Storyworthy
Storyworthy by Mattew Dicks
Matthew Dicks explains his process for finding, crafting, and telling stories that move audiences.
Part 1 of the book details how to identifying meaningful stories from our own lives that we can share. Part 2 explains how to create, craft, and design your stories. Part 3 of the book provides tips on how to tell your story!
In this blog, I will share a summary of the book and then my takeaways from the book! The summary is outlined a bit differently than the layout of the book. I wanted to provide most of the important details first and provide the extra tips towards the end! For the full experience, I highly recommend reading the whole book. Matthew has done a great job sharing his secrets and provides explicit examples of telling better stories!
The blog is organized as follows. Feel free to jump around:
What is a story?
Matthew describes stories as narratives that reflect change over time. You start as Version A of yourself in a good story, but you transfer to Version B over time. The transformation does not have to be an improvement. Additionally, you have to tell your story. The story has to be from your perspective. It can be about someone else, but it has to reflect a change in you. Matthew compares stories to diamonds - something with many facets. Everyone has a different relationship to an account. If you can find a way of making your particular facet of the story compelling, you can tell that story as your own. Otherwise, leave the telling to someone else. He also requires that stories must The Dinner Test:
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?
The performance and the casual-dinner-party version of your stories should be similar! The audience and storyteller should share common ground between the improvised and the memorized version to sound authentic.
Why should you tell stories?
Everyone has stories to tell! They allow others to make a personal connection and get to know a little part of you. Everyone is worthy of telling a story! Additionally, stories can help you find frayed endings:
If you have moments that you know are important but can't explain why; a memory that lingers in our consciousness, a moment that remains locked in our hearts; that we revisit in our dreams;
Then tell your story; speak it out loud, tell the details,
You will often you this to discover or rediscover its meaning to understand the importance of your five-second moment
In this case, drop the rules and just ramble. The goal is to return to the moment as best as possible and find its meaning
Another way to discover the meaning of a moment is to ask yourself why you do the things you do
Part 1: Finding your Stories
Matthew shares three exercises to help discover our five-second storyworth moments. They each require a different level of commitment. His first assignment, Homework for Life, requires less than or about 5 mins. The Crash & Burn exercise requires 15 minutes and the First Best Last Worst method requires updates at sporadic times! Currently, I have been doing my homework for life about a month! I plan to continue this as a lifelong habit. Below, I outline these three techniques:
Homework for Life (H4L):
Take five minutes at the end of your day to sit down and reflect upon your day to find the storyworth moment(s).
Even if it doesn't feel storyworth, write it!
Just a few sentences to remember the gist of the story; no need to narrate it
Matthew recommends you do this in Excel so you can search and easily browse through your stories.
H4L requires commitment and faith - you will do this every night.
Faith - you have to trust the process. It will take you a while to identify the storyworthy moment and refine your lens.
The question to ask your self every night:
If I had to tell a story from today - a five-minute story onstage about something that took place over this day -- what would it be?
Crash & Burn (stream-of-consciousness writing)
Act of speaking/recording whatever enters your mind
Used to generate new ideas and resurrect old memories
Rule 1: You must not get attached to anyone idea
Allow new ideas to interrupt your current ones.
Slashing and burning of previous ideas allow new ideas and memories to arise at the intersection of your ideas.
Rule 2: You must not judge any thought or idea that appears in your mind
Spill your guts on the page.
Don't worry about structure, seriousness, or embarrassment.
Don't worry about good/bad writing.
Just let the words from your head to your fingertips.
Rule 3: You cannot allow the pen to stop moving
Physically writing will allow for greater creativity.
Continue to write even though your brain is empty.
If you get stuck, use colors/numbers/countries - begin listing colors/numbers/countries until one of them triggers a thought or memory.
Pick items where is the list is long and familiar to you.
New ideas will come crashing in; embrace them without hesitation or judgment. Leave a good idea behind in favor of a new one. Keep your hand moving at all times.
3. First Last Best Worst
Great for finding stories to tell during a long car ride or when you first meet someone
Again use a table (it can be excel)
The first column is a prompt, and the following four columns are titled: First, Last, Best, Worst
Prompt | First | Last | Best | Worst
Car | ......... | ......... | ......... | .............
Gift | ......... | ......... | ......... | .............
Travel | ......... | ......... | ......... | .............
Injury | ......... | ......... | ......... | .............
After filling your chart, ask:
Do any entries appear more than once (the signal of a likely story)?
Could I turn any of these entries into useful anecdotes? (Mark them with A)
Could I turn any of these entries into fully realized stories? (Mark them with S)
Matthew asks: Can you take 15 mins out of your day rather than spending time on social media while infinitely scrolling to capture your life?
Part 2: Crafting Your Stories
Throughout the book, Matthew states that stories are about a five-second moment in someone's life. The five-second moments are the moments when something fundamentally changes forever. While deciding a story to tell, Matthew suggests you consider the following questions:
Does it contain a five-second moment?
A moment of true transformation?
What is the 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
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 afraid, but now I am fearless.
Once you have identified a five-second story, you need to find your story's beginning and make it compelling.
Finding the end of the story will help you craft the rest of the story. The story's beginning should be the opposite of the end - so find the opposite of your transformation, revelation, or realization. Matthew provides two tips to help craft the beginning of your stories:
Try to start your story with forwarding movement whenever possible (physically moving through space)
Establish yourself as a person who is physically moving through space. Opening with forwarding movement creates instant momentum in a story. It makes the audience feel that they're already on the way, immersed in your world.
2. Don't start by setting expectations.
Compelling stories keep audiences engaged. Matthew shares several strategies to making stories captivating:
Raise the stakes.
Define the Elephant.
Make use of Backpacks, Breadcrumbs, Crystal Balls, or Humor.
Use the Hourglass strategy.
I briefly outline each of these strategies below!
Five ways to make your story compelling:
Raise the stakes - stakes are the reason that audiences listen and continue to listen to a story.
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 difference between someone telling you about their mother and someone telling you about the time they wanted to disown their mother.
Stakes are the reason we ride roller-coasters.
Define the Elephant - the Elephant is the thing that everyone in the room can see. It's large and conspicuous. It's a clear statement about the need, the want, the problem. 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. Make your audience think they are on one path, then when they least expect it, show them they have been on a different route the whole time. The audience didn't realize that it's a much deeper, more interesting path than first expected. Don't switch Elephants; simply just change the color.
Backpacks - these increase the stake of the story by increasing the audience's anticipation about a forthcoming event.
Make the audience wonder what will happen next.
Make your audience experience the same emotion, or something like the same emotion, that the storyteller experience at the moment about to be described.
Movies like Ocean's Eleven explain almost every part of the robbers' plan before they make a move. You're instantly hooked to see them succeed. But what makes the story more interesting is when things don't go according to plan. That's when you're pulled in even more. Perfect plans executed perfectly never make good stories.
Breadcrumbs - hint at a future event but only reveal enough to keep the audience guessing.
Use breadcrumbs to get your audience guessing what will happen next, but you know that the unexpected is coming.
The trick is to choose the breadcrumbs that create the most surprise in the midst of your audience without giving them enough to guess correctly.
Hourglasses - Find the moment in your story that everyone has been waiting for, then flip that hourglass and let the sand run — slow things down right before big moments. When you know the audience is hanging on your every word, let them hang. Drag out the wait as long as possible. Right before you're about to reveal what happens, stop. Don't do it. Describe something else for a bit. Your audience wants to know what's happening next — but you're in full control, so make use of this to keep the anticipation high.
Crystal Balls - are false predictions made by a storyteller to cause the audience to wonder if the prediction will be accurate. You can do this by verbally predicting the future of your story, which makes your audience wonder about what's to come. Use reasonable crystal balls. Don't introduce objects or thoughts that don't belong.
Humor - humor is optional. Stakes are nonnegotiable
Stories should not only be funny
Start with a laugh (the earlier, the better) - lets them know you are a good storyteller, and they can relax because you know what you are doing
Stops potential interruptions
I have made you laugh everything is fine, whatever horror I will tell is in the past
Make them laugh before you make them cry
Take a breath - break the tension
Stop crying so they can feel something else - end your story on heart no a laugh
Strategies for humor:
Milk cans and a baseball - setup and punch line - work the laugh by using language that carefully builds your milk can tower while saving the funniest thing for last
"K" sounds are funny
Specificity is funny
Babies and blenders - when two things that rarely or never together are pushed together, humor often results
One of these things is not like the other - a list of three descriptors, with the third being nothing like the other two.
Exaggerate
Humor is optional. Heart is nonnegotiable
Additionally, try to craft your story like a movie:
Create a cinematic experience in the minds of every listener
Maintain an unrelenting and uninterrupted movie
Listeners should be able to see the story in their mind's eye at all times
Always provide a physical location for every moment of your story - it will become captivating and memorable & visceral for your audience because every moment is set to a specific location
Make your big story little:
Hard to connect with people through your "big moment."
"This is the trick to telling a big story: it cannot be about anything big. Instead, find the small, relatable, understandable moments in our larger stories. Find the piece of the story that people can connect to, relate to, and understand."
Smaller moments are easier to tell and just as good as the big moments (if not better)
Little moments are hidden inside big moments. That's what we need to find to tell a big story well.
How to humble your stories: - success stories are hard to tell - failure is more engaging than success.
Malign yourself
Marginalize your accomplishment
Cast yourself as the underdog, and the audience will enjoy your success.
Crushing defeat is expected, but an unbelievable win is a surprise.
Part 3: Telling your story
To effectively tell your story use present tense:
Make the audience feel like they are with you - load on sensory information - sounds and sights and feel - make them feel like they are occupying pace & experiencing time like you are experiencing
Use present tense to bring you closer to these moments in time. It helps you see stories - allows to you connect to your account more effectively - the emotional state will more closely match your actual emotions from the time and place that you are describing
The goal as a storyteller is to make my audience forget that the present moment exists - transport them back to the year and the spot that your story takes place
Some thoughts on 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.”
Somethings to avoid while letting stories:
Ask rhetorical questions - causes the audience to think about an answer
Address the audience or acknowledge their existence whatsoever
Props (never)!
Anachronisms (use of things that are set in a period other than that in which it exists)
The word story in your story
Up-playing your physical appearance - dress soberly
Profanity
Vulgarity
Other people's real names
Celebrity or pop culture references
Accents
Memorize your story, rather remember three parts instead:
First few sentences (start strong)
Last few sentences (end strong)
The scenes of your story
Tips for performing:
Make eye contact
Control your emotions
Learn to use the microphone
Additional Tips
Replace "ands" with "buts" and "therefore":
The better connective tissue for stories is the word "but" and "therefore." "And" stories have no movement. "But" and "therefore" signal change. It's a way of zigzagging through the story.
Sentences should cut against each other to add momentum, change, and action
Use buts, therefores, and their synonyms
This happens, therefore that happens, but then this happens, therefore that happens.
Use the negative: "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 not smart, good-looking and not good-looking, popular and unpopular."
Lies in Storytelling - two caveats:
Only lie for the benefit of the audience.
Memory is a challenging concept - research says every time you tell a story, it becomes less accurate.
Each time you access a memory from your mind and play with it for a while, you consciously make changes. So when you return that folder to the file cabinet, the memory is permanently altered.
Lies only work if someone from the story is not standing next to you,
Never add something to a story that was not already there.
Five permissible lies of True Storytelling:
Omission - You need to omit elements from your stories to make your story easier to understand and more concise. Omit people, like third wheelers and random strangers who distract the audience from what matters. Pretend they aren’t there. Omit places that aren’t building your story up. Omit redemption. For example, just like in Inception, the spinning top continues spinning at the end, don’t give the full resolution to the audience. Stories like these linger in the hearts and minds longer. “Audiences don’t want redemption. Redemption cleanses the palate. It ties up all loose ends. It makes the world whole again. It allows your audience to sleep well at night. I want my audience tossing and turning over my story.”
Compression - used when you want to push time and space together to make the story easier to comprehend. For example, you turn a Monday-through-Friday story into a Thursday-through-Friday story. Place scenes closer together to heighten the drama and suspense of the story.
Assumptions - Make assumptions about details. For example, if you can’t remember the make and year of a car, make your best assumption.
Progression - Change the order of events in a story to make it more emotionally satisfying or understandable to the listener.
The world does not always bend to serve our stories best, so we must sometimes bend reality instead.
Conflation - used to push all the emotion of an event into a single time frame because stories are more entertaining this way.
Compression intellectual and emotion transformation into a smaller bit of time
It helps keeps stories short, so they are more entertaining
How to make the audience cry:
Use surprise. It’s the only way to elicit an emotional reaction from your audience.
How to ruin a surprise:
That means you must keep your story unexpected.
Presenting a thesis statement before the surprise
Failing to take advantage of the power of stakes to enhance and accentuate surprise (use breadcrumbs and hourglass)
Failing to hide critical information in a story
make important information seem unimportant
hide it in the clutter
camouflage it with laughter
Heighten the contrast between the surprise and the moment just before the surprise
Use stakes to increase the surprise
Avoid giving away the surprise by hiding important information that will pay off later:
obscure them in a list of other details or examples
place them as far away from the surprise as possible
build a laugh around them (if possible)
Keep your stories short:
Shorter is better; fewer words rule
Shorter stories are hard to tell - hard to decide what to cut and what to present
The longer you speak, the more perfect and precise you must be - the more entertaining and engaging your words must be.
As a dinner companion, you should share:
This is who I am
This is what I believe
This is what I want
This is what I dream
How about you?
Tips delivering a commencement address:
Don't compliment yourself
Be self-deprecating, but only if it is real
Don't ask rhetorical questions
Off one granular bit of wisdom, something that is both applicable and memorable
Don't cater any part of your speech to the parents of the graduates
Make your audience laugh
Speak as if you were speaking to friends
Never mention the weather or the temperature
Emotion is good - be excited, hopefully
Don't describe the world the graduates will be entering
Don't define terms by quoting dictionaries
Don't use a quote that you have heard someone else use. Rather be quotable.
End your speech in less than the allotted time.
My Takeaways
I usually find non-fiction books boring and challenging to finish. However, this book is an absolute outlier. Matthew is very concise and to the point. Additionally, he provides the "why" to almost all of his methods. He presents tips, explains why they are essential, and follows up with examples. Matthew tells you that your life is worthy and has significant realization moments that can turn into great stories. Reading this book during the pandemic allowed me to search for the little moments in my day that changed something inside me. The book changed my view on my typical grad student working day, where I spend 90% of my time in front of a screen trying to be more productive. Now, at the end of my day, I tried to find my five-second moment(s) that are significant, a moment of transformation or realization - something I would want to remember for the rest of my life.
Now, given how moved I am by Matthew's book, I don't follow all of his strategies yet. I am currently a dedicated student for the Homework for Life assignment, where you reflect on your day and try to identify the Storyworthy moments. I plan to start the First, Last, Best, Worst table - I am still looking for the prompts I want to use in my table. Matthew hasn't entirely conceived me of the Crash + Burn exercise every day. I plan to work towards this exercise and start by doing this once a week or so. Currently, I am worried that my Crash + Burn writings would all look the same after a certain point. Additionally, writing for 15 minutes a day seems too long.