Seeing your story as you tell it is a great thing. It will help you connect to it more effectively. Your emotional state will more closely match your actual emotions from the time and place that you are describing. When you can see your story, it is more likely that your audience will see your story too.

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.

Stand-ups want the audience to laugh at all times. Storytellers want the audience to laugh at the right times.

you want your story to linger with your audience (and that should be your goal), you should end in a place that is moving, vulnerable, or revealing, or establishes connection with the audience. Save your laughs for the middle, when you want to keep your audience engaged. Allow them to carry your audience to the end. But end your story with somethin

Instead of the five minutes a day that I’ve asked you to dedicate to Homework for Life, this exercise requires about fifteen minutes at a time.

The Dinner Test is simply this: Is the story that you craft for the stage, the boardroom, the sales conference, or the Sunday sermon similar to the story you would tell a friend at dinner? This should be the goal.

Asking a rhetorical question causes the audience to devise an answer in their mind. You have just turned your story into a Q&A session.

That is my goal here: Make them laugh so the collision and the resulting violence hurt more. Contrast is king in storytelling, and laughter can provide a fantastic contrast to something authentically awful.

I often start my story in one place and end up working my way closer and closer to the end as I revise.