The first of several posts on storytelling.  

I’ve been writing, coaching, and teaching about storytelling for over 25 years, and I thought it was time to distill what I’ve learned down to a handful of takeaways that might help you on your journey to becoming a great storyteller.  These insights come from repeated mistakes, stories that went wrong and failed to hold their listeners, and the occasional win when I got it right and could see that I was, for that moment, onto a cracking good yarn.  Great storytelling is hard, it’s a lifetime practice, and it is important to practice because it is at the essence of good communication.  Everything else is just lists and facts, and we humans simply can’t retain many of those for long without outsized effort.  As our lives move faster and faster, and as we try to absorb more and more information every day, stories are the only way to be memorable.  Oh, and fair warning.  This is a list of (good) advice.  Next time, I’ll tell a story that illustrates what I mean.

1. Find something in the story that you can get personal about. Don’t tell stories that don’t match your own interests. If you’re not engaged, it’s unlikely that you will engage your audience.  Telling a good story is a performance, and it helps if you can tie it to something that truly resonates with you.  Otherwise, the audience will most likely sense your lack of personal connection.  Find the emotional connection that works for you.
2. But don’t get carried away – too much detail is always a story killer. All storytellers struggle with sharing just enough detail to bring the story to life, but not enough to kill the forward momentum.  I’ve made this mistake more times than I can count.  We always know more than the audience wants to – they just want you to get to the good part.  Keep ruthlessly cutting your story detail until you can cut no more and still be comprehensible.  It’s much less detail than you think.  If your hero’s eyes are sparkling, we don’t need to know what color they are. 
3. Begin as late as possible in your story – but no later. Stories should begin at the maximum point of interest before the climax or crisis.  Put the hero and villain at the cliff’s edge, have them teetering on it, then fill in any necessary back story.  So many storytellers start too early in their stories, and the audience gets restless before the stakes get high enough.
4. Don’t tell your story chronologically. We experience our personal stories chronologically, but that’s not the way we make meaning of it.  Chronology is the laziest form of storytelling, and it’s hardly ever the most interesting. Stories may even happen on a timeline, but emotions don’t, conflict doesn’t, resolution doesn’t.  All the best parts of storytelling unfold according to their own logic, and it’s not usually the logic of time.
5. The best stories happen when people struggle. Conflict is interesting. Misunderstandings are interesting.  Disagreements are interesting.  Unrequited passion is interesting.  People at loggerheads are interesting.  Failure is often interesting.  All the states of mind that most of us prefer to avoid in our real lives are what make stories interesting.

Break all of these rules when you need to for the sake of the story but think hard before you do.  It’s tempting to get to the happily ever after part of the story as quickly as you can, especially if you are sharing something from your own life, but you want to prolong the drama for good storytelling.  Just the opposite of real life.  You may want to share your successes with people so that they can emulate you, but what they really want to know is how and when you screwed up.  That’s when we start to believe that you are human just like us.  That’s when we start to care.