Learn to Tell a Better Story

We’ve all experienced the story turned hostage situation. Sometimes we’re captured by an elderly relative, sometimes it’s a co-worker, sometimes it’s a neighbor, sometimes it’s our child, and sometimes it’s a church member. Someone begins by telling a story and it soon becomes apparent that no one may get out alive without creative escape plan. What starts out as the history of the local ice cream stand turns into the life history of the local park ranger and her family connection to Vince Lombardi. No one knows how it came to that, but everyone (except the storyteller, sometimes) wishes it had never happened. We just wish it were over as soon as possible.

Courtesy Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010717043/

I will confess that I’ve told more than my fair share of bad stories. This is particularly true when I’m telling stories about topics I know a lot about. Did you ask about the history of American environmentalism? There is a good chance you’re about to get lost in a sea of names and ideas and we may never actually get to the point. Were you wondering about a C. S. Lewis quote? We may end up exploring Middle-Earth together, which is itself a cache of mathom-like histories that trail off the edge of Tolkien’s notes and letters.

The point is that telling stories isn’t particularly easy and most of us are pretty bad at it. In How to Tell A Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth, the authors provide some helpful how-to to improve the way we weave a tale.

Why Stories?

I’ve always wanted to be good at telling stories. Garrison Keillor’s stories from Lake Wobegon were always entertaining to me. Those fictional, often humorous, accounts gave enough details but left a lot on the table for the imagination. I enjoyed Patrick McManus’s humorous stories and wished I could write like that. As a family we also used to listen to Bill Cosby’s comedy records, where he told stories about his childhood. There is something powerful about the story to communicate and entertain.

As it turns out, though, telling stories doesn’t come naturally. Moreover, we don’t learn how to tell stories—a fact that C. S. Lewis highlights in his fiction.

A brief aside in The Horse and His Boy may have been the first time I was aware of a deficiency in my upbringing that contributed to my anemic stories. When the four main characters of the story meet, Aravis weaves a tail of her adventurous escape “using a rather different tone and style from her usual one.” Lewis explains in a somewhat wistful aside, “For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays” (Lewis, HB, 35).

Everyone has stories. As the Moth authors write, “You are a multitude of stories. Every joy and heartbreak, every disappointment and dizzying high––each has contributed to the complex, one-of-a-kind person that you are today” (3). That’s part of their motivation in telling stories, in coaching storytellers for their show, and in producing their book about storytelling.

Most people don’t write essays well. And fewer still tell stories well. The result is that many people have stories that effectively get lost because no one is interested in sifting the wheat from the chaff.

Moth Method

The method prescribed by the Moth staff is helpful for telling a particular variety of story. The stories that the Moth staff encourage are also severely limited by their narrow-minded commitment to modernity. Some of the suggestions, however, could be applied to other varieties of stories.

The key elements of a story bear consideration:

1.       The story must be able to be summarized in one sentence.

2.       An engaging beginning, which could be chronological, a flashback, or another hook.

3.       A satisfying end-point that brings this little episode to some sort of conclusion, though it need not be a fairy-tale resolution.

4.       An event that is, of itself, somehow noteworthy and significant. That doesn’t mean that it is world history level interesting, but that there is a central point of the story.

5.       There needs to be an emotional connection within the story to draw listeners.

6.       Careful attention needs to be paid to details so that every detail has a purpose. (This is where most stories fail, in my experience.)

Given that the Moth-style stories are about 10 minutes long, if they were written out, they would be from 1,000 to 1,200 words. About the length of a decent blog post. So, even for those of us who primarily communicate through the written word, there is something to be learned here.

Confined by Ideology

It should be no surprise, since the Moth Story Hour is an NPR feature, that the methodology they propose is and the content they produce is intentionally focused on social progressivism and psychologized introspection. The assumption that underlies most of the book and their content is that you are the most important thing to you, so every story has to be how you changed in some way. And that change has to either tear down the social fabric of tradition, adapt the world it to your personal benefit, or be banally focused on something broadly accepted as good by progressives. There is a lot of focus on telling “your truth” in the book and on the show. Still, there is a fair amount of storytelling meat to find amidst the bones.

The keys to telling a story via their method is that it needs to be a true story (though one can rearrange chronology or highlight certain details to keep the plot moving), about the teller, and focus on personal transformation. This is an especially helpful method for first-person stories. That, of course, has the limiting effect because sometimes the stories should be about someone of significance, but they end up being about a specific person interacting with someone who did something important. So, rather than celebrating the life of Nelson Mandela, the story would have to focus on my interaction with him (however miniscule and coincidental) and how that made me a better person. This seems rather shallow and narcissistic.

However, It seems to be that many of their methods could be adapted to tell stories about other people and illuminate their stories. It could also be used to retell fairy tales, ancient histories, or shape fiction. Most helpful in this book is the way they explore what makes particular stories work. That’s a reason this book would be helpful to a wide range of readers.

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

By The Moth, Bowles, Meg, Burns, Catherine, Hixson, Jenifer, Jenness, Sarah Austin, Tellers, Kate

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