WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
The Wonderful Art of Story Telling
Everyone loves a good story, make your story worth hearing. Whether we’re sitting around a campfire or a boardroom table, a great story, well-told, can stick in our minds forever. But what are the secrets to telling an engaging, memorable narrative? Although it might seem otherwise, the truth is that every single one of us has the potential to spin captivating narratives from our life experiences. We just need the right tools and techniques to tell them.
Whether you're at a job interview or at a presentation, mesmerize your audience simply by telling them about key moments in your career, upbringing or everyday life. We’ll discover the ingredients that create the storytelling recipe for success and take a look at the simple do’s and don’ts that can make or break your audience’s interest. You’ll learn the nuts and bolts of storytelling, how to begin and end your story, as well as what to include and what to leave out if you’re going to achieve maximum audience impact.
Great stories contain an element of change and cast the storyteller as the protagonist. Whether you're a sales executive trying to entrance a potential client or a grandparent trying to connect with your grandkids, storytelling is the best way to communicate your idea. Most Importantly, there are some non-negotiable rules to follow if you want to be an engaging storyteller.
First, your story shouldn’t just consist of a succession of extraordinary events – it should reflect some type of change happening to someone or something over a period of time.
Don’t worry, though, because this change may be very small, and it also doesn’t need to reflect personal improvement. But some sort of change must occur in your story. Just consider the worst movies you’ve ever seen – even these reflect certain character changes during the action.
Significantly, stories that fail to involve change over the narrative are simply anecdotes and include vacation-related stories, drinking stories and various other one-note romps. Anecdotes merely recount harrowing, heartfelt or funny moments that may have been extraordinary but, nonetheless, do not leave a permanent mark on who we are. Unfortunately, without an aspect of change, you can’t expect your listeners to feel any sort of deeper connection with you after you’ve finished, or to change their opinions about something important on the basis of what you’ve told them.
You should also ensure that the stories you tell cast you as the protagonist. Your audience wants to hear about something that happened to you, rather than to your best friend.
Why?
Importantly, there is something intrinsically vulnerable, gritty and immediate about hearing the story of the person standing right in front of you. Telling your story requires a lot more courage than telling someone else’s. It also involves hard truths and authenticity – all things that your audience will appreciate.
Crucially, this is not to say that you can’t tell another person’s story; you just need to tell it from your perspective.
Tell your story without any pre-prepared theatrical or poetic flourishes. To see if your story measures up, ask yourself: “Is this the kind of story I would recount to a friend over dinner?” If it isn’t, then it probably isn’t a very good story.
When you’re planning how to tell a story, remember that the way you “perform” it in front of a wider audience – whether to work colleagues or at church – shouldn’t differ from the way you would tell it to a friend.
Just consider the way some storytellers, when in front of an audience, build in strange gestures to emphasize their narrative, like making fluttering hand movements to mime how an idea alighted on them. Ask yourself, would you make these odd gestures at the dinner table? Probably not. Remember, you’re not putting on a one-person theater show, you’re simply telling your story.
In addition to over-the-top hand gestures, there are a lot of needless poetical flourishes with which people adorn their stories when they find themselves on a stage – or when they try to render their stories in writing. Once again, ask yourself, would you have dinner with someone who told you that “the red roses were really ravishing in their glimmering green garden”? Well, you might, but probably only once, right? So remember, you’re not writing poetry here, you’re storytelling.
The same goes for starting your story with dialogue, particularly dialogue that is unnecessary. Take a moment to imagine starting a dinner-party story by saying “Dad, don’t go into my room!” or with a random noise like “Kapow!” It would sound deeply odd, and you likely wouldn’t be invited for dinner again. And yet, on the stage and on the page, many storytellers think it’s appropriate to kick off their narrative in this wacky, confusing way. So instead, before launching into dialogue, first introduce your story and its characters.
Importantly, most of these issues arise because storytellers make one crucial mistake. They think their audience wants them to perform their story rather than just tell it. This could not be further from the truth. Though your audience will likely know that some planning has gone into your story, they’ll want to feel that your story is off-the-cuff and unpracticed. In other words, they want to feel that you’re speaking from the heart. Unfortunately, if you insert any of these ready-made theatrical or poetical flourishes, this illusion will be shattered; and the connection between you and your audience will be lost.
At its heart, every good story is about a five-second moment.
When it comes to storytelling, there is one surprising, yet essential truth you need to know. What is this great secret? It’s that every good story, at its heart, is about a five-second moment in someone’s life. Furthermore, the whole point of your story is to illuminate this instant with as much clarity as possible.
What sort of five-second moment are we talking about?
Specifically, we’re referring to those moments in life in which something changes permanently. Perhaps you meet the love of your life – or you stop loving them. Perhaps you have a dramatic change of opinion on something important, or you forgive someone, or you fall into despair. It’s moments like these – typically sudden, powerful and small – that form the foundation of exceptional stories.
Not convinced? Just consider the following true story, which has made many audiences cry.
As a teenager, author, Mathew Dicks was involved in a terrible car crash in which his upper body was thrown through the windshield, and his legs were smashed into the dashboard. The crash was so bad that, as he was dragged from the vehicle, he technically died and had to be resuscitated by paramedics on the side of the road.
So, is this near-death experience the five-second moment that makes audiences cry?
Interestingly, it isn’t. This moment comes later. Shockingly, the author’s parents didn’t rush to see him in the hospital that night. Instead, they went to check on how the car was. The author was feeling deeply scared and alone when his transformative five seconds kicked in – all of a sudden, his teenage friends showed up in the waiting room to shout words of encouragement at him as he was being wheeled into surgery.
Why is this moment more powerful for audiences than the earlier near-death experience?
Simply because this is a transformative moment in the author’s life to which everyone can relate. Most of us will never understand what it feels like to experience a near-fatal crash. But loneliness, rejection and the power of friendship? These are things we’ve all felt, and so this is what audiences most connect with in the author’s story. In fact, when people talk about this story afterward, they rarely even mention the car crash – all they remember is that sudden change from feeling alone to feeling loved.
To be
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