Storyworthy

Then how am I supposed to teach them about photosynthesis?” he asked.

“Why not tell the story of the first time you learned about photosynthesis?” I said. “Or a time when you taught photosynthesis? Instead of stopping the story completely to explain the process, why not offer a scene in the form of a flashback that also explains photosynthesis? Just keep telling a story.”

In order to achieve this lofty goal, storytellers must do one thing, and happily for you, it’s exceedingly simple:

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

Change the order of the story if the real-life order did not adhere to narrative expectations. The world does not always bend to serve our stories best, so we must sometimes bend reality instead

When I write novels, I try to end my story about ten pages before the reader would want the book to end. In that way, I’m also putting a coat on my audience. If the reader emails me with a question about the end of one of my books

Storytellers end their stories in the most advantageous place possible. They omit the endings that offer neat little bows and happily-ever-afters. The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results. The best stories give rise to unanswered questions

If you’re not sure about the level of stakes in your story, simply ask yourself:

• Would the audience want to hear my next sentence?

• If I stopped speaking right now, would anyone care?

• Am I more compelling than video games and pizza and sex at this moment?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, you need to raise the stakes.

Important Caveat #1

As storytellers, we only lie for the benefit of our audience. We never lie for our own personal gain. We don’t manipulate the truth, alter the fabric of reality, or shift time and space for our own benefit. We’re not in the business of making ourselves look better, appearing more noble, or mitigating our shame or failure. We lie in our stories only when our audience would want us to lie — only when the story is better for our doing so.

We use Crystal Balls in everyday life because we, as human beings, are all prediction machines. We are constantly trying to anticipate the future, so when telling stories, recounting those in-the-moment predictions is critical

There comes a time in many stories when you reached a moment (or the moment) that the audience has been waiting for. Perhaps you have paved the way to the moment with Breadcrumbs and Backpacks, or maybe you’ve used none of these strategies because you’ve got yourself a stake-laden story, and now you’re approaching the payoff. The sentence you’ve been waiting to say. The sentence your audience has been waiting to hear.

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.

Backpacks are most effective when a plan does not work. If I had described my plan for begging for gas, and then the plan worked perfectly, there would have been no payoff for the Backpack. The scene would fall flat. If I go through all the trouble of explaining my plan beforehand, and then I say, “The kid agrees to lend me the gas,” the audience is oddly unsatisfied. They are left wondering why I went through all of that explanation only to find out that things turned out fine