the future.
We all have secrets that we hold close to our hearts. Maybe it’s a secret that you never want anyone to know, or maybe it’s one that you desperately wish someone would uncover. Or maybe, like me, you had a secret that was discovered by a friend or loved one. Either way, we all know what it’s like to have a secret like mine. We know how powerful and painful secrets can be.
We all know what hunger feels like. We know what it’s like to want something important and essential — food, friendship, acceptance, love — but never to have enough of it. And we all know what it’s like to feel embarrassed or ashamed of never having enough of something that you so desperately need.
If I had to tell a story from today — a five-minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day — what would it be? As benign and boring and inconsequential as it might seem, what was the most storyworthy moment from my day?
I would write a snippet. A sentence or two that captured the moment from the day. Just enough for me to remember the moment and recall it clearly on a later date.
I believe in simplicity. I believe in strategies that are easy to apply and maintain even on our busiest days. This is the best way to develop a habit.
There are moments when you connect with someone in a new and unexpected way. Moments when your heart fills with joy or breaks into tiny pieces. Moments when your position on an issue suddenly shifts or your opinion of a person changes forever. Moments when you discover something new about yourself or the world for the first time. Moments when a person says something you never want to forget or desperately wish you could forget.
There are no more throwaway days. Every day can change the world in some small way.
Commitment and faith. Commitment that you will sit down every night and reflect upon your day. It’s crazy to think that you won’t give five minutes a day over to something that will change your life, but many won’t. Instead, you’ll blindly give two hours of your life over to a television show that you will barely remember a year later. You’ll give at least that much time to aimless surfing of the internet and the liking of baby photos on Facebook, but you won’t give five minutes of your day to change your life. You may also lack faith, because this change won’t happen instantly, and in this world, most people want their results instantaneously. But this process does not happen overnight. It didn’t happen immediately for me. The stories that I was finding and recording early on were not very good. I couldn’t see the moments of true meaning, nor could I distinguish them from moments that might be interesting, or even amusing, but ultimately carry no weight. My storytelling lens had not yet been focused and refined, but I was so desperate to find stories that I refused to stop. I kept on doing my homework, even when it seemed pointless, because I was desperate to remain on the stage, and I thought that finding even one story would make it all worth it. It may take you a month, six months, or even a year to refine and focus your storytelling lens. You might give up five minutes of your day for an entire year and receive nothing in return. This process requires you to believe that eventually you will begin seeing these moments in your life, just as I and so many others have. Once it starts to happen, you will find your life changed forever.
Five minutes a day is all I’m asking. At the end of every day, take a moment and sit down. Reflect upon your day. Find your most storyworthy moment, even if it doesn’t feel very storyworthy. Write it down. Not the whole story, but a few sentences at most. Something that will keep you moving, and will make it feel doable. That will allow you to do it the next day. If you have commitment and faith, you will find stories. So many stories.
Story Break: Naked in Brazil
Chapter Four: Dreaming at the End of Your Pen
Rule #1: You must not get attached to any one idea.
Rule #2: You must not judge any thought or idea that appears in your mind.
Rule #3: You cannot allow the pen to stop moving.
Set a timer for ten minutes, follow these three rules, and go.
It’s one of the benefits of Crash & Burn. It allows for random thoughts to enter your mind at any moment.
With each recovered memory, my life feels more expansive and significant.
My life becomes brighter and sharper and better with every memory that is uncovered.
We are the sum of our experiences, the culmination of everything that has come before. The more we know about our past, the better we know ourselves. The greater our storehouse of memory, the more complete our personal narrative becomes. Our life begins to feel full and complete and important.
“Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.” - Zadie Smith
Crash & Burn will not only give you the content you will need, but it will change the way you perceive yourself and your life in the process.
Give me fifteen minutes a day, and I’ll guarantee you some amazing results.
Story Break: Storytelling Instruction Can Apparently Be Romantic
Chapter Five: First Last Best Worst: Great for Long Car Rides, First Dates, and Finding Stories
Make it your mission to find, see, remember, and identify stories, and you will begin to see your life in a new and more compelling light.
Prompts: kiss, car, pet, trouble, injury, gift, travel
Harder prompts: tree, toaster, monopoly, flag, socks
Do any entries appear more than once (the signal of a likely story)?
Could I turn any of these entries into useful anecdotes?
Could I turn any of these entries into fully realized stories?
I mark potential stories (or stories that I have already told) with an S. I mark potential anecdotes with an A.
Prompt yourself, using objects in the room, a random page in a dictionary, or ideas you hear on the television or a podcast.
Part II: Crafting Your Story
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” - Steve Jobs
“Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” - Ancient proverb
“There are people who write every now and then. And there are writers who are people every now and then.” - Dan Kennedy
Chapter Six: “Charity Thief”
Chapter Seven: Every Story Takes Only Five Seconds to Tell (and Jurassic Park Wasn't a Movie about Dinosaurs)
All great stories — regardless of length or depth or tone — tell the story of a five-second moment in a person’s life.
Every great story ever told is essentially about a five- second moment in the life of a human being, and the purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible.
These five-second moments are the moments in your life when something fundamentally changes forever. You fall in love. You fall out of love. You discover something new about yourself or another person. Your opinion on a subject dramatically changes. You find forgiveness. You reach acceptance. You sink into despair. You grudgingly resign. You’re drowned in regret. You make a life-altering decision. Choose a new path. Accomplish something great. Fail spectacularly.
Anything in the story that doesn’t help bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible is marginalized, shaded, or removed entirely. Anything that helps bring clarity to that moment is strengthened and highlighted.
People believe that if something interesting or incredible or unbelievable has happened to them, they have a great story to tell. Not true.
If something happened in Tanzania that altered you in some deep and fundamental way, then you might have a story. Think of it this way: If we remove Tanzania from the story, do you still have a story worth telling?
Story Break: This Book Is Going to Make Erin Barker Very Angry
Chapter Eight: Finding Your Beginning (I'm Also About to Forever Ruin Most Movies and Many Books for You)
So you’ve got yourself a five-second moment — a moment of transformation or revelation or realization. This is good. You’re already a better storyteller than most people in the world.
More good news. You’ve also found the end of your story. Your five-second moment is the most important thing that you will say. It is the purpose and pinnacle of your story. It’s the reason you opened your mouth in the first place. Therefore it must come as close to the end of your story as possible. Sometimes it will be the very last thing you say.
Knowing the ending will inform all the choices that we must make as we craft the rest of the story. Everything must serve our five-second moment, so knowing the ending — and starting the process of crafting the story with the ending — is helpful beyond measure. In fact the ending simply involves the choice of words you will use. How will you describe your five-second moment for the greatest emotional effect?
Once you’ve distilled your five-second moment down to its essence, ask yourself: What is the opposite of your five-second moment?
Simply put, the beginning of the story should be the opposite of the end. Find the opposite of your transformation, revelation, or realization, and this is where your story should start. This is what creates an arc in your story. This is how a story shows change over time.
I was once this, but now I am this.
I once thought this, but now I think this.
I once felt this, but now I feel this.
Stories must reflect change of some kind. It need not always be positive change, and the change need not be monumental. In fact, stories about failure, embarrassment, and shame are fantastic. Stories about trying desperately to achieve a goal and failing spectacularly are beloved.
Even when progress is made, the best stories often reflect incremental change. Tiny steps forward. Glacial improvement. Audiences would much rather hear about incremental, tenuous growth than about overnight success.
Regardless of whether your change is infinitesimal or profound, positive or negative, your story must reflect change. You must begin and end your story in entirely different states of being.
Change is key.
Finding that five-second moment in your life is critical, of course, but in terms of actually crafting your story, where you start your story is the most important decision you will make. The right beginning creates a satisfying narrative arc that will cause people to connect to and remember your story. It will provide a clear, coherent path to the end. It will serve as an enormous arrow that will point both you and the audience in the right direction.
Less effective storytellers latch onto the first thing that comes to mind rather than making a list of anecdotes, analyzing them for content, tone, the potential for humor, and connectivity to the story before deciding.
Great storytellers know this: The first idea is rarely the best idea. It may be the most convenient idea. The easiest to remember. The one you personally like the most. But rarely is the first idea the one that I choose. First ideas are for the lazy. The complacent. The easily satisfied.
More than half of the time I spend crafting stories is spent searching for the right beginning. Once I’ve found it, the rest of the story often flows easily. The correct beginning makes the rest of the choices seem much more obvious.
I also try to start my story as close to the end as possible (a rule Kurt Vonnegut followed when writing short stories). I want my stories to be as temporally limited as possible. I strive for simplicity at all times. By starting as close to the end as possible, we shorten our stories. We avoid unnecessary setup. We eliminate superfluous details.
I often start my story in one place and end up working my way closer and closer to the end as I revise.
Fewer locations in a story always makes things simpler and easier to digest for an audience.
Sometimes the closest place to start is thirty years before your five-second moment. If that’s the case, so be it. But when that beginning can be pushed closer to the five-second moment, your audience will be the better for it.
Try to start your story with forward movement whenever possible.
Establish yourself as a person who is physically moving through space. Opening with forward movement creates instant momentum in a story. It makes the audience feel that we’re already on our way, immersed in the world you are moving us through. We’re going somewhere important.
Don’t start by setting expectations.
First, it establishes potentially unrealistic expectations. “Hilarious” is an exceptionally high bar. “You’re not going to believe this” is probably an impossible mark to hit. Never start your story by setting expectations for it, realistic or otherwise. No one wants a rubric or an introduction at the beginning of a story. They simply want a story.
Surprise is a beautiful thing in a story. Apart from vulnerability, it may be the most beautiful thing about stories. Letting your audience know that your story is hilarious or improbable hinders your ability to catch them off-guard and offer them a surprise later on.
Start with the story, not with a summary of the story. There is no need to describe the tone or tenor at the onset. Just start with story, and whenever possible, open with movement. Forward progress. It’s a simple and effective way of grabbing the listeners’ attention and focusing it somewhere specific. It makes them feel that we’re already off and running.
Story Break: Thirteen Rules for an Effective (and Perhaps Even Inspiring) Commencement Address
Don’t compliment yourself.
Don’t praise your accomplishments in any way. It is not your day. Even if you’re delivering the valedictory speech, it’s still not your day. It’s a day for every person in your graduating class. Don’t place your accomplishments ahead of theirs.
Be self-deprecating, but only if it is real.
Your audience will see right through you. This is even worse than being self-congratulatory.
Don’t ask rhetorical questions.
These questions always break momentum and displace your authority as the speaker onto your audience.
Also, audience members will sometimes answer these questions and interrupt you, which is never good.
Offer one granular bit of wisdom, something that is both applicable and memorable.
The great commencement speakers manage to lodge a small, original, useful, and memorable idea in the minds of the graduates. It’s the offer of one final lesson — a bit of compelling wisdom and insight that the graduates will remember long after they have tossed their caps and moved into the greater world.
Don’t cater any part of your speech to the parents of the graduates.
As much as they may think otherwise, this is not their day either. This is a speech directed at the graduates.
Make your audience laugh.
Never mention the weather or the temperature.
If it’s a beautiful day, everyone knows it. If it’s not, reminding your audience about the heat or rain is stupid.
There is nothing more banal and meaningless than talking about the weather.
Speak as if you were speaking to friends.
Be yourself. If your language sounds more formal than your normal speech, you have failed.
Emotion is good.
Be enthusiastic. Excited. Hopeful. Even angry if needed. Anything but staid and somber. This is not a policy speech or a lecture. It is an inspirational address.
If you plan on describing the world the graduates will be entering, don’t.
It’s ridiculous to assume that the world as you see it resembles the world that this diverse group of people will be entering.
Don’t define terms by quoting the dictionary.
“Webster’s Dictionary says” are three words that should be banned from all speeches and essays until the end of time.
Don’t use a quote that you’ve heard someone use in a previous commencement speech.
Don’t use a quote at all, if possible. Instead, be quotable. Your job is not to recycle but to create something new.
End your speech in less than the allotted time.
Take a deep breath, chill out — catch up on House of Cards and Narcos— and spend the next twenty-two years figuring out what you want to do —and you could still end up matching the achievements of the Greatest Generation.
Relax and place less pressure on themselves to succeed immediately. Take the time to explore the world. Try out many things. Consider all their options. Stumble into opportunities.
Some of you may not know exactly what you want to do or who you want to be. Your brain may be whiting out from too much possibility. Or maybe you’re simply drawing a blank. You haven’t found your passion. Well there’s no shame in that. Quite the opposite.
It’s never too late to start something new. We have more time than we think.
Chapter Nine: Stakes: Five Ways to Keep Your Story Compelling (and Why There Are Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park)
Stories that fail to hold your attention lack stakes. Stories that allow your mind to wander lack stakes.
The Elephant
Every story must have an Elephant. The Elephant is the thing that everyone in the room can see. It is large and obvious. It is a clear statement of the need, the want, the problem, the peril, or the mystery. It signifies where the story is headed, and it makes it clear to your audience that this is in fact a story and not a simple musing on a subject.
The Elephant tells the audience what to expect. It gives them a reason to listen, a reason to wonder. It infuses the story with instantaneous stakes.
The Elephant should appear as early in the story as possible. Ideally, it should appear within the first minute, and if you can say it within the first thirty seconds, even better.
I change the color of the Elephant halfway through this story. I present the audience with one Elephant, but then I paint it another color. I trick them. This is an excellent storytelling strategy: make your audience think they are on one path, and then when they least expect it, show them that they have been on a different path all along.
I try to find a way to make the beginning light and fun, hilarious and joyous. I present an Elephant that is happy, adventurous, and amusing to contrast with the weight, the sadness, and the solemnity at the end.
Backpacks
A Backpack is a strategy that increases the stakes of the story by increasing the audience’s anticipation about a coming event. It’s when a storyteller loads up the audience with all the storyteller’s hopes and fears in that moment before moving the story forward.
It’s an attempt to do two things:
Make the audience wonder what will happen next.
Make your audience experience the same emotion, or something like the same emotion, that the storyteller experienced in the moment about to be described.
By putting a Backpack on them, I allowed my audience to enter the gas station with me, wondering what would happen next. I turned my plan into their plan. They’re now invested in the outcome.
Backpacks are most effective when a plan does not work.
The audience wants characters (or storytellers) to succeed, but they don’t really want characters to succeed. It’s struggle and strife that make stories great. They want to see their characters ultimately triumph, but they want suffering first. They don’t want anything to be easy.
Perfect plans executed perfectly never make good stories. They are the stories told by narcissists, jackasses, and thin-skinned egotists.
Breadcrumbs
Storytellers use Breadcrumbs when we hint at a future event but only reveal enough to keep the audience guessing.
The trick is to choose the Breadcrumbs that create the most wonder in the minds of your audience without giving them enough to guess correctly. Choose wisely. Breadcrumbs are particularly effective when the truly unexpected is coming.
Hourglasses
When you know the audience is hanging on your every word, let them hang. Drag out the wait as long as possible.
In addition to adding in superfluous detail and summary, I’ll slow my pace as I approach this sentence. I will reduce my volume. I want the audience on the edge of their seats, desperately awaiting those twelve words.
Crystal Balls
A Crystal Ball is a false prediction made by a storyteller to cause the audience to wonder if the prediction will prove to be true.
By predicting my future arrest, I’ve established wonder in their minds about a future event.
We use Crystal Balls in everyday life because we, as human beings, are all prediction machines. We are constantly trying to anticipate the future, so when telling stories, recounting those in-the-moment predictions is critical.
We spend our lives predicting our future. Anticipating what will come next. Often these predictions about future events are incorrect, and quite often they become part of the stories we tell. We want people to know what we were thinking as well as what we were saying and doing.
In storytelling, deploy Crystal Balls strategically: Only when your prediction seems possible. Only when your guess is reasonable. And only when your prediction presents an intriguing or exciting possibility.
Remember, the best way to ensure that your story has stakes is to choose a story that has stakes. Elephants, Backpacks, Breadcrumbs, Hourglasses, and Crystal Balls will only get you so far. If your story is boring, it will always be boring. But if your story has some potentially boring parts — sections that need to be told but simply aren’t compelling — these strategies will help a lot.
If you’re not sure about the level of stakes in your story, simply ask yourself:
Would the audience want to hear my next sentence?
If I stopped speaking right now, would anyone care?
Am I more compelling than video games and pizza and sex at this moment?
Humor
Humor doesn’t actually add to or raise the stakes of a story. It doesn’t give your audience a reason to listen for the next sentence. It doesn’t increase the level of suspense or peril or mystery. But it’s a way of keeping your audience’s attention through a section of your story that you think might be less than compelling.
The goal of a storyteller is not to tell a funny story. The goal is to tell a story that moves an audience emotionally. That means a story can contain humor, but if it’s all funny, then the story operates on a single emotional plane and is ultimately forgettable.
Stakes are essential in a story. Stakes are the gears that make stories work. If your story lacks stakes or lacks meaningful stakes, there is nothing you can do to make that story great.
Humor is optional. Stakes are nonnegotiable.
Story Break: Zombie Brother
Chapter Ten: The Five Permissible Lies of True Storytelling
Three important caveats before we proceed with the five types of permissible lies in storytelling:
Important Caveat #1: As storytellers, we only lie for the benefit of our audience. We never lie for our own personal gain.
We’re not in the business of making ourselves look better, appearing more noble, or mitigating our shame or failure.
We lie in our stories only when our audience would want us to lie — only when the story is better for our doing so.
Important Caveat #2: Memory is a slippery thing, and as storytellers, we must remember this.
We tell stories as well as we can remember them, but we must acknowledge that this is probably inaccurate in many ways.
Intentionally or otherwise, our stories contain mistakes, inaccuracies, slippages of memory.
Important Caveat #3: As storytellers, we never add something to a story that was not already there.
We are not fiction tellers. We are truth tellers.
We may not tell the whole truth, and we may manipulate that truth from time to time, but we start with a pile of facts and figures, and we never add to that pile.
It’s our job to take the raw content of a story and craft it into something entertaining, compelling, moving, and satisfying.
Making something up is cheating, and great storytellers are not cheaters.
Lie #1: Omission
If you were to tell every single thing in the story, it would never end. We all omit elements from our stories, but great storytellers do this strategically and for a variety of reasons.
People are the most frequently omitted aspects to stories: third wheels and random strangers who distract audiences from the matter at hand. If a person doesn’t fill a role in your story, simply pretend that person wasn’t there.
Eliminate people from stories when they serve no purpose. Pretend they aren’t there. Ghost them.
Storytellers are also allowed to end their stories wherever they want, thus omitting endings that are undesirable.
No one wants redemption. Everyone wants the clown.
Audiences don’t want redemption. Redemption cleanses the palate. It ties up all loose ends. It makes the world whole again. It allows your audience to sleep well at night. I want my audience tossing and turning over my story.
Storytellers end their stories in the most advantageous place possible. They omit the endings that offer neat little bows and happily-ever-afters. The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results. The best stories give rise to unanswered questions.
Lie #2: Compression