“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.”
–Robert McKee
I woke in the middle of the night to a series of loud rumbling noises. My location was a small, windowless room in volcanic Guatemala. I was twenty-five years old and had just moved in with a local family as part of a Spanish language school home-stay program. Unfortunately for me, the epicenter of this rumbling was my stomach, and the cause was food poisoning. And, as I was about to find out, it was a very bad dose. While I was curled up in the throes of intestinal anarchy, my host family was in the next room, completely unaffected by the gut-twisting superbug. The projectile vomiting started twenty minutes later and seemed to have no stop. With no windows, no trashcan, and no time to react, my backpack loaded with clothes bore the brunt of the storm, with the floor and walls coming a close second and third. I heard footsteps coming to check on me.
My host mother, Flor, a robust lady in traditional long, local dress, came rushing in to find me covered in puke and her whitewashed walls looking like fifty shades of green. I wasn’t due to start classes until the following day, so at this point my Spanish was nonexistent. I rummaged through my sodden belongings to find a small pocket dictionary and flipped to the health section. I looked her in the eyes with my most pitiful puppy-dog-meets-drowned-rat face and, pointing to my source of wisdom, read aloud, “Vomitando . . . Vomitando aquí,” as I pointed to my bag; “aquí,” the floor; and, “aquí también,” (“here as well”) as I gave the walls a broad stroking.
“Alcohólico de Irlanda,” she mumbled, assuming incorrectly that my culture and not her local dish had gotten the better of me.
Tell a Story to Teach
Thankfully, my condition and my Spanish improved quickly. I never forgot the Spanish word for “vomiting,” and I suspect you won’t, either. Experiences do that to you, and stories—shared experiences—do that, too. For better or worse our brains are hardwired to recognize, remember, and appreciate the information that comes to us through storytelling. Stories help us learn.
Rapid language acquisition experts like Benny Lewis (a fellow Irishman) also stress the use of mnemonic devices. Defined as “any learning technique that aids information retention,” mnemonics aim to translate information into a form that the brain can retain better than its original form. Benny has a great example with learning the Spanish word caber, which means “to fit.” Caber sounds like two words more familiar to native English speakers, cab and bear. Utilizing mnemonic devices, we can construct a short visual story of a bear trying to fit into a taxicab. To best remember it, you visualize the unlikely scenario in your mind in as much detail as possible. The premise of this idea is based on something scientists have known for a long time: the mind learns in stories and visual cues. Benny speaks twelve languages, and he learned them all in less time than it took me to learn basic commands en Español.
“The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.”
–Mary Catherine Bateson
Thus, one of the reasons for using stories in our speeches is that stories help us learn and remember things. We all want our audience to learn something and remember what we said.
Many of us have been to a comedy club and laughed hysterically at the comedian, but struggle to remember his/her name or what exactly was said. We’ve had the same experience with business speakers. When someone delivers information as a series of facts or opinions, it’s hard for our brains to recall them.
Don’t be that person. Our aim as public speakers is to be more memorable and have our audience spread our message for us. The best way to do this is to make it work the way the brain likes it—by wrapping the information in a story.
Tell a Story to Build Your Brand
Stories are great for memory retention, but there’s another reason to tell a story: it connects you with and humanizes your brand.
Consider the origin of the word brand. It comes from a hot piece of metal people use to mark cows. True brands tell the world a very simple story, like, “This is Dave’s cow.” The job of the other kind of brand is much the same: to influence what people think of when they think of you. Stories are great for that. They give people’s brains a thing to connect you with. They do the job marketers are supposed to be doing by giving people something to think of when they think of you. Yet much of the marketing industry still thinks it can get away with calling colors, typefaces, and canned music “branding.” If those things are elements of a story, great. But without a story? That’s just a random cow.
Ann Handley is a content marketer who inspires an entire industry. When it comes to storytelling, she says, “Some brands are doing it really well, but storytelling is not a skill marketers have necessarily needed over the last few decades.”3 In an article by Harrison Monarth in the Harvard Business Review, Johns Hopkins researcher Keith Quesenberry discusses the effectiveness of commercials that are like “mini movies.” He says, “People are attracted to stories, because we’re social creatures and we relate to other people.”4
You may not be in marketing, but when you get up to make a speech, you are selling your content, your idea, and maybe even your cow. So you, too, need to develop your storytelling skills to better sell yourself. Whether your experiences tell how you disgusted your host family in Guatemala or how you led your company out of disaster, the same basic principles apply. You are always telling a story.
While most eight-year-olds were learning how to properly squeeze a lemon, Gary Vaynerchuk was managing seven lemonade stands across his neighborhood in Edison, New Jersey, his new home after moving with his family from Belarus. This kind of hustle has led him to numerous business successes, best-selling books, and TV appearances, and has edged him a few steps closer to his goal of buying the New York Jets football team. He is also one of the best business speakers out there and no stranger to using humor. Says Vaynerchuk, “Quality storytelling always wins. Always.”5
It does not take long to find a compelling example. Airbnb went from a failing startup to a billion-dollar business built on a compelling story that their founders have become masters of telling. Airbnb started in 2007, when Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky were struggling to pay their rent. There was a design conference coming to San Francisco and the city’s hotels were fully booked, so they came up with the idea of renting out three airbeds on their living room floor and cooking breakfast for their guests. The site Airbedandbreakfast.com (later shortened to Airbnb) officially launched on August 11, 2008, and initially struggled. With no seed money, the founders hustled to self-fund and keep their dreams alive. They fell back on their design schooling and created special-edition breakfast cereals that capitalized on the presidential election: “Obama O’s” (The Breakfast of Change) and “Cap’n McCains.” The two sold 800 boxes of the cereal (priced at $40 each) in two months, making $30,000 in profits for the cash-strapped founders.
The reasons why they started Airbnb, combined with the fact that they kept the idea alive with breakfast cereal, made a compelling and memorable story for Joe and Brian to tell. It showed their idea was a solution to a real problem, that they were passionate about it, and that they were willing to do anything to succeed.
Investor Paul Graham was impressed with Gebbia and Chesky’s hustle and decided to take on Airbnb in his Y Combinator program (an American seed accelerator providing early stage funding and advice for startups), even though he initially didn’t like their idea. They went on to raise multiple rounds of investment with top-tier firms and VCs and, in April 2014, they closed a round based on a valuation of approximately $10 billion.
Seth Godin is a prolific writer, blogger, and very often hilarious public speaker. He is the author of several notable marketing books, such as Purple Cow, Small Is the New Big, and Permission Marketing, and his ideas have been referenced, regurgitated, and repackaged by just about everyone. Expanding on Godin’s idea that “marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell,” Actionable Marketing Guide blogger Heidi Cohen writes, “In the social media age, your company must build the best product you can because customers will talk about your products and services on social media platforms and in real life. Products need stories to provide context and human emotion. They provide the beginning, middle, and end.”6
Airbnb gave people a great story that clearly explained who the company was, defined the values it held, and directly addressed the needs of those it was trying to serve. For their community of loyal users, Joe and Brian were striving to provide an experience, a home, and a sense of belonging that people don’t get from traditional hotels. Their story also saved them a lot of marketing dollars as media and user attention spread their tale far and wide. The hotel industry had a new competitor, and this competitor had creativity, passion, hustle, and a story worth telling. People don’t invest in your business or product. They invest in you and your story. If you want people to remember what you say, tell a compelling story.
“People don’t invest in your business or product. They invest in you and your story. If you want people to remember what you say, tell a compelling story.”
“Storytelling is everything,” says Barbara Corcoran from ABC-TV’s Shark Tank. “Show me an MBA and your sales numbers, that’s fine. But tell me a great story about how you got started and your vision, and we’ll talk.”7
The same logic could easily be applied to stand-up comedy. Jokes that tell a story, that immerse the audience into the scenario, are much more likely to get them to invest and laugh along.
How to Craft Your Story
So how do we craft a great story? Whether it’s business or not, the story always needs a personal element. Make it your own. Audiences respond better to a story that features the storyteller. Include stories from your own life experiences before referencing those of others. Nobody knows your stories better than you, which also makes telling them a lot easier. Remember, better public speaking is the goal here, and stand-up comedy is our means of achieving it.
The best way to be more engaging, memorable, and funny quickly is to tell a story that contains a few essential elements. “Who wants what and what stops them from getting it?” This, according to Golden Globe–winning writer and three-time Emmy nominee Bill Grundfest, is the secret sauce of all stories in its most simplified form. Yet what makes stories great is the detail we add. We need to put meat on the bones of our story by including the following elements:
Have a hero/protagonist.
Decide who will be the central character of the story. Often people remember the characters more than the story itself. Loose contenders so far in mine are Shakin’ Stevens, Mustafa, and some experimental comedian called Irish Dave.
Describe what your hero is up against.
What challenges does the character have to overcome? What do they want and what is stopping them from getting it? This can be as feisty as Guatemalan food or as terrifying as public speaking. This is your story’s source of tension.
Build in a specific transcending emotion.
You need something that breaks down barriers; love, lust, greed, passion, and loss are perfect.
Include a clear lesson or transformation.
Make sure your characters move toward their goal, objective, or solution to a problem. Even if it’s just finding a bathroom, or omitting words without laying an egg.
Add twists and turns to the story.
Try not to make it predictable for the listener. Introduce a question or challenge and don’t be too quick to solve it.
Make it believable.
It is essential that your story allows the listener to suspend their disbelief by listening to what you are saying rather than questioning the truth of your words. Vulnerability and jokes at your own expense work well here. Tell people how you really felt. Leave some of yourself on the stage. If something was scary, nobody wants to hear how confident you were in overcoming it. If your hands were like a partially defrosted mackerel, tell them.
Have a clear incident that makes the story really take off.
Often referred to as the inciting incident, it is a concept popularized by the master of story, Robert McKee, in his famed three-day “Story Seminar” given all over the world. It is described by Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and The War of Art, here: “The inciting incident in a screenplay or novel is that event that gets the story rolling. In The Hangover, it’s the moment when the guys wake up in their trashed villa with no memory of what happened the night before—and realize that they’ve lost their friend Doug. With that, the story kicks into gear. Everything before that is just setup . . . Ask yourself of your project, ‘What is the inciting incident?’ ‘When does the “story” take off?’ You’d be surprised how many would-be novels/screenplays/restaurants/startups 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. The previously intimidating crowd seems to blend into one friendly sea of faces. These people don’t want to see me fail—most people don’t. Ultimately people want to see other people do well and will cheer them on, especially if they connect or relate to them. Starting with a story gives you the best chance of doing this. Especially a story about yourself that you know. So I tell a story about my time living in Shanghai. It is my own. I know it better than anyone because it happened to me. And as I settle into my storytelling, I can feel my connection with my audience. My laugh lines hit, and people are nodding their heads in recognition as my little slice of the human experience connected to theirs. When the crowd applauds loudly, I know it’s over. Outscoring all the others, I have won.
The good folks behind The Moth are true experts in the art of the story. Below are some of their best tips for storytellers, from novice to expert:12
Be forewarned: stories are told, not read.
We love how the storyteller connects with the audience when there is no PAGE between them! Please know your story “by heart” but not by rote memorization. No notes, paper, or cheat sheets allowed on stage.
Have some stakes.
Stakes are essential in live storytelling. What do you stand to gain or lose? Why is what happens in the story important to you? If you can’t answer this, then think of a different story. A story without stakes is an essay and is best experienced on the page, not the stage.
Start in the action.
Have a great first line that sets up the stakes or grabs attention.
No: “So I was thinking about climbing this mountain. But then I watched a little TV and made a snack and took a nap and my mom called and vented about her psoriasis then I did a little laundry (a whites load) (I lost another sock, darn it!) and then I thought about it again and decided I’d climb the mountain the next morning.”
Yes: “The mountain loomed before me. I had my hunting knife, some trail mix, and snow boots. I had to make it to the little cabin and start a fire before sundown or freeze to death for sure.”
Steer clear of meandering endings.
They kill a story! Your last line should be clear in your head before you start. Yes, bring the audience along with you as you contemplate what transpires in your story, but remember, you are driving the story and must know the final destination. Keep your hands on the wheel!
Know your story well enough so you can have fun!
Watching you panic to think of the next memorized line is harrowing for the audience. Make an outline, memorize your bullet points, and play with the details. Enjoy yourself. Imagine you are at a dinner party, not a deposition.
I followed these tips when I told my story and I did something else: I made it funny. In fact, the biggest advantage my story had over the other nine on that windy San Francisco night was this: it was funnier. The Moth won’t tell you that your story has to be funny, but those that incorporate some humor always do very well. I have now won a number of storytelling nights and performed alongside some of the biggest names nationally, and humor always plays as big a part in my stories as it does in my victories. In the next chapter we’ll look more at adding humor to your stories.
Whether you’re a stand-up comedian, budding storyteller, or a substandard Spanish language student involuntarily destroying a Guatemalan home, your story matters, and how you tell it makes all the difference in how it will be received. Combining storytelling, humanity, and laughter will give you a huge advantage in your public speaking, and the odds are good that you already have all the raw material you need. After all, we all have had something funny happen to us at some stage in life—now it’s just a matter of making it funny on an actual stage.
Exercise: Start Your Funny Story File
Think back through your experiences and make a bullet-point list of stories you like that have happened to you or your friends. When you are in the company of your friends and family, what stories do you like to tell? Think fun over funny at this stage. You can also pull material from your favorite books—the odds are in your favor that most people have not even read the biggest bestsellers, so this is an easy source.
Consider travel, school, college, parties, work, interaction with parents/in-laws, customer, and client interactions. Looking at old photos will help to jog memories. We all have had something funny or embarrassing happen to us at some point and, as Birbiglia showed us, even if it wasn’t funny then, it might be funny now. As Charlie Chaplin said, sometimes “to truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.”
We want to identify topics you already know well and already like to talk about. This will make your on-stage delivery much more engaging. Imagine your best friend, partner, or coworker completing this sentence: “(Your name here) is always talking about . . .” These are the beginnings of your story list, which we will edit as we go forward through the book.
Often listening to other people’s stories will jog your own memory. With this in mind, buy tickets to a comedy or storytelling show and go see it this week, or listen to a podcast like The Moth, Risk, Mortified, or Snap Judgment. Remember, great stories often come from seemingly mundane topics.
