Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

I accentuate the surprise by stressing the idea that I am alone. I paint the picture of a boy who is badly hurt and completely alone in a place where no one even knows his name. I’ve primed the audience for an emotional response by playing upon their sympathy, empathy, and outrage. My parents decide to check on the car before checking on me. The nu

it’s always good to get your audience to laugh in the first thirty seconds of a story. A laugh at the beginning does these three things: 1. It signals to the audience: “I’m a good storyteller. I know what I’m doing. You can relax.” 2. In a small, less formal situation, this early laugh will serve as a stop sign for potential interruptions. It serve

That is what the story is about. Not a step-by-step accounting of Charlie’s birth or the harrowing potential of a placental abruption, but a look into the horror and the beauty of the unexpected. A little moment hiding within a big event.

Almost anyone can find a way to get from beginning to end in ten minutes. But it’s hard to tell a five- to six-minute story. It means making difficult choices about what will stay and what will go. It requires careful crafting and clever construction. Words and phrases must be expertly manipulated. Your choices must be spot-on. But the results are

In “This Is Going to Suck,” I ask the nurse to call McDonald’s (a fact I want to hide), so then I say, “[The nurse] looks at me as if I’m crazy, which I kind of am. I was dead twenty minutes ago and now I’m worried about work, but that drive-through does not run well without me, and they’re going to have to get someone in.” That laugh line draws at

Oftentimes I will load a portion of a story with superfluous information simply to hide the one important bit of information that I need the audience to know but not yet recognize as important. I clutter the landscape so that the audience can’t tell what is important and what is not.

Comedians want to be funny. Great storytellers want to be remembered. For this reason, they deploy laughter strategically.

Make ’em laugh before you make ’em cry.

Pop-Tart is also a funny word, which only adds to the humor. Some words are just funny. It’s well known that words with the K sound are funny. Words like cattywampus, cankles, kuku, caca, and pickle are funny just because of that hard K sound (though I think pickle is funny even without the K sound). Oddly specific words are also funny. It’s funnie

This is the art of Milk Cans and a Baseball. Taking moments of potential humor and making them as funny as possible. The stack of milk cans need not be large to generate a laugh. “A car about the size of a box of Pop-Tarts” also gets a reaction. It’s only a giggle, because the tower of milk cans isn’t that tall, but it’s still a surprise.