don’t have inciting incidents. That’s why they don’t work.”8
Know where you want to end up (the punch line) from the outset.
The last line should be the first line you write. Then work backward toward your inciting incident and setup.
Quickly build in a hook to grab your audience’s attention and draw them into the story.
This is especially important in light of today’s ever-decreasing attention spans. You’re your audience’s reason to keep their phones in their pockets. For instance, what happened at the Castro Theatre that night? For someone afraid of public speaking, standing in front of fourteen hundred people doesn’t sound like the best plan. If you’re wondering if I’ll get back to that, don’t worry. I will.
Reference your opening lines/setup in the conclusion of your story.
This is referred to as the Bookend Technique, and it will give your story a feeling of completion or symmetry. More on this in chapter seven.
Frame your story within a three-act structure.
The three acts are Setup (Beginning), Confrontation (Middle), and Resolution (End).
The hook and inciting incident usually happen within the first act. “People have forgotten how to tell a story,” said Steven Spielberg. “Stories don’t have a middle or an end anymore. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.”9 If one of the most awarded directors of all time says that’s a problem, it’s a problem. Make sure you don’t make the same mistake.
Entertain.
Modern-day storytelling is joke telling. Today’s audiences expect some lightheartedness and entertainment. Airbnb gave it to them in the form of funky-named cereals. A story should make people care by including personal experience that the audience can relate to their own lives. The most powerful stories are not about the storyteller; they are about the person who is hearing the story. Most marketers and presenters forget this.
Sometimes, being entertaining doesn’t even require you to tell jokes. In his book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds, Carmine Gallo reminds us, “The funny thing about humor is that you don’t need to tell a joke to get a laugh.” It can be enough simply not to take yourself too seriously—or to be brutally honest.
This has rung very true for my own attempts at being funny on stage. Often the biggest laughs came from stories and encounters I had in my own life rather than cleverly crafted witticisms or opinions—my vomitando story has served up more laughs than any alliterative quip I could come up with. The world is a funny place and your existence within it is probably funnier. Accepting that fact is a blessing that gives you everything you need to see humor and craft stories on a daily basis. All you have to do is document them and then tell someone.
“The safest humor involves personal stories, because they are guaranteed to be original and unheard, they can be practiced and perfected, and they are highly personalized to your style.”
–Alan Weiss
The Art of Storytelling
On a windswept, summer-like evening in San Francisco in May 2014, I go to check out The Moth storytelling series, founded by novelist George Dawes Green. Since its launch in 1997, the series has presented thousands of stories, each of them told live and without notes to standing-room-only crowds worldwide. It has a great mix of performers, authors, business speakers, and everyday folks. In short, it is the perfect development ground for TED-type talks. High-profile storytellers have included Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, John Turturro, Annie Proulx, Gabriel Byrne, and AJ Jacobs. Not-so-high-profile storytellers include . . . some Irish guy who’s definitely not Gabriel Byrne.
The format is quite harrowing for anyone afraid of public speaking the way I am. You sign up, but there is no guarantee you will be called to tell a story. There are ten spots available and, most of the time, more than ten storytellers sign up. Names are drawn at random live on stage. At the insistence of my friends, I put my name in the hat, figuring I would let fate decide whether I appeared. Names are called immediately before you are expected to take the stage—you don’t know the order or even if you will be called—so there is little to do but wait.
The room is packed, and although the air conditioning blows with an arctic chill, I am sweating uncontrollably. Thankfully, I have learned to wear dark colors to hide the sweaty spots. After all, showing your humanity is important, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be sweaty.
Humanity, in fact, is one of the keys to great storytelling and great stand-up. One of The Moth’s great storytellers, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, makes a distinction between good storytellers and good stories in that same light:
A good storyteller is somebody who’s comfortable on his or her feet and is enough of a ham to get a charge out of the response of a crowd, that surge of electricity that goes back and forth between you and an audience. If that does not turn you on you won’t be a good storyteller. A good story has to be extremely particular and peculiar to your life. It has to have an element of singularity and yet—and this is the alchemy and paradox of storytelling—it has to be something immediately universal, part of something that we all experience.10
As a good storyteller, you need to be totally human. Be vulnerable, embrace embarrassment, and vocalize failure before success. This was something stand-up comedian and Moth storyteller Mike Birbiglia tapped into when he described his first impressions of “making out” in high school: “It was like watching a dog eating spaghetti.” He thought kissing seemed weird, so he never tried it. But he told all his friends that he had. When it finally did happen, he says, “It was like eating the spaghetti and the fork.” He later recounts how, after his first make-out, the girl told his friends that he was a terrible kisser—an embarrassing public rejection, a universal fear that everyone has probably felt at some point in their lives. Rather than admit his inexperience, the true reason why he was “the worst kisser she’s ever kissed,” Mike tried to save face in front of his buddies: “Yeah, that sounds about right. I’m a terrible kisser. That’s kind of my thing.”11 This is the essence of human nature and what people want to hear. They are quite happy to hear what a fool you have been before opening up to your success, and happier still if you never achieve it.
So as I sit in The Moth audience, with name after name drawn from the hat and read aloud by the host, Dhaya, who looks every bit the consummate stage professional, my nerves are multiplying with every passing second. Focusing on someone else’s story seems near impossible when fate has you on the clock. Storytellers come and go in agonizing slow motion. Maybe tonight I’ll be off the hook. Nine speakers have taken the stage and told their stories in front of a packed audience of strangers, while I am left sitting nervously cycling uncontrollably between hot and cold. Then finally, “Next to the stage, please give a warm welcome to our final storyteller, David Nihill.”
I am a bag of jelly by this point but keep my nerves in check by remembering one of the greatest things about storytelling: the story is yours. You know it better than anyone. You don’t have to train yourself to remember it. You have told it before to friends, family, or colleagues, whether at work, a dinner party, or some informal setting. You have done this before.
I start to relax once I am on stage.
