Notes

Part I: Finding Your Story

Chapter 1: My Promise to you

Chapter 2: What Is a story? (and what is the dinner test)

  • Your story must reflect change over time. It cannot simply be a series of remarkable experiences.
  • Your story only or your side of other people’s story
  • Dinner test: Would you tell a friend/family member this story over dinner?
  • Storytelling is not theater. It is not poetry. It should be a slightly more crafted version of the stories you would tell your buddies over beers.

Chapter 3: Homework for life

  • Ted talk by Matthew Dicks
  • Way to create some fodder.
Time flies.
The last school year went by in the blink of an eye.
I can't even remember what I did last Thursday.
I feel like my twenties went by in a flash.
  • Story tool: 1 of 3

Story Break: Naked in Brazil

Chapter 4: Dreaming at the end of your pen

  • Crash and burn
    • Rule 1: You must not get attached to one idea.
    • Rule 2: You must not judge any thought/idea that appears in your mind.
    • Rule 3: You cannot allow the pen to stop moving.
  • Story tool: 2 of 3

Story Break: Storytelling instructions can apparently be romantic

Chapter 5: First Last Best Worst

  • Table
    • x-axis: Prompt First Last Best Worst ; * y-axis: Prompts (ex. Car, Injury, etc…)
  • Post Exercise:
    • Do any of these appear more than once (the signal of a likely story)?
    • Could I turn any of these entries into useful anecdotes?
    • Could I turn any of these entries into fully realized stories?
  • As a beginner, this helps develop your lense for identifying stories.
  • Story tool: 3 of 3

Part II: Crafting Your Story

Chapter 6: Charity thief

Chapter 7: Every story takes five seconds to tell

  • Find the five second of transformation.

Story Break: This books in going to make Erin Barker very angry

Chapter 8: Finding your beginning

  • The beginning is usually the opposite of your five second moment. This helps create an arc.
I was once this, but not I am this.
I once thought this, but now I think this.
I once felt this, but now I feel this.
  • Rules of beginigs:
    • Try to start your story with forward movement whenever possible.
    • Don’t start by setting expectations.
  • If you’ve 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 an 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 my be.
  • Be carefull of your opening scence - not simply chosing the first thing that comes to mind but instead ask yourself what the opening scene needs to gra the attention of the audience off the bat.

Story Break: Thirteen rules for an effective commencement address

  • Good list

Chapter 9: Five ways to keep your stories compelling

Stakes - A way to keep the audience so they ask what will happen next?

Ways to increase steaks:

  • Elephant
    • Every story must have an elephant.
    • The elephant is the thing signifies where the story is headed.
    • It should appear in the beginning as possible.
    • Elephants can change color - Flat tire in the beginning, loliness in the end. “Laugh, laugh, laugh, cry” strategy.
  • Backpacks
    • Increases the audience’s anticipation about an upcoming event. It does two things
      • Make the audience wonder what will happen next.
      • Makes the audience experience the same emotion that the storyteller experienced.
    • To mount a backpack, you need to load up the audience with as much detail so they feel like they are in the same place.
    • Backpacks help with audience relate with the character, they want the character to suceed but they don’t really want the character to succeed. It’s struggle and strife that make great stories.
    • Perfect plans executed perfectly never make good stories.
  • Breadcrumbs
    • hint at a future event but only reveal enough to keep the audience guessing.
    • “….. I see a crumpled unifor on the backseat and I suddenly have an idea”.
      • There are many things that can be done with the uniform (sell, work, etc…)
    • Only effective when something truely unexpected happens.
  • Hourglass
    • Find the moment in your story that everyone is waiting for. Then flip that hourglass and let the sand run
  • Crystal Balls
    • A false prediction made by the storyteller to wonder if the prediction will prove to be true.
  • Humor
    • Doesn’t give your audience reason to listing to the next sentence. It doesn’t add stakes. However, it’s a way to keep your audience’s attention.
    • Humore is optional. Stakes are nonnegotiable.

Story Break: Zombie brother

Chapter 10: The five permissible lies of true story telling

Lies that benefit the listener:

  • Omission
  • Compression
  • Assumption
  • Progression
  • Conflation

Story Break: Doubt is the Enemy of Every Storyteller

Chapter 11: Cinema of the mind (aka “Where the hell are you”?)

  • Stories are not suppose to start with the thesis statement or universal truth.
  • A great storyteller creates a movie in the mind of the listeners. 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.
  • Things that are not storytelling:
    • Lecturing
    • Essays All of these the audience does not have a contigious movie in their mind.
  • Storytelling vs essays:
    • 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 where 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, what 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 crooked old lady both in body and mind. She wears only dark colors and lies to serve food that has been stewed in pots for days. I like to imagine there was a time in her life where she smiled - or at least didn’t scowl - but if that time existed, it was long before me.
    • If version 1 was a movie, then it would open on a black screen. version 2 would make a nice movie.

Chapter 12: The principles of but and therefore

  • but and therefore signify change. However, most peple use and and combine sentences making it monotonous.

  • version 1: My cousin Lisa came over for a sleepover, and we went to bed on time and we didn’t sleep. When everyone was asleep we snuck downstairs and watched TV. And my parents heard us, and thought the voices on the TV were burglars robbing the house and they called the police. They didn’t wake us up because they didn’t want us to be scared and they didn’t check my room. My dad waited upstairs with a baseball bat. The police came to the house and saw us watching TV though the window. They called my parents and told them that it was us downstairs and we got in so much trouble.
  • version 2: My cousin Lisa came over for a sleepover but we had no intention of sleeping.We went to bed on time but we didn’t close our eyes. Instead we snuck downstairs when everyone was asleep to watch TV. But my parents heard us, except it wasn’t us they head. It was the TV. They heard strange voices from the television program. Instead of investigating the voices, they assumed (therefore) assumed that burglars were robbing the house, so they called the police. The police came to the house, but instead of finding burglars they found us watching TV. (Therefore) they called my parents and told them it was us downstairs. (As a result) we got in so much trouble.

Story Break: Storytelling makes you just like family

Chapter 13: This is going to suck

Chapter 14: The secret to the big story

  • Find the small moment in the big story.
  • Because most people can’t relate with the big story but they can with the small moment.
  • Big stories are hard to tell and for audience to relate.

Story Break: Brevity is the soul of wit

  • “Come hear out pastor. He’s not very good, but he’s quick”
  • Brevity takes time, because brevity is always better.
  • The longer your speak, the more perfect and precise you need to be.

Chapter 15: There is only one way to make someone cry

  • Surprise is the only way to elicit emotional reaction from your audience.
  • Use contrast to prime the pump for surprise.
  • How to ruin surprise:
    • Presenting a thesis statement prior to the suprise. Storytelling is the opposite of the 5 paragraph essay.
    • In storytelling our job is to describe action, dialogue and thought.
  • Failing to hide critical information in the story: If you can’t hide critical information from the audience, they see it from the a mile away.
    • Techniques:
      • hiding the bomb in the clutter
      • camouflage
        • Laughter is the best way to hide something.
  • To review:
    • Avoid thesis statements
    • Heighten the contrast between the suprise and the moment just before the surprise.
    • Use steaks to increase surprise.
    • Avoid giving away the surprise in your story by hiding important information that will pay off later (planing bombs). This is done by:
      • Obscuring them in a list of other detials or examples.
      • Placing them as far away from the surprise as possible.
      • When possible, building a laugh around them to camouflage the importance.

Chapter 16: Milk cans and baseball, babies and blenders

  • Humor is an enormous asset is most stories, but it is not required and must be used strategically whenever possible.
  • Here are four strategic ways:
    1. Start with a laugh
      • A laugh at the begining does the following things:
      • “I am a good storyteller. I know what I am doing, you can relax”.
      • It indicates that you have the floor and grabs everyone’s attention.
      • “I made you laugh. Everything is fine. Whenever horror i’m about to tell you about, it’s in the past.”
    2. Make them laugh before you make them cry
      • contrast is the king is storytelling, and laughter can provide a fantastic contrast to something authentically awefull.
    3. Take a breadth
    4. Stop crying so you can feel something else again.
  • End your story on hart and not a laugh. The goal of all storytellers is to make it memorable. Laughter does not make things memorable.
  • Humor is all about surprise, but the two ways to acheive humor are:
    1. Milk Cans and Baseballs:
      • Setup and tear down.
      • This causes surprise.
    2. Babies and Blenders:
      • Two things that should not be together

Chapter 17 Finding the frayed ending of your story

  • Storytellers seek to constantly make meaning from their lives. We contextualize events, find satisfying endings to periods of our lives, abd struggle to explain how our lives make sense and fit into a larger story.

Story Break: Connecting with my mean old elementary school principle

Part III: Telling Your Story

Chapter 18: The present tense is king

  • By using the present tense, you bring the audience closer to the what is happening in the story.
  • Use the past tense as a setup but the present tense helps add the most attention.

Story Break: A storyteller and a magician

Chapter 19: The two ways of telling a hero story

  • Sometimes, when you want to tell a success story:
    • Marginalize yourself
    • Marginalize your accomplishments
  • Human beings love underdog stories.
  • Human beings prefer stores of small steps over long time. Most accomplishments, both great and small are not composed of singular moments, but rather many small moments.

Chapter 20: Storytelling is Time Travel

  • The goal of a storyteller is to make the audience forget that the present moment exists but transport them into the time of the story.
  • Whenever you pop that bubble, the audience will realize you are just telling them a story.
  • Techniques to avoid popping the bubble:
    • Don’t ask rhetorical questions
    • Don’t address the audience or acknowledge their existance
    • No props
    • Avoid refering to objects that are time specific and that don’t exist today.
    • Don’t mention the word story in your story.
    • Downplay your physical attire/look as much as possible.

Story Break: Fine is apparently not a good way to describe my sex life

Chapter 21: Words to say, words to avoid

  • Avoid:
    • Profanity
    • Vulgarity
    • Other people’s real name
    • Celebrity and pop culture references
    • Accents

Chapter 22: Time to perform

  • Memorize the following parts:
    1. The first few sentences. Always start strong.
    2. The last few sentences. Always end strong.
    3. The scenes of you story.
      • Most stories should have at most 7 scences. 7 is from the number of amount of info short term memory can hold.

Story Break: The solitude of a storyteller

Chapter 23: Why did you read this book?

References