How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth

love. JENIFER ON STORYSLAMS: These weren’t people we’d worked with prior to the show. It was an uncontrolled environment. What happened was a roller coaster: some thrilling parts, some super-harrowing turns, bumps, a few sleepy sections, and of course, some stunning highs and some spectacular fails. But each story, limited to just five minutes, was

You have important stories to tell. They are stories that no one else can tell. But you have to be willing to do the work of developing them—and then work through your fears to share them.

Instead of rushing through life, it’s an opportunity to stop, sit back, and reflect.

Stories are how we keep our collective history alive.

Once we start to focus on a story, we ask the teller to consider a few bigger, often harder-to-answer questions. What is this story ultimately about for you? Why is this story important for you to tell? How would you describe yourself at the beginning of the story, and who had you become by the end?

the horrifying feeling of pressure was necessary, because by the time I got to the big stage, I had already faced my fears.

We didn’t always understand all the details, but seeing our mother light up while telling us stories made us light up too. Her excitement became our excitement, her sorrow our sorrow, and so on. Telling those stories is what kept my mother alive, kept her heart beating through loss after loss after loss—that is how I came to understand the power of

when a person is listening and comprehending a story, their brain activity begins to couple, or align, with the brain of the teller. The scientific term is “speaker-listener neural coupling.”

it. We identify scenes and details that can bring the story to life. We ask you, “If this were a movie, what scenes would keep us glued to our seats?” Retrace every step, describe it in Technicolor. We often ask that you “blow it up big” and look at every detail you could play with, and then pick the very best and shiniest.