Having written a blog since 2004, I’ve long understood the power of unbridled honestly and unflinching vulnerability. I’ve managed to capture the attention of a sizable audience by writing openly and truthfully about my life.
No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story. — Daniel Kahneman
Let’s also be clear that when I talk about storytelling, I am speaking about personal narrative. True stories told by the people who lived them. This is very different than the traditional fable or folktale that many people associate with the word storytelling. While folktales and fables are entertaining and can teach us about universal truths and important life lessons, there is power in personal storytelling that folktales and fables will never possess.
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. The change can be infinitesimal. It need not reflect an improvement in yourself or your character, but change must happen. Even the worst movies in the world reflect some change in a character over time. So must your story. Stories that fail to reflect change over time are known as anecdotes. Romps. Drinking stories. Vacation stories. They recount humorous, harrowing, and even heartfelt moments from our lives that burned brightly but left no lasting mark on our souls. There is nothing wrong with telling these stories, but don’t expect to make someone fall in love with you in a Chili’s restaurant by telling one of these stories. Don’t expect people to change their opinions on an important matter or feel more connected to you through these stories. These are the roller-coasters and cotton candy of the storytelling world. Supremely fun and delicious, but ultimately forgettable.
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.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t tell someone else’s story. It simply means you must make the story about yourself. You must tell your side of the story.
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 Lastly, the story must pass the Dinner Test. The Dinner Test is simply this: Is the story that you craft for the stage, the boardroom, the sales conference, or the Sunday sermon similar to the story you would tell a friend at dinner? This should be the goal.
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. When telling a story to an audience, we play a game with them: we pretend that we are speaking completely off the cuff. Extemporaneous storytelling, unprepared and unrehearsed. This is not usually true. While most storytellers don’t memorize their stories (and I strongly advise against it), they are prepared to tell them. They have memorized specific beats in a story. They know their beginning and ending lines. They have memorized certain laugh lines. They have a plan in place before they begin speaking.
As a player in this game, the audience also pretends that the story is extemporaneous. Off the cuff. Unprepared and unpracticed. 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.
Years ago, I found a way to recognize and collect these moments, and it has changed my life. It’s turned me into a storyteller with an endless supply of stories. Stories that don’t rely upon near-death experiences or unlawful imprisonment or homelessness to be effective. It’s also made me a happier person. Let me explain. Back in 2013, I was becoming desperate. I’d been telling stories onstage for almost two years, and I was head over heels in love with storytelling. As I continued to perform night after night, I realized two things: 1. I needed more stories. If I was going to continue to perform, I was going to have to generate more content. 2. The stories that my friends initially thought would be great — the near-death experiences, the arrest and trial for a crime I didn’t commit, sharing a bedroom with a goat — are all good stories. Audiences love them. But the story about Charlie throwing his food and my wife uncovering my childhood secret — a tiny story that takes place at a dining-room table between a husband and a wife — that’s the kind of story that audiences love best of all. Here’s why: If I tell the story about the time I died on the side of the road and was brought back to life in the back of an ambulance, it’s going to be challenging for an audience to connect with my story and with me. It might be exciting and compelling and even suspenseful, but audience members are probably not thinking, “This is just like the time I died in a car accident and the paramedics brought me back to life!” There’s nothing in the horror of a car accident for an audience to connect to. Nothing that rings true in the minds of listeners. Nothing that evokes memories of the past. Nothing that changes the way audience members see themselves or the world around them. But if I tell you about my secret childhood hunger, that story is much more likely to resonate with you. Why? 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.
I’ve been a schoolteacher for almost twenty years, so it was only natural that I assign myself homework. I assigned myself Homework for Life. This is what I did: I decided that at the end of every day, I’d reflect upon my day and ask myself one simple question: 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 decided not to write the entire story down, because to do so would require too much time and effort. As desperate as I was for stories, even I wouldn’t be able to commit to writing a full story every day, especially if it wasn’t all that compelling. Instead 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 also allowed myself to record any meaningful memories that came to mind over the course of the day, in response either to something I added to the spreadsheet or something that came to mind organically. Oftentimes these were recovered memories: moments from my past that had been forgotten for years but had returned to my mind through the process of doing Homework for Life. To do this work, I decided to use an Excel spreadsheet. It works well for several reasons. First, it forced me to capture these moments in just a few words. As you can see, my spreadsheet is broken into two columns: the date and the story. That’s it. As a result, I don’t allow myself to write more than the story cell allows. For a novelist who is accustomed to writing hundreds and sometimes thousands of words per day, the temptation to write more was great, but 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.
By creating a system requiring that I write only a few sentences a day, I was also sure that I’d never miss a day, and this is important. Miss one day, and you’ll allow yourself to miss two. Miss two days, and you’ll skip a week. Skip a week and you’re no longer doing your Homework for Life. Moreover, by placing these most storyworthy moments in a spreadsheet, I could sort them for later use. I could copy, cut, and paste these ideas into other spreadsheets easily, allowing me to ultimately separate the truly storyworthy ideas from the ones that merely had potential.
Look at the highlighted item on my spreadsheet, for example. It reads: Walked Kaleigh. 2:00 AM. Underwear. Birds. Rain. Beauty. What does this mean? My dog, Kaleigh, wakes me up at two in the morning. She almost never does this, so I’m surprised. Annoyed too. It’s clear she needs to pee. I’m wearing a pair of Valentine-themed satin boxers, given to me by my mother-in-law (a fact I try hard to forget every time I put them on), and nothing else. I have a decision to make: take the time to get dressed or bring the dog out while I’m wearing nothing more than my boxers. It’s early November, but we’re in the midst of a bout of warm weather. I live on one of those short side streets that you don’t drive on unless you live on the street. I know all my neighbors. None of them are the type to be awake in the middle of the night. And it’s two in the morning. I’ll likely have the street to myself. “Fine,” I say, staring down at Kaleigh from my bed. “Let’s go.” I bring her onto the lawn and wait as she does her business. My boxers-only decision is looking good. I’ll be back in bed in no time. But apparently peeing is not enough for Kaleigh, because once she’s done, she turns and starts walking down the street. I’m still only wearing my boxers, but I think, “This will be fine. I live on a little street with almost no traffic. It’s two in the morning. No one will ever see me. And even if they do, I’m wearing boxers. Practically gym shorts.” So I walk with my dog under the yellow glow of streetlights. The air is cool. The sky is starless. Kaleigh has an unusual bounce in her step. Her tail is wagging. She’s happy. When we reach the end of my street, where she typically turns back for home, she pauses. Looks back at me. Then she turns right. Great. She wants to walk around the block. And it’s a busy block once we’re off my street. One more right turn, and we’ll find ourselves on Main Street. Still, it’s the middle of the night. How many people are driving around at 2:00 AM? And Kaleigh looks so damn happy. Fine, I decide. We’ll go around the block. I start walking. It’s a nice walk. If you’ve ever been outside in the middle of the night, you know that the birds are louder when the sun is down than any other time of the day. They sing their hearts out at 2:00 AM. On this night, they are especially loud. Riotous. So here I am, walking my dog around the block, listening to the birds sing, wearing nothing but boxer shorts. It’s a little crazy, but it’s fine. Nice, even. Unnerving but nice. We turn right again onto Main Street, the farthest point on the block from my home and one of the busiest streets in town, when something unexpected happens. It’s one of those moments when it wasn’t raining, and then one second later, it’s a downpour. Noah’s Ark–level precipitation. I am instantly soaked. Now I know why the sky was starless. Storm clouds were overhead. Now I know why the birds were so riotous. They knew what was coming. So here I am, with my dog and my boxers and the birds and the rain, and I still have two sides of this block to walk before we’re home. And now I’m on Main Street. It’s the middle of the night, but still, it’s called Main Street for precisely what’s happening right now. Cars and trucks are passing me by. Years ago, I would have been angry at this turn of events. Angry with myself for blundering into this mess, and angry with Kaleigh for dragging me to this point. I would have seen nothing in this moment other than a forgettable series of terrible decisions, extreme irritation, and likely embarrassment. I probably would have picked up Kaleigh and marched her home, swearing most of the way. Fortunately, on that day I had my storytelling lens intact. By then, my lens was well developed. So I stopped on that corner despite the rain and the location and my scanty boxers, and I looked down at Kaleigh. She looked up at me. Her tail was still wagging. Her tongue was hanging out in a doggy smile. This occurs to me: Kaleigh is fourteen years old. She is my best friend. I’ve lived with her longer than I’ve lived with my wife, but I know that she’s not going to be around for much longer. She’s old. She’s been hobbling a bit. She’s already survived a ruptured disk and back surgery. She’s reached the end of her expected life span. This might be the last time that we walk in the rain together. So I stand on that corner in the pouring rain and soak in the moment in all its glory. It is beautiful. Crazy and absurd but beautiful. What would have been just annoying and forgettable five years ago is now something that I’ve captured and will have for the rest of my life. Just from reflecting, absorbing, and recording that moment, it will never be lost to me.
It happened that night in the rain with Kaleigh. I’m standing on that corner in the rain, staring down at Kaleigh, who is still smiling up at me, when a new memory fills my mind. One of those unexpected geysers. It’s the image of Measleman, a beagle mutt that my family owned when I was a boy. Measleman, the first dog that I loved with all my heart, who was named after the doctor who gave my father his vasectomy. Measleman, who followed my father wherever he went. Measleman, whom my father thought of as a third son and I thought of as a four-legged brother. Kaleigh has momentarily disappeared. Main Street and the birds and my boxers have disappeared. Measleman is suddenly filling my mind’s eye. Standing on that corner in the rain, I can see Measleman as if he were standing beside me, smiling at me the same way Kaleigh was smiling at me a moment ago. Long tongue hanging out of his mouth. Panting. Sitting tall on his haunches. The combination of a memory of a dog long since dead with my aging dog of today somehow sparks a thought in my mind, and I realize — for the first time in my life — that not only did my father lose his wife, children, home, horse farm, and horses when my mother left him for another man, but he also lost his dog, Measleman. My father moved into a room behind a liquor store and was forced to leave his Measleman behind. Not only did my father lose the dog he loved so much, but Measleman became the property of the man who’d stolen his wife and usurped his family. As I stand in that warm rain, it somehow feels like the worst loss of all, and suddenly the shame that my father must have felt in losing his home and family to another man is my own. For the first time in my life, I look upon my father’s losses through the eyes of a man instead of the eyes of a boy, and I realize how complicated, painful, and terrible it all must have been for him.
All of this happens because I sit down every evening and ask myself: What is my story from today? What is the thing about today that has made it different from any previous day? Then I write my answer down. That’s it. That’s all I do. If you do it, before long you will have more stories than you could ever imagine.
I give this to you: Homework for Life. 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. There are meaningful, life-changing moments happening in your life all the time. That dander in the wind will blow by you for the rest of your life unless you learn to see it, capture it, hold on to it, and find a way to keep it in your heart forever. If you want to be a storyteller, this is your first step. Find your stories. Collect them. Save them forever.
I love Q&A. Ask me a question, and I’ll tell you a story.
Essentially Crash & Burn is stream-of-consciousness writing. I like to think of it as dreaming on the end of your pen, because when it’s working well, it will mimic the free-associative thought patterns that so many of us experience while dreaming. Stream of consciousness is the act of speaking or writing down whatever thought that enters your mind, regardless of how strange, incongruous, or even embarrassing it may be.
When Crash & Burn is at its best, ideas are constantly crashing the party, slashing and burning the previous ones. It’s in these intersections of ideas that new ideas and memories are unearthed.
Everything must land on the page, regardless of how ridiculous, nonsensical, absurd, or humiliating it may be. Similarly, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization are meaningless.
Many writers have no idea what their next sentence or paragraph will be. Much of writing is done in the dark. The next sentence is often as much of a surprise to the writer as it is to the reader.
I have found that engaging in Crash & Burn with a pen tends to trigger greater creativity (and there is some science to support this claim). But if you must use a keyboard, go for it. Either way, your hand or fingers cannot stop moving. You must continue writing words even when your mind is empty. To make this happen, I use colors. When I have no other thought in my mind, I begin listing colors on the page until one of them triggers a thought or memory.
Once I’ve finished with a session, I look back and pull out threads that are worth saving. Story ideas. Anecdotes for future stories. Memories that I want to record. New ideas. Interesting thoughts.
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. As I said, Crash & Burn is damn good for the soul.
Author Zadie Smith says, “Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.” She’s right. Storytellers must selfishly guard their time, especially from the people they love most.
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.
First Last Best Worst. All you need to play is pen and paper. As you can see from the worksheet that follows, the top row of the page (the x-axis) is labeled with the words “First,” “Last,” “Best,” and “Worst,” along with a column labeled “Prompts.” Along the left side of the page (the y-axis), the prompts are listed. The prompts are the possible triggers for memories. What was your first kiss? What was your last kiss? What was your best kiss? What was your worst kiss? For each of these prompts, you fill in the word or words that indicate the answers to those questions. That’s it. The sheet here contains the list of prompts that I use most often in my beginner’s workshops, and it also contains my responses. Prompt First Last Best Worst Kiss Laura Clara Elysha Sheila Car Datsun B210 Hyundai Tucson 1976 Chevy Malibu Datsun B210 Pet Measleman Toby & Pluto Kaleigh Prudence Trouble Corner in kindergarten Speeding ticket Inciting riot upon myself Arrested Injury Mysterious head wound Elbow tendinitis Pole-vault pole snaps Datsun B210 accident Gift Puppy 12 dates for 12 months Friends as family Bath towels Travel Pasadena 1988 Lewiston, Maine Honeymoon Disney with Cushman After completing my chart, I analyze it. Specifically, I ask myself three questions: 1. Do any entries appear more than once (the signal of a likely story)? 2. Could I turn any of these entries into useful anecdotes? 3. 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.
In class, we use First Last Best Worst as an improv game. You are given a prompt and must tell a story using the first, last, best, or worst version of that prompt. Not only does it generate storytelling ideas, but in class it helps promote extemporaneous-speaking skills and teaches my students to utilize the skills and strategies we learn in class without rehearsal. The best storytellers can spin a hilarious and heartbreaking tale with little or no preparation.
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.
No. Visiting Tanzania is not a story. Your ability to travel the world does not mean that you can tell a good story or even have a good story to tell. But if something happened in Tanzania that altered you in some deep and fundamental way, then you might have a story. If you experienced a five-second moment in Tanzania, you might have something. Think of it this way: If we remove Tanzania from the story, do you still have a story worth telling?
“But did the experience fundamentally change you in some way?” “Yes,” the man said. “I always have a good story to tell. Something to make people laugh. I love that.” The producer explained that this man had more of a romp than a story. A romp is an entertaining and amusing anecdote — often longer than you might imagine an anecdote to be — but not something that will move an audience emotionally. There was no resonance to his story. No lasting effect. Nothing for the audience to connect to. It was fun and exciting and surprising, but it was unlikely to remain in the hearts of the audience in the way a good story can.
This is how most big stories operate. At least the good ones. Big stories contain these tiny, utterly human moments. We may be fooled by whips and snakes and car chases, but if it’s a good story, our protagonist is going to experience something deep and meaningful that resonates with the audience, even if the audience doesn’t fully realize it.
When something changed forever, even if that moment seems minuscule compared to the rest of the story. That will be your five-second moment. Until you have it, you don’t have a story. When you find it, you’re ready to begin crafting your story.
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. Truly. Tell a story about a real moment of meaning from your life — a five-second moment — and people will want to hear more. 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 your ending is a good thing. When I write fiction, I have no idea where my story is going to end. As odd as it may sound, I have never accurately predicted how any of my novels were going to conclude, and many novelists operate similarly.
But when telling true stories about our lives, we always start with the ending, because we’re not making stuff up. We’re not hoping to invent the perfect combination of action, description, and dialogue. We’re telling the truth, so even if we’re not entirely sure of how to tell our ending — which combination of action, dialogue, and description will best capture that five-second moment — we know what happened. We know the who, what, where, and when, and we probably know the why (though that can sometimes come later). We know what our five-second moment is, and therefore that is where we begin the process of crafting our story. We start at the end.
This is a beautiful thing, because 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?
The hard part is finding the beginning, because it involves choosing the right moments from your life, and there is often a multitude of choices. So how do you choose the right place to start a story? Simple. Ask yourself where your story ends. What is the meaning of your five-second moment? Say it aloud. In “Charity Thief,” I might say it like this: “I thought I was alone in this world, facing a lifetime of loneliness. Then I met a man who taught me that I knew very little about loneliness and never wanted to know loneliness the way that man knew it on that day and probably many, many days thereafter.” That’s my five-second moment. That is what I’m trying to say to you as simply as possible. It’s not a good story on its own, but choose better words to describe the moment, prop it up with everything that comes before the moment, and you have yourself a story. 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.
Audiences would much rather hear about incremental, tenuous growth than about overnight success.
You must begin and end your story in entirely different states of being. Change is key. The story of how you’re an amazing person who did an amazing thing and ended up in an amazing place is not a story. It’s a recipe for a douchebag.
You create the arc of a story through the change that your story ultimately describes. Starting in one place and landing in another. Think of it like air travel. An airplane takes off, flies through the sky, and lands in a new place. Your story must do the same. The easiest, most effective way of doing this is by ensuring that the beginning and the ending of your stories are opposites or as close to opposites as possible. This is not the case in every story that I tell, but it’s true for most. I was once hopeful, but now I am not. I was once lost, but now I am found. I was once happy, but now I am sad. I was once uncertain, but now I know. I was once angry, but now I am grateful. I was once afraid, but now I am fearless. I once believed, but now I don’t.
Simply ask yourself what the opposite of the first fifteen minutes of a movie is, and you will almost always have your ending.
Remember the beginning of Jurassic Park? Alan Grant terrifies a small, round boy with a gruesome description of his death at the hands of a pack of velociraptors. The dialogue between Grant and his love interest, Ellie Sattler, then goes like this: ELLIE Hey, Alan, if you wanted to scare the kid, you could’ve pulled a gun on him, you know. GRANT Yeah, I know. Kids. You wanna have one of those? ELLIE I don’t want that kid. A breed of child, Dr. Grant, could be intriguing! I mean, what’s so wrong with kids? GRANT Ah, Ellie, look. They’re noisy, they’re messy, they’re expensive. ELLIE Cheap, cheap. GRANT They smell. ELLIE They do not smell! GRANT Some of them smell. If you don’t think Grant is going to fall in love with children by the end of the movie, you’re not paying attention.
When we search our past for the beginnings of our stories — which storytellers do quite often — we have a mountain of material from which to choose. 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.
I also believe that 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.
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.
Fewer locations in a story always makes things simpler and easier to digest for an audience.
Simplifying also helps storytellers tell their stories better. When time and space is limited, it’s easier to remember your story. Easier to master your transitions, and easier to remember those favorite lines that you don’t want to forget. But simplification is even more important because of the difference between oral storytelling and written storytelling. A written story is like a lake. Readers can step in and out of the water at their leisure, and the water always remains the same. This stillness and permanence allow for pausing, rereading, contemplation, and the use of outside sources to help with meaning. It also allows the reader to control the speed at which the story is received. An oral story is like a river. It is a constantly flowing torrent of words. When listeners need to step outside of the river to ponder a detail, wonder about something that confuses them, or attempt to make meaning, the river continues to flow. When the listener finally steps back into the river, he or she is behind. The water that has flowed by will never be seen again, and as a result, the listener is constantly chasing the story, trying to catch up.
Simplifying also helps storytellers tell their stories better. When time and space is limited, it’s easier to remember your story. Easier to master your transitions, and easier to remember those favorite lines that you don’t want to forget. But simplification is even more important because of the difference between oral storytelling and written storytelling. A written story is like a lake. Readers can step in and out of the water at their leisure, and the water always remains the same. This stillness and permanence allow for pausing, rereading, contemplation, and the use of outside sources to help with meaning. It also allows the reader to control the speed at which the story is received. An oral story is like a river. It is a constantly flowing torrent of words. When listeners need to step outside of the river to ponder a detail, wonder about something that confuses them, or attempt to make meaning, the river continues to flow. When the listener finally steps back into the river, he or she is behind. The water that has flowed by will never be seen again, and as a result, the listener is constantly chasing the story, trying to catch up. To keep your listener from stepping out of your river of words to make meaning, simplification is essential. Starting as close to the end as possible helps to make this happen. 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.
Here are a couple more practical tips for choosing an opening: 1. 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. 2. Don’t start by setting expectations. Listen to people in the world tell you stories. Often they start with a sentence like, “This is hilarious,” or “You need to hear this,” or “You’re not going to believe this.” This is always a mistake,
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.
Pay attention to the opening scenes of movies. So many of them use this strategy as well. We open on the protagonist or someone similarly important to the story. That person will be moving. Walking. Running. Driving. Flying. Climbing. Fleeing. Falling. Swimming. Crawling. Diving. Filmmakers want to immerse you into their world as quickly as possible. They want you to forget the theater and the popcorn and the jackass who is texting beside you. They want you to be absorbed by the story. They want you to forget that you even exist for the duration of the film.
If you stop reading right now, you’re already a better storyteller than most. If you are telling a story about a five-second moment of your life — a moment of transformation, realization, or revelation — you’re doing well. If you’ve also found the right place to begin your story — a place that represents the opposite of your five-second moment, and one as close to the ending as possible — you’ve established a clear frame and arc in your story. You’ve identified the direction your story is headed in, and you and your audience probably have a good sense of where that may be. You are already going to be well received by audiences big and small. If you’re careful about choosing that opening scene — not simply choosing the first thing that comes to mind but instead asking yourself what the opening scene needs — and you open your story with story and not any form of unnecessary or qualifying introduction, you are going to grab your audience’s attention right off the bat. Stop here and you’ll be better than most.
8. Speak as if you were speaking to friends. Be yourself. If your language sounds more formal than your normal speech, you have failed.
Don’t use a quote at all, if possible. Instead, be quotable. Your job is not to recycle but to create something new.
13. End your speech in less than the allotted time.
Thirteen Rules for an Effective (and Perhaps Even Inspiring) Commencement Address 1. 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. You’ve already been recognized as valedictorian; that should be more than enough credit for one day. Make the speech about something other than the great things you have done. 2. Be self-deprecating, but only if it is real. Don’t ever pretend to be self-deprecating. Your audience will see right through you. This is even worse than being self-congratulatory. 3. 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. 4. Offer one granular bit of wisdom, something that is both applicable and memorable. Anyone can deliver a speech filled with sweeping generalities. Most people are capable of offering old chestnuts and choice proverbs. 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. 5. 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. 6. Make your audience laugh. 7. 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. 8. Speak as if you were speaking to friends. Be yourself. If your language sounds more formal than your normal speech, you have failed. 9. 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. 10. 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. Your prognostications will most assuredly prove to be wrong. These graduates’ paths will be multifarious. Some will be moving on to higher levels of education. Others will be hired for jobs that may not even exist yet. Others will join family businesses, travel the world, launch their own companies, or return home to care for aging parents. Telling these people what the world will be like for them requires hubris on a monumental scale. 11. 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. 12. 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. 13. End your speech in less than the allotted time.
Simply defined, stakes are the reason audiences listen and continue to listen to a story. Stakes answer questions like: • What does the storyteller want or need? • What is at peril? • What is the storyteller fighting for or against? • What will happen next? • How is this story going to turn out? Stakes are the reason an audience wants to hear your next sentence. They are the difference between a story that grabs the audience by the throat and holds on tight and one that an audience can take or leave.
Stakes are why sports dominate our culture and why asking a girl on a date can be so difficult. Stakes are the Nazis and the snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Darth Vader and his storm troopers in Star Wars. The iceberg in Titanic. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.
The audience doesn’t know why they are listening to the story or what is to come, so it’s easy to stop listening. If you don’t present a reason to listen very early on, you risk losing their attention altogether. 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.
The Elephant is the difference between these two beginnings of a story: Version #1 My mother was the kind of woman whom everyone adored. The model of decorum and civility. She served as PTO president and treasurer of the ladies’ auxiliary. She was the only female umpire in our town’s Little League. She baked and knit and grew vegetables by the pound. Version #2 I don’t care how perfect my mother was. When I was nine years old, I wanted to disown her. Leave home and never return. Forget she ever existed. My mother was the kind of woman whom everyone adored. The model of decorum and civility. She served as PTO president and treasurer of the ladies’ auxiliary. She was the only female umpire in our town’s Little League. She baked and knit and grew vegetables by the pound. The first story offers a character sketch of the storyteller’s mother. We have no idea what kind of story we are listening to, so it’s easy for us to check out at this point. Nothing is at stake. There is no wonder. We don’t need to hear the next sentence. The second story starts with an Elephant. It contains exactly the same character description, but it opens with a clear explanation of what to expect. “When I was nine years old, I wanted to disown her. Leave home and never return. Forget she ever existed.” The audience has a good idea of the story being told, and it’s likely that they will want to hear more. Now they have something to wonder about: Why did this woman want to disown her mother at such an early age? Will things turn out okay in the end? Was her mother to blame for these feelings of ill will, or will we discover that the storyteller was the real problem? Three simple sentences at the start of the story change our perception about everything that follows. The Elephant may strike you as a simple and obvious technique, but it’s not. Pay attention to the way that people tell stories. More often than not, you will find yourself two or three minutes into a story, unsure of where the story is going and why you should continue to listen. Is this tactic simple? Yes. Obvious? Unfortunately not. Elephants can also change color. That is, the need, want, problem, peril, or mystery stated in the beginning of the story can change along the way. You may be offered one expectation only to have it pulled away in favor of another. Start with a gray Elephant. End with a pink one. In “Charity Thief,” the Elephant that I present at the beginning of the story is a simple one: I’m stuck in New Hampshire with a flat tire and no spare. The audience knows this almost immediately. It all happens within the first two sentences of the story. At this point, the audience is probably thinking that this is an escape story: How will Matt escape from New Hampshire and return home without a spare tire or money? Those are the stakes. The problem is clear. Now the audience has a chance to guess. To predict. To wonder. Hopefully the audience wants to know how it all turns out. Eventually the Elephant in my story changes color. The story isn’t really about escaping New Hampshire at all. It’s really a story about understanding the nature of loneliness. 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.
The Elephant is the difference between these two beginnings of a story: Version #1 My mother was the kind of woman whom everyone adored. The model of decorum and civility. She served as PTO president and treasurer of the ladies’ auxiliary. She was the only female umpire in our town’s Little League. She baked and knit and grew vegetables by the pound. Version #2 I don’t care how perfect my mother was. When I was nine years old, I wanted to disown her. Leave home and never return. Forget she ever existed. My mother was the kind of woman whom everyone adored. The model of decorum and civility. She served as PTO president and treasurer of the ladies’ auxiliary. She was the only female umpire in our town’s Little League. She baked and knit and grew vegetables by the pound. The first story offers a character sketch of the storyteller’s mother. We have no idea what kind of story we are listening to, so it’s easy for us to check out at this point. Nothing is at stake. There is no wonder. We don’t need to hear the next sentence. The second story starts with an Elephant. It contains exactly the same character description, but it opens with a clear explanation of what to expect. “When I was nine years old, I wanted to disown her. Leave home and never return. Forget she ever existed.” The audience has a good idea of the story being told, and it’s likely that they will want to hear more. Now they have something to wonder about: Why did this woman want to disown her mother at such an early age? Will things turn out okay in the end? Was her mother to blame for these feelings of ill will, or will we discover that the storyteller was the real problem? Three simple sentences at the start of the story change our perception about everything that follows. The Elephant may strike you as a simple and obvious technique, but it’s not. Pay attention to the way that people tell stories. More often than not, you will find yourself two or three minutes into a story, unsure of where the story is going and why you should continue to listen. Is this tactic simple? Yes. Obvious? Unfortunately not. Elephants can also change color. That is, the need, want, problem, peril, or mystery stated in the beginning of the story can change along the way. You may be offered one expectation only to have it pulled away in favor of another. Start with a gray Elephant. End with a pink one. In “Charity Thief,” the Elephant that I present at the beginning of the story is a simple one: I’m stuck in New Hampshire with a flat tire and no spare. The audience knows this almost immediately. It all happens within the first two sentences of the story. At this point, the audience is probably thinking that this is an escape story: How will Matt escape from New Hampshire and return home without a spare tire or money? Those are the stakes. The problem is clear. Now the audience has a chance to guess. To predict. To wonder. Hopefully the audience wants to know how it all turns out. Eventually the Elephant in my story changes color. The story isn’t really about escaping New Hampshire at all. It’s really a story about understanding the nature of loneliness. 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. Note that I’m not actually changing the path that the audience is on. It’s the same path we’ve been walking since the start of the story. The audience just didn’t realize that it’s a much deeper, more interesting path than first expected. Don’t switch Elephants. Simply change the color. Changing the Elephant’s color provides an audience with one of the greatest surprises that a storyteller has to offer.
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: 1. Make the audience wonder what will happen next. 2. Make your audience experience the same emotion, or something like the same emotion, that the storyteller experienced in the moment about to be described. The first goal is fairly easy to achieve if a Backpack is used properly. If you can accomplish the second goal, that is really something. In “Charity Thief,” I stick a Backpack on my audience when I describe my plan for begging for money before entering the gas station. I say: So I make a plan. I’m going to beg for gas, because it’s 1991. Gas is eighty-five cents a gallon, so eight dollars is all I need to get me home. I’ll offer my license, my wallet, everything in my car as collateral in exchange for eight dollars’ worth of gas and the promise that I will return and repay the money and more. Whatever it takes. So I rehearse my pitch, take a deep breath, and walk in. At this point the audience is loaded with my hopes and dreams. They know the plan, so when the kid behind the counter refuses to give me gas for my car, the audience experiences the same kind of disappointment that I felt that day. They knew the plan. They wanted it to succeed. When I tell this story onstage, I watch my audience carefully at the moment when the kid behind the counter refuses my request. It’s always the same. When the kid says no, shoulders slump. Chins dip to chests. The audience looks frustrated. Angry. Some audibly sigh. They were hoping, just as I was, that my problem would be solved. 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.
This is why heist movies like the Ocean’s Eleven franchise explain almost every part of the robbers’ plan before they ever make a move. If you understand their plan to rob the casino, you can experience the same level of frustration, worry, fear, and suspense that the characters feel when their plans go awry.
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.
Backpacks are most effective when a plan does not work.
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. I am about to impersonate a charity worker in order to steal money from innocent homeowners. That is unexpected. The perfect moment to lay a Breadcrumb.
The sentence you’ve been waiting to say. The sentence your audience has been waiting to hear. This is the moment to use an Hourglass. It’s time to slow things down. Grind them to a halt when possible. When you know the audience is hanging on your every word, let them hang. Drag out the wait as long as possible. In “Charity Thief,” that moment occurs as I am knocking on that blue door. The audience knows that I’m about to do something to attempt to solve my problem. They know that a McDonald’s uniform is involved (my Breadcrumb), but they probably can’t imagine what my solution might be. They want to know. They need to know. So what do I do? I stop the story cold. I bring everything to a halt. I start by describing things that don’t require a description. I say: An hour later, I’m standing on the porch of a small, red-brick house on a quiet, residential street. I’m knocking on a blue door. I’m wearing my McDonald’s manager’s uniform. We all know what a McDonald’s uniform looks like. Everyone has seen one, either in real life or on the multitude of McDonald’s commercials that plaster the television screen daily. Even if an audience member has never seen one before, knowing what it looks like is irrelevant to the story. There is no need to describe this uniform in any detail, yet I choose to describe it anyway, in the greatest detail. It is the longest bit of description in the entire story, and I’m describing the last thing in the word that needs to be described. This is because I have my audience now. I own them. They cannot wait for that blue door to open so the unknown can become known. What the hell is Matt planning to do? Why is he wearing his McDonald’s uniform? I want this moment to last as long as possible. I want to milk it for every bit of suspense.
The Crystal Ball is the easiest of the strategies to deploy, because you already use Crystal Balls in everyday life. 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. In “Charity Thief,” I say: [The man] points his finger at me and says, “You stay right there.” Then he walks back into his house, and I know what he’s doing. He’s calling the police, and they will come and arrest me for stealing money from McDonald’s. This does not happen, of course, but when I present this very real possibility, the audience wants to know if it will happen. 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. You might tell your significant other, “The boss called me into her office this morning, and as I walked down the hall, I just knew I had done something wrong and was getting fired. This was it. The end of the road for me. It was the longest walk of my life. When I stepped into her office, she told me that I was being promoted.”
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.
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? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you need to raise the stakes. Use these strategies to engage your audience and bring them to the edge of their seat.
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.
But also remember that the goal of a storyteller is not to tell a funny story. The goal is to tell a story that moves an audience emotionally.
We want to tell true stories of our lives, but no story is entirely true. Intentionally or otherwise, our stories contain mistakes, inaccuracies, slippages of memory. All I am asking you to do is to be strategic in some of your inaccuracies, and only when it’s done for the benefit of the audience.
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.
Every story contains omissions. 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.
“You ruined that story,” he repeated. “Don’t ever tell that ending again. No one wants redemption. Everyone wants the clown.”
The longer that story lingers in the hearts and minds of our audience, the better the story. When I tell my audience about the $604, I make it easy for the audience to remove the coat. “I did a terrible thing, but then I more than made up for my transgression. The world is back in order. All debts are paid.” If I don’t tell my audience about my redemption, the world remains broken. I did a terrible thing, and it still weighs on my soul. It’s a much more difficult coat to remove. Days later you’ll find yourself thinking about what I did, because I will still be guilty of the crime in your mind. The world will still be broken.
When I write novels, I try to end my story about ten pages before the reader would want the book to end. In that way, I’m also putting a coat on my audience.
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 Compression is used when storytellers want to push time and space together in order to make the story easier to comprehend, visualize, and tell. If the first scene of your story takes place on a Monday, for example, and the next scene happens on Friday, and you are concerned about the audience wondering about Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, you simply push time together and turn your Monday-through-Friday story into a Monday-through-Tuesday story. Placing scenes closer together also heightens the drama and suspense of a story. It makes the world seem more visceral and cinematic.
Lie #1: Omission Every story contains omissions. 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.
Geography can also be compressed for the sake of comprehension and visualization.
There is never room for needless complexity in a story. Remember that stories are like rivers (not unlike the river I dammed up to empty the Basin). They continue to flow even as your audience struggles to understand a time line or attempts to construct a complicated mental map in their minds. For this reason, simplicity should be prized at all points. Compression can often be helpful in this regard.
Lie #3: Assumption Storytellers use assumption when there is a detail so important to the story that it must be stated with specificity, so the storyteller makes a reasonable assumption about what the specifics may be. This does not mean that a storyteller should assume all details. It is only when the forgotten detail is critical to the story that an assumption should be made. I tell a story about the time my brother and I dropped our Batman and Robin action figures through the rusted-out hole in the floor of my mother’s 1972 Chevy Chevette as she drove down the highway. We tied rope to the figures and let out the line until Batman and Robin were bouncing behind the car. Then we tied off the line on the gearshift and hopped into the way-back to watch them ricochet off the road and each other. It was the 1970s version of an iPad. Hours of entertainment on those long drives. One day Batman ricocheted off Robin and bounced into the opposing lane and hit a car, setting off a chain of events that launches the story. I can’t remember the model or make of the car that Batman hit, but it’s such a critical moment in the story that I want everyone in the audience to see the same thing at the same time, so I make an assumption. Since it’s the 1970s, I declare that the car was a station wagon, because that was a common vehicle on the roads in the seventies. I’d love to say it was a cherry-red Corvette instead of a station wagon, because it would make the story more interesting, but when I assume (and I don’t very often), I always make the most reasonable and likely assumption.
Lie #4: Progression A lie of progression is when a storyteller changes the order of events in a story to make it more emotionally satisfying or comprehensible to the listener. In my experience, this is the least common lie told, and I have never done it myself, but I’ve recommended that other storytellers use it from time to time. My favorite example is from a storyteller who was placed in charge of her brother’s ashes following his death. Her brother was a Baltimore Orioles fan, so she hoped to spread his ashes on Camden Yards, the Orioles’ ballpark. This is impossible, of course. If ashes could be spread on professional baseball fields, stadiums would be heaped up with ashes and games could never be played. Still, she went to Camden Yards three days after the season ended and spoke to a groundskeeper outside the stadium. They shared an incredible, tear-filled moment, and then he let her spread her brother’s ashes on the foot of the Orioles’ dugout so that every time a player runs onto the field, he would carry a little bit of her brother with them. Beautiful. Right? Then she went to Baltimore’s inner harbor and spread more of her brother’s ashes on the doorsteps of his favorite strip clubs, so every time a man entered a strip club, he would carry a little bit of her brother with him. Then she ended her day at a tree where the family picnicked for years. Family members gathered for a brief ceremony, and the remaining ashes were buried there. Beautiful story, but told in the wrong order. The Camden Yards moment is the centerpiece to the story, and it will make you cry, so it needs to happen at the end of the story. It’s her true five-second moment. Nothing she says after that moment at the ballpark feels as important. The strip-club moment should come just before that, because it’s always better to make people laugh before they cry. It hurts more that way. And she should open her story at the tree, where she can establish the family members and their relationship and set the scene for all that is to come. She isn’t adding anything to the story that doesn’t already exist. She’s simply reengineering the order of events for the benefit of the audience, who expect an emotional journey to follow a certain trajectory.
Lie #5: Conflation Storytellers use conflation to push all the emotion of an event into a single time frame, because stories are more entertaining this way. Rather than describing change over a long period, we compress all the intellectual and emotional transformation into a smaller bit of time, because this is what audiences expect from stories. For example, I fell in love with a girl named Heather in sixth grade. I looked across Mrs. Schultz’s classroom and saw Heather in a way I had never seen her before. It was the moment I went from a boy who thought nothing of girls to a boy who couldn’t stop thinking about girls. Heather was beautiful, funny, athletic, and best of all, she didn’t seem to give a damn about what others thought. I have often thought that confidence is the most attractive quality in a person. I loved Heather throughout all of sixth grade but was too afraid to do anything about it. I watched her from afar and dreamed of the day we might be together. In seventh grade, Heather and I went off to high school and joined the marching band. I was a member of the drum corps, and she transitioned from flute player to drum major. I saw her a lot. I stared at her as she conducted the band, because I needed to in order to keep time and play well, but also because I wanted to stare at her as often as possible. Later we both joined the track team and saw even more of each other. Still I did nothing. In eighth and ninth grades, I tried to talk to Heather. Tried to make her laugh. Prayed that she would take notice of me. She started dating a guy named Greg, which was one of the universe’s greatest tragedies. What were you thinking, Heather? Still I didn’t care. I still tried like hell to get her attention. In tenth grade, Heather and I were in biology class together. Being a fifteen-year-old boy, I was convinced that the best way to get a girl’s attention was to treat teachers terribly, disrupt class, and show as little interest in learning as possible. I honestly thought that acting like a criminal would finally make Heather realize all that she was missing. So I began treating Mrs. Murphy, our biology teacher, terribly. I tell a story about it. At the end, after describing how I failed miserably to get the attention of anyone except Mrs. Murphy, I say, “That was the moment when I realized that Heather would never be mine.” This is not entirely true. If I’m being honest, I never really thought that Heather would be mine. As much as I dreamed about the two of us being together, I strongly suspected that I had a snowball’s chance in hell of ever making it happen. Besides, even after my biology-class failure, I still held out hope for our union, struggling to get her to see me at band camp the following summer. But it’s a far more interesting story if I take all the emotional and intellectual transformation of the four previous years before biology class and the summer after biology class and squeeze it into that one class. That is conflation. I conflate the emotions of the moment. I transform a moment into the moment. Movies do this all the time. If you track the number of days that pass over the course of the average movie, the number is small. A lot of stuff is often jammed into one or two days of movie time, when in real life, no one ever has days so packed with action. Think again about the Ocean’s Eleven franchise. Danny Ocean and his gang plan their heist over the course of just a few days, struggling to complete the preparations for the robbery in time. In real life, the multimillion-dollar robbery of a casino might take years to plan, but years are boring. Days are thrilling. Conflation will also help you to keep your stories shorter, which is always a good thing. Shorter stories, onstage and in real life, are always more entertaining. Audiences would much rather hear about the moment I realized that Heather would never be my girlfriend than the process by which I slowly came to understand this. Feel the difference?
Cinema of the Mind (Also Known as “Where the Hell Are You?”) I’ve talked about movies a lot so far. Perhaps you’ve noticed. There’s a good reason. A great storyteller creates a movie in the minds of the audience. Whether your audience is a theater full of storytelling fans, a boardroom filled with potential clients, a classroom bursting with apathetic high-school students, or a group of friends around the dinner table, the goal of every storyteller should be to create a cinematic experience in the minds of every listener. This is important. You may think it’s obvious, but if it were, storytellers would do this all the time. They would obsess about the idea of maintaining an unrelenting, uninterrupted movie in the minds of their listeners. But they don’t. Often, instead of making the story the center of their performance, storytellers make themselves the center of the show. They crack jokes. Insert amusing or observational non sequiturs. Step outside the story’s time line. Ask rhetorical questions of the audience. These are all terrible ways to start stories. Rather than presenting a fully realized cinematic experience, they present bits of the movie. They give a scene here or a scene there, intersected by unnecessary or poorly formatted exposition that ruins the flow. Even worse, they open stories by pontificating and proselytizing: Love is a beautiful thing when it isn’t killing you. There are two kinds of toddlers in this world: those who raise your hopes for humanity and those who belong in a cage. I used to think that I understood my mother better than anyone in the world, but now I know that mothers are like oceans: deep, dark, and full of secrets. These are not the beginnings to stories. These are sentences that supposedly state some universal truth that the story will then illustrate. But this is not how stories work. Stories are not supposed to start with thesis statements or overwrought aphorisms. Let me say it again, because it’s that important: A great storyteller creates a movie in the mind of the audience. Listeners should be able to see the story in their mind’s eye at all times. At no point should the story become visually obscured or impossible to see. As the title of this chapter suggests, effective storytelling is cinema of the mind. In order to achieve this lofty goal, storytellers must do one thing, and happily for you, it’s exceedingly simple: Always provide a physical location for every moment of your story. That’s it. If the audience knows where you are at all times within your story, the movie is running in their minds. The film is cycling from reel to reel. If your audience can picture the location of the action at all times, you have created a movie in the mind of your listeners. Hopefully it’s a good one.
Here are two versions of the first few lines of a story that I tell about my fraternal grandmother. Version #1 My grandmother’s name is Odelie Dicks, which probably explains why she is who she is. She’s a crooked old lady in both body and mind. She wears only dark colors and likes to serve food that has stewed in pots for days. I like to imagine that there was a time in her life when she smiled — or at least didn’t scowl — but if that time existed, it was long before me. Version #2 I’m standing at the edge of my grandmother’s garden, watching her relentlessly pull weeds from the unforgiving soil. My grandmother’s name is Odelie Dicks, which probably explains why she is who she is. She’s a crooked old lady in both body and mind. She wears only dark colors and likes to serve food that has stewed in pots for days. I like to imagine that there was a time in her life when she smiled — or at least didn’t scowl — but if that time existed, it was long before me. One of these versions is the beginning of a story. The other sounds more like the beginning of an essay. Can you see the difference? Can you feel it? If a director were filming the first version of my story, the movie would probably open on black. The description of my grandmother would be conveyed via voice-over. There’s nothing for the audience to see, because no location is ever identified. It’s almost impossible to imagine my grandmother, because there is no place to imagine her in. At best you might picture an ethereal image of her floating in space. More than likely, you’re not picturing anything at all. You’re probably staring at the storyteller, waiting for him or her to engage your imagination more fully. There is no movie running in your mind. It’s merely a series of anecdotal descriptors. In the second version, an image is instantly formed in your mind. A director would know exactly where to point the camera. Can you see it? The lens pans across a garden on a summer day. You see me standing on the edge of the garden, staring at an old woman who is crouching somewhere between rows of vegetable plants. As I describe her, you see her bending over, pulling a weed, bending again. There is action. Specificity. Setting. You don’t know what my grandmother’s garden looks like, but that’s okay. Your mind instantly fills in those blanks for me. You place your own idea of a garden into the scene, and because the dimensions and size and general appearance of my grandmother’s garden are not relevant to the story, I allow this to happen. I allow you to populate my story with your details. With very little effort, your mind formulates a fully realized scene, with depth, color, and texture, and all I did was give the moment a specific location. One extra sentence has changed the story entirely. Actually, it made it a story.
Whatever you are doing, if the movie has stopped in the mind of your audience, it’s no longer a story.
I once worked with a storyteller who needed to ensure that his audience understood photosynthesis in order for the rest of his story to make sense. His original plan was to say something like, “Okay, before I continue, I need to give you a quick refresher on photosynthesis. If you remember your freshman biology class . . .” and then proceed to explain the process to his audience. At that moment, his story stopped being a story. It became a science lecture within a story. The only thing the audience could see during that explanation was the storyteller, standing on the stage, discussing a scientific principle. The movie had stopped running. The filmstrip had snapped in two. I advised the storyteller against this approach. I explained why it wasn’t working. I told him that his science lecture was not entertaining and destroyed the flow of his story. It cut off the cinema of the mind. “Then how am I supposed to teach them about photosynthesis?” he asked. “Why not tell the story of the first time you learned about photosynthesis?” I said. “Or a time when you taught photosynthesis? Instead of stopping the story completely to explain the process, why not offer a scene in the form of a flashback that also explains photosynthesis? Just keep telling a story.” If I had to explain photosynthesis, I told him, I would probably insert an anecdote from my tenth-grade biology class. I would describe Mrs. Murphy, my biology teacher, standing at the chalkboard, explaining with crude drawings and hastily scribbled labels how plants took in sunlight and carbon dioxide and produced oxygen. Mrs. Murphy was so excited about the way photosynthesis worked that she could barely contain her enthusiasm. She admired the efficiency and symbiotic nature of the process, and she couldn’t wait for us to understand it.
That’s the trick. A simple one: Make sure that every moment in your story has a location attached. Every moment should be a scene, and every scene needs a setting. It’s the simplest, most-bang-for-your-buck strategy that I have to offer.
The Principle of But and Therefore
“And” stories have no movement or momentum. They are equivalent to running on a treadmill. Sentences and scenes appear, one after another, but the movement is straightforward and unsurprising. The momentum is unchanged. But and therefore are words that signal change. The story was heading in one direction, but now it’s heading in another. We started out zigging, but now we are zagging. We did this, and therefore this new thing happened.
I started teaching this technique in workshops, and my students adopted it quickly. As my students’ ands became buts and therefores, their stories improved almost immediately. Performances that felt flat and lukewarm suddenly had an energy and spirit to them that had previously been unrealized. Students reported that using this technique also helped them craft their stories. They suddenly had a better sense of direction. They could better determine how the next scene should open. One student said, “I feel like I know where to go next in my stories. When I’m stuck, I just look for the but and the therefore.”
One other aspect to the but-and-therefore principle: the power of the negative. Oddly, the negative is almost always better than the positive when it comes to storytelling. Saying what something or someone is not is almost always better than saying what something or someone is. For example: I am dumb, ugly, and unpopular. I’m not smart, I’m not at all good-looking, and no one likes me. The second sentence is better, isn’t it? Here’s why: it contains a hidden but. It presents both possibilities. Unlike the first sentence, which only offers single descriptors, the second sentence offers a binary. It presents the potential of being smart and not smart, good-looking and not good-looking, popular and unpopular. The second sentence really says this: I could be smart, but I’m dumb. I could be good-looking, but I’m ugly. I could be popular, but no one likes me. By saying what I am not, I am also saying what I could have been, and that is a hidden but.
One other aspect to the but-and-therefore principle: the power of the negative. Oddly, the negative is almost always better than the positive when it comes to storytelling. Saying what something or someone is not is almost always better than saying what something or someone is. For example: I am dumb, ugly, and unpopular. I’m not smart, I’m not at all good-looking, and no one likes me. The second sentence is better, isn’t it? Here’s why: it contains a hidden but. It presents both possibilities. Unlike the first sentence, which only offers single descriptors, the second sentence offers a binary. It presents the potential of being smart and not smart, good-looking and not good-looking, popular and unpopular. The second sentence really says this: I could be smart, but I’m dumb. I could be good-looking, but I’m ugly. I could be popular, but no one likes me. By saying what I am not, I am also saying what I could have been, and that is a hidden but. This probably sounds a little wonky and overspecific, but it makes a real difference when speaking to people. “I was lost” is just not as good as “I could not find my way home.” “Heather is my ex-girlfriend” is not as good as “Heather is no longer my girlfriend.” “I was penniless” is not as good as “I didn’t have a penny to my name.” This isn’t always true, of course. A short, positive statement at the end of a paragraph of description can often serve as an amusing button to a scene. Heather laughed at me when I wasn’t trying to be funny. She refused my offer of a birthday cupcake, claiming she’d already had a cupcake that day, even though it was only 9:30 AM. She chose to walk five miles home from school, even though I offered her a ride and she lived next door to me. Heather despised me. That short, positive statement at the end of the paragraph serves to summarize all that came before. Inflection and timing can make that simple sentence amusing. It might even get a laugh. But did you notice the three sentences before that last one? Each one of them contained an implied hidden but. Heather laughed at me when (but) I wasn’t trying to be funny. She refused my offer of a birthday cupcake, claiming she’d already had a cupcake that day, even though (but) it was only 9:30 AM. She chose to walk five miles home from school, even though (but) I offered her a ride and she lived next door to me. Three sentences embracing the power of the negative, followed by a single, positive statement to summarize. Simple, positive statements are also preferred when answering questions. In answer to the question, “Who is Heather?” a statement like “my ex-girlfriend” is more effective than “She was once my girlfriend.” Short answers to simple questions should never feel dramatic or crafted.
All big stories. Why haven’t I told them? They are hard to tell. It’s taken almost two years for Monica to finally tell her airplane-crash story. Instead she’s told stories about an incredibly awkward second date and a Christmas morning when she felt like the worst mother in the world. Why? Plane-crash stories are hard to tell. Long, silent, awkward dates and parental missteps are stories that audiences connect to more easily. They are easier to tell. I’d much rather tell you the story of the time I danced with Clara to the Ramones in the dying light of a summer day and learned something about regret. Or the time I swallowed a penny as a little boy and couldn’t tell my parents. Or the time Elysha said to me (at least a month before we started dating), “If we start dating, we’ll never break up. We’ll get married and be together forever.” Smaller moments, to be sure. Tiny, even. Moments no one would have recognized had they witnessed them firsthand. But they are easier to tell and just as good as the big moments. Maybe better.
One of my favorite church signs that I’ve ever seen says: “Come hear our pastor. He’s not very good, but he’s quick.” In storytelling, you should always try to say less. Shorter is better. Fewer words rule. The twenty-minute commencement address is almost always better than the forty-minute address. The thirty-minute meeting is almost always more effective than the sixty-minute meeting. The six-minute story is almost always better than the ten-minute story. And yes, the shorter sermon is always better than the longer sermon. As Blaise Pascal first said, “If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” Brevity takes time, because brevity is always better. The longer you speak, the more engaging, amusing, and captivating you must be. That’s a tall order. Those are high expectations. Most people are not engaging, amusing, or captivating by nature.
The longer you speak, the more perfect and precise you must be. The longer you stand in front of an audience — whether it be a theater or a boardroom — the more entertaining and engaging your words must be. So speak less. Make time your ally.
But when it comes to me, I’ve only made her cry twice. Why? And more importantly, how? The answer is simple: surprise. With my marriage proposal and the publication of my first novel, I surprised Elysha with unexpected information. Joyous information, but completely unanticipated. When it comes to storytelling, I believe that surprise is the only way to elicit an emotional reaction from your audience. Whether it’s laughter, tears, anger, sadness, outrage, or any other emotional response, the key is surprise.
We must use our words strategically to create and enhance surprise for our audience. Think about the moments of emotional response in “This Is Going to Suck.” All of them are generated through surprise. Audiences react with shock and sympathy when my car collides head-on with the Mercedes, mostly because, as terrible as they suspect a head-on collision can be, they don’t expect to discover that my entire bottom row of teeth would be knocked to the back of my mouth or that my head would crash through the windshield. They don’t think my legs would be as ravaged as they are. It’s a surprise. As bad as they may have predicted the accident to be, it’s rare for someone to expect this level of violence and gore. I enhance this surprise through contrast. I paint a very different picture of the world right before the collision. I talk about my hopes for a perfect Christmas. I describe the picture postcard–like appearance of the homes that I pass. I turn the snow, which will prove to be the cause of my downfall, into something beautiful, blanketing the lawns in white. All of this is done specifically to enhance the surprise of the collision. I’m creating contrast between the moment just before the collision and the moment immediately after. I’m establishing expectations so I can quickly upend them.
How to Ruin Surprise For you as a storyteller, this means that you need to build surprise into your stories. There must be moments of unexpectedness so that your audience can experience an emotional response to your story. You may argue that I was able to surprise my audience in “This Is Going to Suck” because my story had surprises already built in. Head-on collision. Death. Friends suddenly appearing in the waiting room. But this is not true. I will grant that the story contains moments of potential surprise, but almost every story ever told has this kind of potential. It’s up to the storyteller to ensure that these moments are as surprising as possible. Storytellers often mitigate or even ruin surprise by making some simple mistakes or failing to accentuate or enhance the potential surprise of the moment.
Common mistakes that storytellers make that ruin surprise include: Presenting a thesis statement prior to the surprise. This often takes the form of an opening sentence that gives away all that is surprising about the story. “This is a story about a time in my life when my friends became my family.” “This is a story about a car accident so serious that it took my life, if only for a moment.” “This is the story of a waiting room full of surprise guests.” It sounds ridiculous, I know, but this is done all the time, both onstage and in less formal situations. People feel the need to open their stories with thesis statements, either in an effort to grab the audience’s attention with a loaded statement or (more likely) because this is how they were taught to write in school: thesis statement, followed by supporting evidence and details. But storytelling is the reverse of the five-paragraph essay. Instead of opening with a thesis statement and then supporting it with evidence, storytellers provide the evidence first and then sometimes offer the thesis statement later only when necessary. This is how we allow for surprise. The same holds true for smaller moments of surprise within stories. For example, in describing the way my grandmother pulled my teeth, I have two choices: Option #1 My grandmother tied a length of string around my loose tooth. She leaned in close so our two faces were just inches apart. She told me to look her straight in the eyes. “Don’t blink,” she warned. Then she wrapped the other end of the string around her fist, raised it between our noses, smiled, and pulled down. Hard. My grandmother was a sadist. Option #2 My grandmother was a sadist. She tied a length of string around my loose tooth. She leaned in close so our two faces were just inches apart. She told me to look her straight in the eyes. “Don’t blink,” she warned. Then she wrapped the other end of the string around her fist, raised it between our noses, smiled, and pulled down. Hard. See the difference? In option #1, the thesis statement comes at the end of the paragraph, allowing for my grandmother’s method of pulling my teeth to be as surprising as possible. That thesis statement “My grandmother was a sadist” also probably adds a laugh at the end to punctuate the moment.
Failing to take advantage of the power of stakes to enhance and accentuate surprise. Remember in “Charity Thief” when I put a Backpack on my audience before I enter that gas station? I describe my plan for begging for gas in great detail. It sounds like a plausible idea. Probable, even. My audience is rooting for me. They expect me to get the gas I need. I know this because when I tell this story in workshops, I see the same reaction every time I say, “But the kid won’t give me the gas.” Shoulders slump. Faces contort in anger. People groan. They shake their heads in disgust. They experience an emotional reaction very similar to the one I experienced that day. Why? They are surprised. They wanted my plan to work. They expected it to work. It sounds like something that should have worked. If I don’t explain my plan before I enter the gas station, no one is surprised if the kid says no. He should say no. Who gives away free gas? It’s only when I load up my audience with a complete description of my plan, as well as all my hopes and dreams, that they experience the surprise of the refusal. The same thing happens later in that story, when I say, “Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m collecting money for Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities.” It’s the most surprising moment of the story. People either gasp or laugh when they hear me say those words. If you’ll remember, I accentuate this surprise with a Breadcrumb and an Hourglass. I give a hint about what is to come (a crumpled McDonald’s uniform), and I make the audience wait forever to hear it by slowing my speech and adding enormous amounts of unnecessary description and repetition. Can you imagine how less surprising the moment would be if I had climbed into my car, spotted the crumpled McDonald’s uniform, and said, “I know. I’m going to go door-to-door pretending to be a charity worker.” Still surprising, perhaps, but not nearly so. Yet this is what many storytellers do. Rather than seeking ways to make the surprise even more surprising, they kill the surprise through a failure to accentuate it. They fail to take advantage of the power of stakes to make something that is potentially surprising truly surprising.
Failing to hide critical information in a story. As storytellers, we must hide pertinent information from our audiences to allow the surprise to pay off later. I often refer to this as planting a bomb in a story that will explode when the time is right. In “This Is Going to Suck,” the bomb that I plant is the moment that I ask the nurse to call McDonald’s to tell my manager that I can’t make it to work. This is important. It’s critical to the story. It’s the reason why my friends know about the accident and make their way to the emergency room. But I don’t want my audience to foresee these events, so I hide this important moment in two ways: Hiding the Bomb in the Clutter We hide these important moments by making them seem unimportant. We do this by hiding critical information among other details. We make the important information seem no more important than the rest of the information by pushing it all together. In the case of “This Is Going to Suck,” I turn my all-important request for the nurse to call McDonald’s into just another detail by placing it amid a series of doctors’ and nurses’ interactions with me. Rather than highlighting the encounter, I add it to a long list: Nurses picking glass from my forehead Dental surgeons wiring teeth Doctors prepping my knees for surgery A nurse asking for contact information See what I did? It’s a critical moment in the story, essential to all that is to come, but I portray the nurse as just another medical professional doing another job. Oftentimes I will load a portion of a story with superfluous information simply to hide the one important bit of information that I need the audience to know but not yet recognize as important. I clutter the landscape so that the audience can’t tell what is important and what is not. Camouflage I also camouflage the bomb within a laugh. Laughter is the best camouflage, because it is also an emotional response, and audience members assume that the laugh is the result of the storyteller’s wanting to be funny. This is never the case. Comedians want to be funny. Great storytellers want to be remembered. For this reason, they deploy laughter strategically. I’ll talk more about this in the next chapter, but when it comes to preserving surprise, laughter is an excellent way to hide something important that needs to surprise the audience later on. In “This Is Going to Suck,” I ask the nurse to call McDonald’s (a fact I want to hide), so then I say, “[The nurse] looks at me as if I’m crazy, which I kind of am. I was dead twenty minutes ago and now I’m worried about work, but that drive-through does not run well without me, and they’re going to have to get someone in.” That laugh line draws attention away from the importance and relevance of this moment. It makes the moment feel like a storyteller’s attempt at a joke instead of the conveying of a critical bit of information. This is an exceptionally important concept in storytelling. If you can’t hide critical details and preserve the surprise, the audience sees it coming a mile away. In that case, you may as well not even tell your story. A couple of examples: I tell a story about the time my girlfriend’s father surprised me by serving me my pet rabbit on Thanksgiving. When I’m twenty years old, Bengi and I decide to buy a pair of rabbits and keep them in the house as pets in hopes that girls would think this sweet and like us more. It kind of works. Girls come over to see the rabbits and hang out for the rest of the day. I don’t know if they like me more, but they hang around our apartment longer and more often, which is great for me. My primary means of attracting girls has always been proximity. I stand as close to a girl as possible as long as possible, hoping to wear her down. I crack jokes and tell stories, and eventually the girl might turn my way. Sounds silly, I know, but remember this: Elysha fell in love with me while our classrooms were separated by about twenty-five feet of hallway. Proximity. It’s genius. Bengi and I train the rabbits to use a litter box, feed them rabbit food in cereal bowls, and basically give them the run of the house. A few months later, the rabbits begin chewing incessantly through the electrical cords on the TV and lamps, so we decide it’s time for them to move on. My girlfriend’s father keeps rabbits in a large hutch behind his house, so when he hears about my problem, he offers to take them off our hands. I’m thrilled. Then he feeds the rabbit to me at Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t know it at the time, but my girlfriend’s father is Portuguese, and the Portuguese eat rabbit the same way I eat chicken. Nor did I realize that my girlfriend’s father raised rabbits to sell to local restaurants. To him, a rabbit is nothing more than a food source. Still, he knew the rabbit was my pet. He understood the difference. He thought he was being funny. It was a terrible thing to do. The trick of the story is to not allow the audience to foresee me eating my rabbit until the moment I take my first bite of the stew. I need it to be a surprise. It’s not easy. I maintain the surprise in the story by hiding the rabbit in a laundry list of things I do to try to impress my girlfriend’s father, who is manlier than I will ever be. Bonding over his adoption of my rabbit is just one of many ways that I try to earn this man’s respect and admiration and perhaps become the kind of man I’ve always wanted to be. I hide the rabbit in the clutter of the story. I make my rabbit just one of the details (and an amusing one, using laughter as camouflage) instead of the most important element of the story, which it truly is. So when my girlfriend’s father asks, “What do you think about the stew?” the audience still doesn’t know that I’m eating my rabbit, because it doesn’t feel like a story about a rabbit. “It’s good,” I say. “I like it.” My girlfriend’s father smiles and says, “You should like it because . . .” That is the moment when the audience realizes that I am eating my rabbit, just one second before I realized it back in 1991. When I told the story for the first time, the audience gasped in horror. One of them shouted, “No! No!” By hiding the rabbit in the story, and by making it no less obvious than any other detail, I was able to maintain the surprise and give my audience the emotional reaction that the story demanded.
To review, the strategies for preserving and enhancing surprise in a story: 1. Avoid thesis statements in storytelling. 2. Heighten the contrast between the surprise and the moment just before the surprise. 3. Use stakes to increase surprise. 4. Avoid giving away the surprise in your story by hiding important information that will pay off later (planting bombs). This is done by: • Obscuring them in a list of other details or examples. • Placing them as far away from the surprise as possible. • When possible, building a laugh around them to further camouflage their importance.
Let’s consider the humor in “This Is Going to Suck.” The story of my near-fatal car accident is not funny. No one would ever characterize it as funny, and yet I use humor four times in the story, in four very strategic ways, for four very different reasons: 1. Start with a laugh. The first time I try to make the audience laugh is at the start of the story. Audiences usually laugh when Pat tells me that “Guys don’t buy Christmas presents for other guys. Especially surprise Christmas presents.” But even if they don’t laugh there, they will almost always laugh at the disclosure that I have also bought a surprise Christmas present for Pat. I try to make the audience laugh here, because it’s always good to get your audience to laugh in the first thirty seconds of a story. A laugh at the beginning does these three things: 1. It signals to the audience: “I’m a good storyteller. I know what I’m doing. You can relax.” 2. In a small, less formal situation, this early laugh will serve as a stop sign for potential interruptions. It serves as an unspoken signal that you have the floor. In fact, whenever faced with a person who cannot stop interrupting, I will often try to make the people around us laugh (never at the expense of the interrupter) to reassert my control over the space. “I made them laugh. I’ve got the floor. Let me finish, damn it.” 3. An early laugh lets the audience know that regardless of how serious, intense, or disturbing the story I am telling may be, I’m okay now. “I made you laugh. Everything is fine. Whatever horror I’m about to tell you about, it’s in the past.” This last thing is important when you’re telling an especially difficult story. The story of the armed robbery in a McDonald’s (“The Robbery”) is the most difficult story for me to tell, and it’s probably the most difficult story to hear. A gun is pressed to the side of my head and the trigger is pulled in an effort to get me to open a portion of the safe that is locked. But I open this story with my children’s ridiculous, hilarious magic show. The disappearing-dime trick, for example, features my daughter telling me and my wife to close our eyes while she makes the dime disappear. Then, without warning, she violently jams the coin into my ear. It’s a sweet, funny moment that is relevant (the robbery affects the way I see my children to this day), but it’s also intentionally light and joyous. In a couple of minutes, I’ll be describing how my face is pressed into a greasy tile floor as I listen to a man slowly count down to what I think is my death. The experience will result in two decades of untreated PTSD and an ongoing existential crisis. It’s my darkest story by far. But opening with something light invites my audience in and lets them know that, as violent and disturbing as events are about to become, I have a beautiful, little girl in my life who jams dimes into my ears as a part of her magic show. It’s all good. An early laugh also provides the storyteller with an all-important auditory signal of approval: “Oh, good. My audience likes me. They’re on my side.” It’s a fine way to feel as you begin. In a larger theater, where I often can’t see my audience because of the glare of the spotlight, that auditory response is especially reassuring. “Oh, good. The audience is still there. They didn’t quietly leave while I was adjusting the microphone.” Early laughter puts everyone at ease and makes the next few minutes supremely easier.
2. Make ’em laugh before you make ’em cry. The second time I make the audience laugh is just before the actual accident. Describing my mother’s car as the size of a box of Pop-Tarts often generates a giggle, but the real laugh comes a few seconds later, when I tell the audience that I’ve always been told to steer into the skid in situations like this, but I don’t know what that means. I want my audience to laugh here because we are seconds away from the collision. The contrast between their laughter and the approaching horror heightens the shocking and visceral nature of what is about to happen. I often say that I like to make people laugh before making them cry, because it hurts more that way. That is my goal here: Make them laugh so the collision and the resulting violence hurt more. Contrast is king in storytelling, and laughter can provide a fantastic contrast to something authentically awful. 3. Take a breath. The third time I make the audience laugh is immediately following the accident. One of the kids from the pickup truck looks me over, leans in, and whispers, “Dude, you’re fucked.” This almost always causes the audience to laugh, but I tag the boy’s dialogue with “It is the most accurate medical assessment that I will receive that day.” Big laugh. I want my audience to laugh here because they have just endured the details of a horrific car accident, and I need to break the tension. The audience needs to take a breath. Whenever a story has become exceptionally tense and the audience needs to reset, a laugh is the best way to do this. This laugh may seem organic rather than planned. The kid shows up at the right moment and says the perfect thing to cause a laugh. True, but a lot of kids show up that day. Another boy places my head on his lap and prays, telling me not to worry, I’ll see God and Jesus soon, and all will be okay. Another boy screams uncontrollably upon seeing my legs and needs to be moved away. A girl weeps beside me. A lot more happens than is described, but I strategically choose the one line that has the most potential to be funny, and it’s made funny through timing, tonality, and that tag on the end. That’s the job of a storyteller. Make good, strategic choices, and then make the most of those choices.
You must end your story on heart. Far too often I hear storytellers attempt to end their story on a laugh. A pun. A joke. A play on words. This is not why we listen to stories. We like to laugh; we want to laugh. But we listen to stories to be moved. We love stories that contain moments of humor and hilarity. Sometimes an entire story can be funny. But those last few precious sentences — the space where you will land your story — should end with heart. Close with meaning. Stories must conclude with something greater than a laugh. If you want your story to linger with your audience (and that should be your goal), you should end in a place that is moving, vulnerable, or revealing, or establishes connection with the audience. Save your laughs for the middle, when you want to keep your audience engaged. Allow them to carry your audience to the end. But end your story with something bigger than a laugh.
As I said, I can’t make people funny, no matter how often I am asked to try. I have yet to figure out that trick, and I may never figure
Humor is a combination of wit, speed, tonality, confidence, daring, nonconformity, flexibility with the language, understanding of your audience, and more. In a lot of ways, it’s all about the way you say something. Delivery is critical. It can make the unfunny incredibly funny.
Like all other emotional responses (see the previous chapter), humor is based entirely on surprise. A combination of specific words spoken in a specific way at a specific moment initiates a surprise that sparks a smile, a giggle, or actual laughter. Like every other emotional response, laughter is simply a well-cultivated surprise.
Milk Cans and a Baseball Milk Cans and a Baseball refers to the carnival game where metallic milk cans are stacked in a triangular formation and the player attempts to knock them down with a ball. In comedy, this is called setup and punch line. The milk cans represent the setup, and the ball is the punch line. The more milk cans in your tower, the greater potential laugh. The better you deliver the ball, the more of that potential will be realized. The trick is to work to the laugh by using language that carefully builds your tower while saving the funniest thing for last. Sadly, the instinct of most people is to say the funniest thing first. They can’t wait to get to the funny part, and in doing so, they ruin it. For example, in a story entitled “Homeless and the Goat,” I tell the story about the period of my life when I was homeless. Near the end I say, “I was rescued from the streets by a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I sleep in a pantry off their kitchen that they’ve converted into a tiny bedroom. I share this room with a Jehovah’s Witness named Rick, a guy who speaks in tongues in his sleep, and the family’s indoor pet goat.” Goat is the funniest word in that paragraph, because it is the most unexpected of all the words. It’s the biggest surprise. Therefore it must be said last. It is the ball that I use to knock down my tower of milk cans. Can you see the tower I built before getting there? Saved by Jehovah’s Witnesses, pantry, tiny bedroom, Rick, speaks in tongues, in his sleep, indoor pet goat. That’s a lot of milk cans. Look at those last two words: indoor and pet. I chose them with care. I say them slowly, with a definite pause between the two. I use these words to enhance the surprise. When I say indoor and pet, my audience is thinking, Dog? Cat? Parakeet? Hamster? Even potbellied pig is an option. But goat?
Milk Cans and a Baseball Milk Cans and a Baseball refers to the carnival game where metallic milk cans are stacked in a triangular formation and the player attempts to knock them down with a ball. In comedy, this is called setup and punch line. The milk cans represent the setup, and the ball is the punch line. The more milk cans in your tower, the greater potential laugh. The better you deliver the ball, the more of that potential will be realized. The trick is to work to the laugh by using language that carefully builds your tower while saving the funniest thing for last. Sadly, the instinct of most people is to say the funniest thing first. They can’t wait to get to the funny part, and in doing so, they ruin it. For example, in a story entitled “Homeless and the Goat,” I tell the story about the period of my life when I was homeless. Near the end I say, “I was rescued from the streets by a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I sleep in a pantry off their kitchen that they’ve converted into a tiny bedroom. I share this room with a Jehovah’s Witness named Rick, a guy who speaks in tongues in his sleep, and the family’s indoor pet goat.” Goat is the funniest word in that paragraph, because it is the most unexpected of all the words. It’s the biggest surprise. Therefore it must be said last. It is the ball that I use to knock down my tower of milk cans. Can you see the tower I built before getting there? Saved by Jehovah’s Witnesses, pantry, tiny bedroom, Rick, speaks in tongues, in his sleep, indoor pet goat. That’s a lot of milk cans. Look at those last two words: indoor and pet. I chose them with care. I say them slowly, with a definite pause between the two. I use these words to enhance the surprise. When I say indoor and pet, my audience is thinking, Dog? Cat? Parakeet? Hamster? Even potbellied pig is an option. But goat? Goat is funny, but it’s only funny when said properly. When my friends tell this story on my behalf, they say things like, “Matt once slept with a goat. And a guy who talked in his sleep. The guy actually spoke in tongues when he was sleeping. They slept in this tiny room off the kitchen of this family of Jehovah’s Witnesses.” They kill the humor. They kill it because they can’t wait to say the word goat. They kill it because they make no effort to make the goat more than situationally funny. They kill it by not using the but-and-therefore principle; the way they tell it is essentially with an awful series of ands. I take a situationally funny moment (I once shared a room with a goat) and make it into a bigger laugh by manipulating the language around it.
It’s well known that words with the K sound are funny. Words like cattywampus, cankles, kuku, caca, and pickle are funny just because of that hard K sound (though I think pickle is funny even without the K sound).
Oddly specific words are also funny. It’s funnier for me to say, “I’m pouring water over Raisin Bran because I am too stupid and lazy to buy milk” than it is to say, “I’m pouring water over a bowl of cereal.” Why? Specificity is funny.
Babies and Blenders is the idea that when two things that rarely or never go together are pushed together, humor often results. In the story about Elysha discovering that I was hungry as a boy, I describe Charlie like this: Except for Charlie’s obsession with biting his mother’s ass — an obsession I can understand quite well — he is the sweetest boy you’ve ever met. His first complete sentence was “Thank you, Mama.” When he needs a diaper change, he shouts, “Poop is here!” When I arrive home at the end of a long workday, Charlie is the first and often the only person to greet me at the door. Charlie oozes love. But when it comes to food, my sweet, angelic, three-year-old boy is a little asshole. This always gets a laugh, because three-year-old boys are rarely described as assholes, especially after being described as sweet, angelic, and little. In the story about the way that my grandmother pulled my loose teeth, I refer to her as a sadist. Grandmother and sadist are rarely seen together, so it’s funny.
My favorite example of Babies and Blenders is an old Sesame Street game called “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.” Storytellers play this game in their stories all the time by creating a list of three descriptors, with the third being nothing like the other two. My favorite storyteller in the world — Steve Zimmer — does this in a story entitled “Neighborhood Watch.” After Steve’s family is not invited to the neighborhood Hawaiian luau, they decide to host the Zimmer family barbecue, which features “Zimmers, pineapple-flavored ham, and despair.” One of those things is not like the others, and the result is a big laugh.
When I tell my audience that my Jewish wife picked out her first Christmas tree, and it was “seven feet wide and three feet tall,” everyone knows this is an exaggeration. No one believes that the tree was really seven feet wide and three feet tall. Therefore they laugh. Although exaggeration is easy, it must still be executed well. The “seven feet wide by three feet tall” Christmas-tree dimensions were chosen carefully after many other dimensions were cast aside. For reasons that I don’t entirely understand, seven by three feet is funnier than nine by four feet or five by two. I tried them all. I didn’t grab the first exaggeration that came to mind. I acknowledged that the words are important and the choices should be made with care.
“Eddie in a Bathtub” was a five-second moment of my life, to be sure, but I really had no idea why. We have moments like this in our lives, when something happens to us and we know it’s important, but can’t explain exactly why. It’s a memory that lingers in our consciousness, a moment that remains locked in our heart; maybe it’s a time in our life that we frequently revisit in dreams. This was one of those moments. “Eddie in a Bathtub” was an important moment in my life, but I had no idea why. In these cases, my advice to storytellers is always the same: Tell your story. Speak it aloud. Don’t worry about stakes or lies or anything else. Don’t fret over where to start or finish. Just tell the story as honestly and completely as possible. Spill out all the details. Tell the overly detailed version of your story. Through this process, you will often discover (or rediscover) its meaning. You’ll come to understand the importance of your five-second moment. That’s what happened to me on that day. I told the story — without any thoughts of craft or polish — and when I reached the end, I knew. Through the process of telling the story, I had managed to put myself back into that bathtub, and instantly I understood why this moment had stuck with me for two decades. I realized that the story had two important meanings for me: 1. It was the first time I realized that people will turn their backs in the face of evil and walk away rather than taking a stand. 2. It was the first time I felt that the world was a fundamentally unsafe place, that people will hurt you for no better reasons than traditions and payback. It wasn’t an easy moment to confront in front of an audience of thirty students. That bathtub was a terrible place for me, and when I found myself in it again twenty years later, it was no better. I became emotional. I rushed to the end, leaving out the brutality and specificity of the beating. I wasn’t ready to share it all with an audience, but I had found the meaning. Two meanings, really. And that is no good. Stories can never be about two things. I explained to my students that even though that moment in the bathtub came to mean two different things to me, the story that I tell onstage someday about that moment can only be about one of those things. This is because of what you already know: The ending of the story — your five-second moment — will tell you what the beginning of your story should be. The beginning will be the opposite of the end. If my story is about my realization that the world (and especially people) are fundamentally unsafe and willing to hurt you for the pettiest of reasons, the beginning of my story needs to present my previous belief that people are basically good and the world is generally safe. The arc of the story will trace my path from innocence to cynicism. From optimism to pessimism. If my story is about how people will turn their backs on you in moments of crisis, the beginning of my story needs to be about my belief that people can be depended upon in times of need. The arc of the story will go from faith in my fellow man to a loss of that faith. This is why your story can never be about two things. This does not mean that I can’t tell both versions of this story. In fact, as a storyteller, I’m thrilled to have two stories that center on the same moment. Those two stories, which have yet to be fully crafted, will start entirely differently but will ultimately converge on the same moment in the bathtub.
I was a member of the Blackstone Millville Regional Junior Senior High School marching band. I marched with the band from 1984 to 1989 as a member of the drum corps, playing the bass drum and various percussion instruments in the pit. This was serious business. We were a competition marching band, performing elaborate halftime shows, even though the school had neither a football team nor a football field. We practiced in a school parking lot painted with yard markers. We worked like hell. We were Massachusetts champions for all the five years that I played in the band, and New England champions in two of those years. I marched in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Rose Parade, and down Main Street in both Disneyland and Disney World. Serious business. Every summer I spent a week at band camp preparing for the coming season. Band directors would bring us to a college campus or a vacant military base to plan and practice our music and marching routines for the coming year. For the first few years of band camp, until Massachusetts law changed, this also meant hazing. Lots and lots of hazing. Hazing rituals included being forced to carry the upperclassmen’s drums, enduring shaving-cream bombs, withstanding blasts of CO2 from fire extinguishers, and in some cases, serious violence. It wasn’t uncommon for my scalp to be split open by the class ring of an upperclassman, turned stone down to pummel my skull. The 1980s were a different time in America. John Hughes got it right. These were not times of unity and acceptance in public high schools. The worst of the hazing (other than the actual physical assaults) was “doughboying.” In this case, an upperclassman (or a team of upperclassmen) tossed a lowerclassman into a bathtub and covered him in a combination of ingredients: flour, sugar, cornstarch, and yeast. Warm water was then run over the victim until the mixture congealed into a sticky substance that adhered to the skin. This was usually done just before a three-hour practice in the hot August sun, thus allowing the mixture to bake on the victim. When you had been doughboyed, everyone knew you had been doughboyed. It was sticky, uncomfortable, but most of all embarrassing. During lunch one day, I realized that I had forgotten my sheet music in my dorm room and went to retrieve it. Unbeknownst to me, three seniors followed, including Eddie, the most violent person I had ever met. Eddie had split my head open with his ring more than any other senior. He was the person in my life that I feared most. Eddie and his partners caught me running for the exit from the dorm and dragged me down the hall, through their room, and into their bathroom. I never had a chance. I was a fourteen-year-old noodle-shaped boy who weighed no more than a hundred pounds. I’d yet to grow any facial hair or any chest hair. Two in Eddie’s posse had full mustaches, including Eddie. One of the seniors worked a full-time job. They were men, and I was a boy. Eddie and his gang tossed me into the bathtub and began the doughboy process by pulling off my shirt and pouring the mix on my body. Once I was in the bathtub, I stopped struggling. No sense fighting the inevitable. Instead I used the only weapon I had available to me: my mouth. I called them cowards. Punks. Future Losers of America. “Three against one? What are you? A bunch of chickens? You’re twice my size, and it took three of you to take me down? You suck!” Eddie’s face darkened. I thought this was something that only happened in Stephen King novels, but no, I was witnessing it in real life. He clenched his fists. He was seething. I looked to the other two guys, who were standing just behind Eddie. Our eyes met. They knew what was about to happen. They turned and walked out into the dorm hallway. Eddie beat the hell out of me in that bathtub. He hurt me in a way I’d never been hurt before. It took everything I had to stop myself from crying.
This is not the only time I have discovered the meaning of a story simply by telling it. It’s happened many times. Reimmersing myself in the moment and telling as much of the story as possible, and ignoring all my storytelling strategies in favor of telling everything that I remember, has been exceptionally useful in finding the meaning behind those nagging moments from my life.
The other way of discovering the meaning of a moment is to ask yourself why you do the things you do. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, my father and I write letters to each other. This is our primary form of communication. Since he disappeared for most of my childhood and for much of my adult life, it has been difficult for us to maintain an ongoing relationship. We are miserable on the phone. My father has never been on the internet. He won’t leave his hometown. Eventually we settled on letters. It turns out that he’s an excellent writer. He’s an even better storyteller. I just wish he would write faster, but these letters have allowed me to get to know my father better than ever before. Just a couple of weeks ago, my wife asked what my father’s most recent letter contained. My answer: “I’ll let you read it.” I said this because I had not read it myself. What I’ve never told my wife (or anyone else) is that I don’t open any of my father’s letters until I receive another one from him. Sometimes this means I hang on to an unopened letter for months. I always keep one unopened letter from my father on hand at all times. It was true that for the first letter, I was afraid of what he may or may not have written, and that’s why I brought it to the movie theater to read. But even today, I don’t open one of my father’s letters until another one arrives. Why? In the spirit of “Ask yourself why you do the things you do,” I did exactly that: “Why do you do this? Why do you keep an unopened letter from your father in your bag?” I thought about my father. Our relationship. Our personal history. I told myself the story of our history, starting with his disappearance from my life following the divorce of my parents up until present day. I spoke the words aloud, leaving nothing out. It took some time. When I finished, I suddenly knew. The answer came to me as clear as day. I keep an unopened letter from my father because ever since I was a boy, I have waited for him to return to my life, and every time he has made an appearance, I am afraid it will be his last. I have lived in fear that my father will leave me again and never come back. If I keep an unopened letter from my father, he can never leave me again. I’m holding on to this unexplored piece of him, and as long as I have the promise of reading his letter someday, he can never disappear again. Just like that, I have a story. It’ll be a good one too, I think. The kind of story that will connect with many people on many levels. Even better, I understand myself a little better now. I often ask myself why I do the things I do. Sometimes the answer is simple: You’re pedantic. You’re neurotic. You’re a jerk. You’re selfish. You like ice cream way too much. You think “No Right on Red” signs are bullshit. You despise the way neckties are nothing but decorative nooses. But sometimes the answer to the question reveals something much deeper — a hidden truth that often makes for a great story.
Another strategy that I’m using to put you on this train with me is the use of the present tense. These events are happening right now for me, literally as I write this sentence, and, I hope, you feel as if they are happening in the space and time that you are occupying as you read these words. This is the magic of the present tense. It creates a sense of immediacy. Even though you are reading these words in bed or by the light of a roaring fire or perhaps naked in your bathtub, a part of you, maybe, is on this train with me, staring at a little boy who desperately needs to pee. The present tense acts like a temporal magnet, sucking you into whatever time I want you to occupy. It allows me to put you on an Amtrak train somewhere in central New Jersey in the summer of 2017 or in my 1976 Chevy Malibu on a lonely highway in New Hampshire in the fall of 1991 or in a chaotic emergency room on December 23, 1988. The present tense will bring you a little closer to these moments in time. It may even trick you into believing that you have time traveled back in time to these moments.
Did you see what I did there? I opened that section in the present tense again, trying like hell to suck you back into the time and space of the train, but then I shifted to the past tense when I slipped into backstory about the day I taught Charlie how to pee on the tree. I did this deliberately, for two reasons: 1. I didn’t want to compromise the immediacy of the train part by bringing in a second present tense to my story. If I spoke about Charlie’s tree-peeing lesson in the present tense as well, then I would risk diluting the visceral, present-tense nature of the train. Stories cannot have two or more events that took place at different times happen in the present time of the story. It’s like putting a hat on a hat. 2. The use of the past tense in backstory makes sense. It’s in the past. It should be presented as such. This is not always the case, but it’s often the case. When in doubt, tell backstory using the past tense. Following the tree-peeing backstory, I end that last section by returning you to the present tense. I placed you back on the train, walking down the aisle, passing the woman with the knowing glance after another failed attempt. I want you with me on that train again, if you left at all. There are other reasons to shift tenses when telling a story. Sometimes I want to push an audience back before bringing them forward again. I do this in “This Is Going to Suck” when I reveal that my friends are filling the waiting room outside the emergency room. Look how often I shift tenses in this paragraph: But I’m not alone, because when the nurse called McDonald’s to tell them about the accident, the manager on duty told my friends, and those friends started calling other friends. An old-fashioned phone tree begins, with friends calling friends calling friends, and the waiting room is now filling up with sixteen- and seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids in ripped jeans and concert T-shirts, and one fourteen-year-old boy who is cooler than all of them. And my friend Bengi is the first one to arrive. I start in the present tense (“But I’m not alone”), but then shift to the past tense to something you already know happened (“when the nurse called McDonald’s”). Then I shift back to the present tense (“An old-fashioned phone tree begins, with friends calling friends calling friends”), even though I’m still relating information from the past. This phone tree already happened. The waiting room is already full of kids. I’m about to tell you this, but I still want this past event told in the present tense. I do this because the disclosure that “an old-fashioned phone tree begins” is a powerful moment in the story. It means a lot to me, and I hope it will mean a lot to my audience. I want them to feel as if it’s happening in the present. I want them to see teenagers calling teenagers, rushing to my assistance while my parents go to check on the car first. I can’t tell you about this phone tree when it’s actually happening, because it would ruin the surprise of my friends in the waiting room, so I tell you about it after it has happened — but in the present tense. While these time shifts were admittedly intentional, many are not. As you begin to tell stories in the present tense, the shift from present to past to present will become instinctual as you learn to sense when you want your audience in the present moment as opposed to the past.
There’s one more benefit to the present tense: It helps you see your story. Some storytellers are able to see their stories. As they tell it, they almost relive the moments. Rather than staring into the eyes of their audience, their minds recreate a vision of the events as they unfold.
Seeing your story as you tell it is a great thing. It will help you connect to it more effectively. Your emotional state will more closely match your actual emotions from the time and place that you are describing. When you can see your story, it is more likely that your audience will see your story too.
Some things are told better from a distance. Urination, I think, is one of them. But then I switched to the present tense when I admitted to crying in the restroom, because in that moment, I wanted you as close to me as possible. But the important part is this: I made the choice. I weighed my options. I didn’t simply default to one tense. I chose what I thought was the correct tense for that particular moment. That said, not every person can tell stories in the present tense. I meet many people who have been telling stories exclusively in the past tense for years. Shifting to the present tense occupies so much of their mental bandwidth that it does more harm than good. There is nothing wrong with telling a story from the past — even five minutes in the past — using the past tense. You will not be a terrible storyteller if you do. In a lot of ways, this is the most intuitive, logical, and expected way to talk about the past. It makes a lot of sense. But try the present tense. See if it’s something you can fall into naturally. If you can, great. You’ll have a much better chance of drawing your audience into your story and perhaps seeing your story as well. You’ll have more choices to make in crafting your story, and they will give you an additional strategy for your toolbox. If you can’t do it, I’ve loaded that toolbox up already with plenty of strategies, more than you can probably manage at this point. Better to tell your story well from the past tense than poorly (or unnaturally, or stressfully) from the present tense.
Avoiding bragging can make storytelling difficult, because we all have moments of true accomplishment that we want to share, and, in some cases, we are almost required to share: Job interviews College applications Meeting the in-laws for the first time There is nothing wrong with sharing your success stories, but they are hard stories to tell well. The truth is this: failure is more engaging than success.
Getting fired from your dream job is probably more entertaining than being hired for your dream job. Tragic first-date stories are far better than perfect first-date stories. The story of an F is almost always better than the story of an A+.
Nevertheless, there are times when you might want to tell a success story, and when you do, there are two strategies that I suggest you employ. 1. Malign yourself. 2. Marginalize your accomplishment. Rather than attempting to be grandiose about yourself or your success, you must undermine both you and it. This is because of two realities: First, human beings love underdog stories. The love for the underdog is universal. Underdogs are supposed to lose, so when they manage to pull out an unexpected or unbelievable victory, our sense of joy is more intense than if that same underdog suffers a crushing defeat. A crushing defeat is expected. An unbelievable win is a surprise. You already know the importance of surprise in storytelling. If you cast yourself as the underdog, your audience will enjoy your success. They will root for you. They will expect you to lose and hope for you to win.
In a story entitled “Bring Me a Shrubbery,” I tell about changing the life of a chronically shy student named Lisa through our unexpected shared love of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Through the humor of Monty Python, Lisa begins using her voice for the first time. Lisa’s parents tell me that I “saved her life” by bringing their withdrawn daughter out of her shell and helping her to make friends. It’s a success story, to be sure, but I open the story by describing a moment on the first day of school that year when I throw my shoe in the direction of a student and accidentally clock her in the head. Why do I open my story with this moment? I want to be sure that my audience knows that I’m not perfect, nor am I pretending to be. I’m not the best teacher in the world. Not even close. I may save a girl’s life, but I also struck a child with flying footwear. I marginalize myself. I cast myself as the underdog by sharing a highly imperfect moment of teaching, so I can tell you about the closer-to-perfect one later.
Second, human beings prefer stories of small steps over large leaps. Most accomplishments, both great and small, are not composed of singular moments but are the culmination of many small steps. Overnight success stories are rare. They can also be disheartening to those who dream of similar success. The step-by-step nature of accomplishment is what people understand best. This is how to tell a success story: Rather than telling a story of your full and complete accomplishment, tell the story of a small part of the success. Tell about a small step. Feel free to allude to the better days that may lie ahead, but don’t try to tell everything. Small steps only. In “Bring Me a Shrubbery,” Lisa’s parents tell me that I saved their daughter’s life. It’s a joyous moment for me, and I feel incredible for exactly three days. Then I pass by Stephanie in the hallway, a former student and an equally shy girl. Stephanie was so shy that her friend Quiana often spoke on her behalf when she was in my class. I didn’t save Stephanie. I quit on her. I never found her Monty Python and the Holy Grail. What was even worse, I stopped trying to find it. There were others too. Kelly from a couple years before. Kayla from a year before that. And in my first year of teaching, Joseph, whose voice I cannot remember, probably because he barely spoke in class that year. I didn’t save any of them. In fact, I didn’t even save Lisa. I got lucky. I shouted out the line from a movie, and by some miracle, it connected with a student in an unexpected way. I gave Lisa the space and encouragement to grow and thrive, but had I not shouted that line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, she could have ended up like Stephanie and all the rest. In the end, it’s a success born from good fortune, but it was just one student. So many others had already passed through my classroom quietly. That is what my story is about. I maligned myself by admitting I’d thrown a shoe at a student. I marginalized my accomplishment by pointing out that while I may have saved Lisa, I had failed to save the many who came before her. I know. It’s not the easiest thing to do. Sometimes we are so proud of our hard-fought success stories that we want to tell every bit of them. Sometimes we want to be the hero, damn it. But the line between hero and insufferable person is a thin one. Caution is advised.
Sometimes you can’t help but tell the whole story. In the summer of 2017 I worked with a man named Tim Warren who summited Mount Everest years before. Is Tim expected to stop his story halfway to the top of the tallest mountain in the world? No. That would be ridiculous. But Tim also failed to reach the summit on his first attempt, and he certainly didn’t reach the top on his own. He was part of a climbing team. By passing on some of the credit to the teammates who made his climb possible, and by highlighting his initial failure, Tim can tell the story of his ascent in a way that an audience can relate and connect to. I also suggested this: Can Tim’s story be about something other than Mount Everest? Can the climb to the summit be about something more personal? More interior? Perhaps a bit of individual growth that resulted from the climb? I know it sounds crazy to turn the summiting of Mount Everest into something other than the summiting of Mount Everest, but if I can turn a story about putting my head through a windshield and dying on the side of the road into a story about my friends taking the place of my family, why not? If the successful climb taught Tim to trust others, listen to his gut, accept failure, find inner peace, believe in himself, or uncover a strength he never knew he possessed, that would make for a story with much greater universal appeal and potential connectivity. We all have our own Mount Everests to summit. Tim’s just happened to be the real thing. If he can use that enormous pile of rock and ice to reach his audience on their own level by expressing something more personal about his feat, the power of the story and its potential to connect to an audience increases exponentially. Summiting Mount Everest is an adventure story. Changing your life by summiting Mount Everest is a great story.
My goal as a storyteller is to make my audience forget that the present moment exists. I want them to forget that I exist. I want their mind’s eye to be filled with images of the movie I am creating in their brains. I want this movie to transport them back to the year and spot that my story takes place. A lonely New Hampshire highway in the fall of 1991 The sidewalk outside of a record store on December 23, 1988 Main Street in Newington, Connecticut, in a rainstorm at 2:00 AM If a storyteller is performing well, and if the conditions are right, I think this magic can happen. I believe that audiences — in theaters, in boardrooms, or at dinner tables — can be transported back into the past. It’s admittedly easier to achieve this form of time travel if the conditions are just right. Lights turned down. Comfortable chair. Silence. Perhaps even a glass of wine or beer in the bellies of your audience members.
Here are some rules to avoid popping this mystical bubble: Don’t ask rhetorical questions. Actors in movies never ask rhetorical questions of their audience (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being the only exception I have found so far), and neither should you. Asking a rhetorical question causes the audience to devise an answer in their mind. You have just turned your story into a Q&A session. You’ve reminded them that you exist, they exist, and this moment that you and they are occupying exists. Don’t address the audience or acknowledge their existence whatsoever. Avoid phrases like “You guys!” for the same reason you shouldn’t ask rhetorical questions. When a storyteller says something like “You guys, you’re not going to believe this!” the bubble is instantly broken. Time travel has abruptly ended. The audience is keenly aware that someone is standing in front of them, speaking directly to them and the people sitting around them. This also applies when the audience talks back to you. If you say, “I was walking across the campus at Ohio State” and someone in the audience shouts in approval at the mention of their alma mater, say nothing and do nothing. Unless you’re speaking in a Baptist church, storytelling is rarely a call-and-response scenario, so pretend the whoop or the cheer was never uttered. Ignore it completely. We disregard fools in the hope that our lack of recognition will cause them to cease acting foolish in the future. Allow them to silently stew in a puddle of shame and regret, and move on. No props. Ever. I once listened to a man tell a story about his frantic sprint through the Miami airport while dragging his daughter to catch a flight. He treated everyone in his path terribly. He was rude, dismissive, and unkind. When he finally arrived at the ticket counter, he demanded that the airline employee hurry so he and his daughter could board the plane before it was too late. The airline employee looked at the ticket, smiled, and told the man not to worry. He had plenty of time. The ticket was for next month. The man looked down at his daughter and realized that he had just dragged her through the airport, setting the worst example for her ever. He felt like a fool. Great story told brilliantly. I could feel the heat and humidity of Miami. I could see the throngs of travelers blocking his path. I could even hear the public-address system call out flight numbers and gates. I was in that airport with him and his child. Brilliant. Then he removed the ticket from his back pocket and waved it to the audience. “And it’s still good,” he said. “Too bad I won’t be in Miami three days from now to use it.” Pop! That was it. I was no longer in the Miami airport. I was in a theater in Brooklyn, staring at a middle-aged man with a piece of paper in his hand. Time travel over. Did the ticket help his story? Of course not. It punched his nearly perfect story right in the mouth. Don’t use props. They never help. Even worse, they always hurt. Avoid anachronisms. An anachronism is a thing that is set in a period other than that in which it exists. It’s a microwave in the Middle Ages. A refrigerator during the Renaissance. The internet during the Inquisition. If you’re telling a story about something that happened in 1960, but at some point you say that your mission was as unlikely as the moon landing, you’ve created a temporal impossibility in the story and likely popped your time-traveling bubble. Anachronisms are like sledgehammers, reminding us that this story is just a story. It reinforces the idea that we are not traveling through time. Sometimes, unfortunately, they are also unavoidable. In “Charity Thief,” I mention that it’s 1991 and cell phones don’t exist. I hate saying this. If cell phones didn’t exist in 1991, then they shouldn’t be spoken of at all in my story. The only reason I mention the absence of a cell phone is because too many millennials have asked me why I didn’t have a cell phone on that day, so I feel the need to control their wonder by reminding the audience that something that didn’t exist in 1991 did not exist in 1991. Apparently if you’ve lived in a world where cell phones have always existed, it’s hard to imagine them not existing. Annoying. But in most cases, I avoid these anachronisms at all costs. Don’t mention the word story in your story. Phrases like, “But that’s a story for another day,” or “Long story short” serve to remind our audience that we are telling a story. If your audience knows that you’re telling a story, then they’re not time traveling. Downplay your physical presence as much as possible. When I tell a story onstage (or even in a workshop or at a conference), I wear blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a hat. I wear this every time. It’s my uniform, chosen because it suits me as a person and is fairly nondescript. My goal is to downplay my physical presence. I want to increase the likelihood of becoming a disembodied voice in the mind of my audience. I want them to completely forget that I’m standing in front of them. There was a time when I varied my outfit slightly. I wore graphical T-shirts and other variations of shirts and pants. Then I took the stage in Boston one night wearing a T-shirt featuring a half-dozen storm troopers from Star Wars, sitting on a beam, looking like construction workers. As I adjusted the microphone, a cluster of audience members up front began to laugh. I looked. Why were they laughing? I listened. They were laughing at the graphic on my shirt. I didn’t want my audience laughing yet. I didn’t want them looking at me. I didn’t want them taking inventory of my wardrobe or thinking about my shirt at all. From that moment on, I’ve opted for the same bland outfit every time. This is not to say that jeans and a black T-shirt are my recommendation for everyone. Just don’t wear clothing that might upstage you or attract the audience’s attention during your story. An audience member once told me, “Listening to you tell a story is like listening to an audiobook.” Exactly what I wanted.
My decision to keep my blog clean and free of specific teaching references and vulgarity helped a lot. I continue to blog daily, but I still don’t swear or speak profanely on my blog. I don’t criticize my school district or my colleagues. You’ll never find a photograph of my holding a beer or drinking wine. I knew what to write and what not to write to preserve my reputation in my community. I knew where the line was, and I often stepped on it but never over it. It saved me. As a storyteller, you need to do the same. Whether you are telling a story to a coworker, conducting a presentation in a boardroom, toasting your brother at a wedding, or performing onstage, the words you choose will in part determine how your audience perceives you. It will impact the opinions that they form about you.
Avoiding swearing also makes it easier for public and private organizations, religious institutions, school systems, and the like to trust me and hire me. A storyteller who leans heavily on profanity isn’t likely to be hired to teach children, rabbis, corporate executives, librarians, priests, or teachers. He’s less likely to be hired to perform for nonprofits, yoga institutes, holiday parties, religious retreats, high schools, and more. Also, swearing is lazy. In most cases, a swear word can be replaced by a better word or phrase. The swear word is easy and may engender a laugh, but it’s rarely the best word to choose. That said, there are times when I think it is appropriate to swear: • Repeated dialogue: The kid who arrives at my car accident swears. He says, “Dude, you’re fucked.” It’s his words, repeated exactly. • When a swear is simply the best word possible: There is no better way to describe my former stepfather than asshole, so that is the word I choose every time. • Moments of extreme emotion: There are certainly times in our lives when the best way to capture the heightened emotion of a moment — particularly when it comes to anger and fear — is with profanity. • Humor: Though I would never rely solely on profanity for humor, there are moments when a well-placed swear word makes a perfect punch line to a joke.
Vulgarity is the description of events that are profane in nature. This includes actions of a sexual nature, anything involving bodily fluids, and the like. In “Genetic Flaws,” for example, I tell about my visit to a semen-collection facility for the purposes of genetic testing. I acknowledge in the story that I will need to masturbate in order to provide a sample, but at no time am I specific about it in such a way to make an audience uncomfortable. I use euphemisms, allusion, self-deprecation, and humor to set the scene without exposing the scene. Everyone knows the reality of the situation without needing to know the exact reality of the situation. In all stories, we take care of our audience by ensuring that they are not repulsed, offended, or disgusted by what we are saying.
A friend once told a story at a Moth StorySLAM about his intestinal disagreement with Thai food while on a first date. While sitting on the woman’s white couch, my friend experiences a loss of bodily control, and the result is an unfortunate situation for both him and the couch. He described the defiling of the cushions in specific, graphic detail, including color, smell, viscosity, and texture. He scored poorly with the judges that night, because his description of the situation was repulsive and sickening. What he thought was honest and authentic was revolting.
A friend once told a story at a Moth StorySLAM about his intestinal disagreement with Thai food while on a first date. While sitting on the woman’s white couch, my friend experiences a loss of bodily control, and the result is an unfortunate situation for both him and the couch. He described the defiling of the cushions in specific, graphic detail, including color, smell, viscosity, and texture. He scored poorly with the judges that night, because his description of the situation was repulsive and sickening. What he thought was honest and authentic was revolting. All he needed to say was that he stood up, turned around, and discovered a “situation” on the couch. “A serious situation. An unfortunate situation.” This would have resulted in both an understanding and a laugh while not repulsing the audience in any way.
The rule with vulgarity is simple: If you are speaking about a topic that would be awkward to talk about with your parents or grandparents, tread lightly. Take care of your audience.
I’m often asked how to handle using real people’s names in my stories. I tell storytellers that changing the names of people to protect their anonymity is perfectly reasonable. When you change the name, however, I always suggest that you choose a similar name to make it easier to remember. Barry becomes Bobby. Sally becomes Sandy. As a teacher, I always wait five years before telling a story involving a student. Even then, I always change the student’s name, and I never tell stories about students that cast them in a negative light. They are always stories about my failures as a teacher. Never the failures of my students. Sometimes we just don’t tell certain stories. Speaking them aloud might irreparably damage relationships with loved ones. You may expose someone else’s secret. You may put your job or your company in jeopardy. Sometimes it’s just not worth the story.
When we refer to celebrities in our stories, we make three mistakes: 1. We risk alienating half of our audience, who might not be aware of the reference. While one side of the room nods and laughs in recognition, the other side of the room feels foolish or lost. 2. Comparing a person to a celebrity sticks that celebrity into the story and pops that mystical time-traveling bubble. I once heard a storyteller say that her father looked a lot like Ronald Reagan. As a result, Reagan was now playing the role of her father in the story, and having a former president walking around her cruddy little apartment made no sense. It’s impossible for an audience to picture someone looking “kind of like Ronald Reagan.” They will just use Reagan, turning a formerly sensible story into something dreamlike and strange. Just don’t do it. 3. It’s lazy. We gain very little by saying “so-and-so looks or acts like so-and-so.” It’s shorthand, but it doesn’t reveal much about character. Instead of comparing my former girlfriend to a Zooey Deschanel character, I now say something like this: Jen was the kind of girl who never seemed to have a job but always seemed to have just enough money. She was carefree. The girl who would never grow up. Never grow old. Never worry or complain. She always had a new obsession, and each obsession was cooler than the one before. She was ethereal but present. Happy but aloof. This description makes people nod, smile, and laugh. No one squints.
The rule on accents is simple: Don’t. There is never a reason to imitate the accent of a person from another country or another culture. A white man imitating the accent of the Mexican cabdriver (as I once heard a storyteller do) only runs the risk of making the white man sound insensitive and racist (which it did). There is one exception to this rule: you can always do the accents of parents and grandparents. Parental love conquers the potential hazards of racial stereotypes. I also think that you can imitate the accents from the region where you grew up, particularly if you share a race with the people who you are imitating. For example, I grew up near Boston and had a Boston accent. I’ve lost much of it after living in Connecticut for almost twenty-five years, but I could reproduce the accent for a story if I wanted, and it occasionally creeps into my speech. I don’t think I would use it. I can’t see any reason to do so, and I think it might be a distraction. But it wouldn’t be objectionable, just as it wouldn’t be wrong for a person who grew up in Ireland but has lost the Irish accent to imitate it when repeating dialogue from childhood. But I would tread lightly here. Even if a blond, blue-eyed, white man grew up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood with Puerto Rican friends, imitating a Puerto Rican accent under these circumstances is fraught with peril and should not be done. When in doubt, don’t do an accent.
Conversations about the weather are the antithesis of this ideal of an entertaining, connected, meaningful world. They are the death of good conversation. They are the enemy of the interesting. My humble suggestion: Avoid these conversations at all costs. Change the subject. Do not engage. Walk away if necessary. You will be the happier, and the more interesting, for it.
Time to Perform (Onstage, in the Boardroom, on a Date, or at the Thanksgiving Table)
Steve connects with the audience before he even speaks, because through his nervousness, he shows them that he is just like them. They are rooting for him before he ever says a word. I stand there like a jerk. I’m not worried at all. If the audience doesn’t like me, I act as if it’s their own damn fault. Steve is right. I had better tell a great story, because I give the audience nothing to love as I stand before them. I’m an overly confident, probably arrogant, “neckless stump with legs for arms,” in the words of one friend. The lesson here: Nervousness can be your friend. Too much of it is never good, but not being nervous at all isn’t good either. I bristle at the saying, “If you’re not nervous, you don’t care enough,”
There are moments, of course, when nervousness won’t help you. If you are presenting at a professional conference, pitching or selling a product, delivering the State of the Union address, or teaching high-school seniors, nervousness will not be perceived well. When you are supposed to be the expert or the authority, confidence is often required. But performing onstage? Talking to a girl on a first date? Delivering a wedding toast? Even a job interview? A little bit of nervousness is fine. Helpful, even. It’s endearing. It shows how much you care. It bridges the gap between you and your audience.
“I just think you’re not afraid because speaking onstage can never be as bad as all the stuff you’ve been through.” She might be right. When you’ve been brought back to life by CPR twice, been arrested and tried for a crime you didn’t commit, been homeless, and suffered through a brutal robbery and decades of PTSD, the stage doesn’t seem so bad.
Don’t memorize your story. Actors are required to memorize their lines. You are not, nor should you. Actors also have fellow actors on the stage or in the wings to help them when they forget a line. Actors are also pretending to be other people. It’s hard to be authentic and vulnerable when you’re reciting lines. It’s also obvious to an audience when a storyteller is simply reciting a story instead of telling a story. Instead of memorizing your story word-for-word, memorize three parts to a story: 1. The first few sentences. Always start strong. 2. The last few sentences. Always end strong. 3. The scenes of your story. If you’re following my advice and placing every moment of your story in a physical location (chapter 11), then your story will be composed of scenes: places where the action, dialogue, and internal monologues are taking place. If you remember these places, you will remember what happens there, even if every prepared word of your story suddenly flees your mind. In “This Is Going to Suck,” for example, my scenes are: 1. On the sidewalk outside the record store 2. Driving in my car through Mendon, Massachusetts 3. The accident scene immediately following the collision 4. The ambulance 5. The emergency room 6. The waiting room outside the emergency room 7. The other side of the emergency room I don’t memorize my stories. I memorize the places where my story takes me, so even if I can’t remember how I want to tell it, I can still do so. I may lose some laugh lines, clever transitions, and “golden sentences,” but I’m still telling my story. It may not sound as good as it could, but I’m not trapping my audience in awkward, story-killing silence.
scenes in a story. The phone company uses seven digits in our phone numbers because they determined that seven bits of information is the most that the average person can retain at one time. Seven feels right to me. I have some stories that only have three scenes — even better. I have a story composed of just one scene. But seven is my max.
I try not to have more than seven scenes in a story. The phone company uses seven digits in our phone numbers because they determined that seven bits of information is the most that the average person can retain at one time. Seven feels right to me. I have some stories that only have three scenes — even better. I have a story composed of just one scene. But seven is my max.
That said, you also need not make eye contact with each and every person. You have enough to do without inventorying your audience. My suggestion is this: Find a person on your left, a person on your right, and a person dead center who likes you. These will be the people who are smiling. Nodding. Laughing. Use these three people as your guideposts. Make eye contact with them, and the people in each of those areas will feel you are attending to them as well. Choosing people who like you will make you feel great.
You think you know how to use a microphone, but you probably don’t. Find an expert and practice. That said, here are three universal tips that apply to almost all microphone situations: 1. The microphone is not a magical device. Many people believe that once they are speaking into a microphone, they can speak as softly as they want. It’s not true. Even when you’re speaking into a microphone, you should be trying to speak to the back of the room. Think of the microphone as the guarantee that your voice will reach the back of the room, but you must do the work first. You must push your voice through the device. 2. If you’re speaking into a microphone set on a stand, be sure that the microphone is perfectly adjusted before you speak. Don’t rush this process. Every second that it takes you to adjust the microphone will feel like ten minutes, but to the audience, it will feel like less than a second. Take your time. There is nothing worse for you or the audience to be thinking about a poorly set microphone as you speak. 3. If given the option to use a microphone, do so regardless of how booming your voice may be. In speaking to hundreds of audiences, I have learned that hearing impairment is far more prevalent than most people realize, and quite often hearing-impaired people have no desire to announce their impairment to the world. I simply assume that there is a hearing-impaired person in every audience, so if asked if I want to use a microphone, I always say yes.
In his memoir Tough Shit, filmmaker Kevin Smith writes that anytime a person is speaking to a group of people, in any context, the speaker has a duty and an obligation to be entertaining. I couldn’t agree more. It’s the purpose of this book. Or at least one of them. Whether you are speaking to friends on barstools or students in a classroom or customers in a conference room or grandchildren at Thanksgiving or an audience of thousands in a theater, you must be entertaining.
When a student-teacher presents me with a lesson that he or she would like to teach to my class, my first question is always this: “What’s the hook? What is the reason for my students to listen and pay attention to you?”
This is why every lesson requires a hook. A hook is not a statement like “This material will be on Friday’s test” or “This is something you’ll use for the rest of your life.” A hook is an attempt to be entertaining, engaging, thought-provoking, surprising, challenging, daring, and even shocking. This can be done in dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of ways.
A teacher can be funny. Surprising. Animated. Confused. Even purposefully depressed. A teacher can offer students uncommon levels of choice or challenge them with a meaningful, winner-take-all competition. A lesson can include something students have never seen before or (even better) something they have seen a thousand times before, but now in an entirely new context. The lesson can include cooperative learning in groups that the children will actually enjoy. Students can be made the center of the lesson. Students can be invited to teach the lesson. Lessons can be broken up into smaller, rapidly changing segments to hold student interest. This is just a smidgen of the strategies that teachers can use, and most if not all of them can also be used by a person running a meeting, conducting a workshop, or otherwise stealing an hour from people in order to convey content. Most importantly, a teacher can use storytelling. Not only is storytelling an entertaining way to engage and entertain students, but it opens your heart to your students. It demonstrates your humanity, your authenticity, and your vulnerability. It’s a way to establish trust and faith with your students. It connects you to them. When your students love you, they will learn, even if they despise the subject.
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. These are the moments that make great stories.
Breadcrumbs Storytellers use Breadcrumbs when we hint at a future event but only reveal enough to keep the audience guessing. In “Charity Thief,” I drop a Breadcrumb when I say: But as I climb back into the car, I see my crumpled McDonald’s uniform on the backseat, and I suddenly have an idea.