Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

There’s also nothing wrong with becoming emotional during storytelling as long as your emotion doesn’t overwhelm your craft. My wife was emotional during our entire wedding ceremony, but she was still able to recite vows, laugh, and enjoy the moment. She was endearing, sweet, and authentic. Beautiful too. You should aim to do the same.

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 en

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 w

when you tell stories, you do yourself a kind favor by taking a moment to write your name in the wet cement of life before you head to whatever is next.