Storyworthy

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

Storytelling helps you mark your life and connect with others by sharing small, true moments. Focus on your own brief, relatable experiences rather than grand events. Practice telling them plainly and honestly to find meaning and keep listeners engaged.

Key takeaways / actions:

• Look for “storyworthy” five-second moments in daily life.
• Tell your own short, specific story without overpreparing.
• Reimmerse in the memory to uncover meaning and emotional truth.

Highlights from Article

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.

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 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.

• Adapt this asap.

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.I know this sounds a little ridiculous, but it’s absolutely true. Also, rejoice! This truth — once understood and embraced — makes the storyteller’s job much easier.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. They are the moments that we seek when doing our Homework for Life. They are often small and sudden and powerful. These are the best stories. They are the only stories worth telling.

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.

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.

Establish yourself as a person who is physically moving through space. Opening with forward movement creates instant momentum in a story.

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.

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.

Every story must have an Elephant. The Elephant is the thing that everyone in the room can see. It is large and obvious. It is a clear statement of the need, the want, the problem, the peril, or the mystery. It signifies where the story is headed, and it makes it clear to your audience that this is in fact a story and not a simple musing on a subject.

The Elephant tells the audience what to expect. It gives them a reason to listen, a reason to wonder. It infuses the story with instantaneous stakes.

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.

Changing the Elephant’s color provides an audience with one of the greatest surprises that a storyteller has to offer. My wife has often said that this is my preferred model for storytelling, and she’s right. I’m always most excited about a story when I can change the color of the Elephant.“The laugh laugh laugh cry formula,” she calls it.The audience thinks they are in the midst of a hilarious caper, and then they suddenly realize that this story is not what they expected.

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.

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.

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.

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.If the audience can’t see your story in their minds, the film is no longer running. You have failed to achieve cinema of the mind. Instead of visualizing the past, perhaps even forgetting where and when they even are for a moment, your audience is now staring at you in the present. Their imagination has been disengaged. The movie has stopped.This is no longer storytelling; it’s lecturing.

Parker and Stone explained that as they storyboard each scene in their show, they have found that they must be able to connect the scenes (they refer to them as beats) with a but or a therefore for the next scene to work. If the words and then can be placed between any two scenes, Parker says, “You’re fucked.”

The ideal connective tissue in any story are the words but and therefore, along with all their glorious synonyms. These buts and therefores can be either explicit or implied.“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.

This is the trick to telling a big story: it cannot be about anything big. Instead we must find the small, relatable, comprehensible moments in our larger stories. We must find the piece of the story that people can connect to, relate to, and understand.You need to find the story of the man who learns to love children among the man-eating dinosaurs so he can be with the woman he loves.You need to find the story of the scientist who finds faith in a higher power among the Nazis and snakes and enormous rolling boulders.You may never understand what it’s like to crash your head through a windshield, but you’ve probably been let down or ignored or forgotten by a loved one, as I was in that emergency room.You probably understand what it feels like to be alone at a moment of need.

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.This is unlike real life, where many things can give rise to an emotional reaction, and surprise is not always required.

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

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