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 establishe

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.

“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 th

Just tell your story. All of it. Forget the strategies. Start in the wrong place and end in the long place. Ramble. The goal is to return to that moment as best as possible in order to find its meaning.

It’s a story of a mother’s worry and love instead of a plane crash. The plane crash is like my car accident or the blown-out tire on my Chevy Malibu: simply a means to getting to what really matters.

Just tell your story. All of it. Forget the strategies. Start in the wrong place and end in the long place. Ramble. The goal is to return to that moment as best as possible in order to find its meaning.

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.

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

Comedians want to be funny. Great storytellers want to be remembered. For this reason, they deploy laughter strategically.