Storyworthy

by Matthew Dicks

  So I stay. I soak in the scenery. The height of the stage. The angle of the spotlight. The position of the audience and the microphone. I try to relax. I try to make this space my home.

  Jenifer records the scores from the prior storyteller. It’s time for me to take the microphone and tell my story.

  I hate this night. I despise every bit of it.

  Then I begin speaking my first words into the microphone and fall instantly in love. Alone on the stage, standing before a room packed with strangers, I tell a story about learning to pole-vault in high school. I reveal my secret desire for my teammate to fail, so I could look better than he did in our teammates’ eyes. I bare my soul to that room. I tell them about the ugly truth that resided at the center of my seventeen-year-old heart. I make them laugh. I make them cheer.

  When I finish, I step off the stage and return to Elysha and our wobbly table. I have no idea how I’ve done, but I know it felt great. I already want to do it again.

  Dan Kennedy asks the judges for their scores. When the final score is announced, a woman sitting beside me leans over and says, “You won!”

  I look at the scoreboard. She’s right. I’ve won my first Moth StorySLAM. I can’t believe it. I return to the stage for a bow. Jenifer informs me that I’m automatically entered in the next GrandSLAM championship. I have no idea what a GrandSLAM is or what she’s talking about, but I smile and thank her. I shake Dan Kennedy’s hand.

  I can’t believe it. The next day I write the following blog post:

  Yesterday was one of those days that I will never forget. Last night I had the honor of telling a story at one of The Moth’s StorySLAMs at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side. My goal was to simply be chosen to tell my story, but at the end of the night, I was fortunate enough to be named the winner of the StorySLAM.

  I got home last night around 1:30, went to bed around 2:00, woke up around 5:30 to play a round of golf, and I was still walking on air. I know it sounds a little silly, but in the grand scheme of things, the birth of my daughter was probably the most important day of my life. Next comes the marriage to my wife, and then the sale of my first book, and then maybe this. Definitely this. It was that big for me.

  Perhaps I’ll tell more stories in the future, and The Moth will become old hat for me. Maybe this day will recede into the past with other forgettable memories. But on this day, at this moment, I couldn’t be happier.

  Little did I know how prescient those words would prove to be. Less than six years later, I’d won thirty-four Moth StorySLAMs in fifty-three attempts. Thirty-four wins is among the highest win totals in the two-decade history of The Moth. I’m also a five-time GrandSLAM champion (also one of the highest totals in Moth history).

  Since that fateful night in 2011, I’ve told hundreds of stories in bars and bookstores, synagogues and churches, and theaters large and small to audiences ranging from dozens to thousands. I’ve performed throughout the United States and internationally, telling stories alongside other talented storytellers and in my own one-person shows. My stories have appeared on The Moth Radio Hour and their weekly podcasts many times and have been listened to by millions of people.

  I began my storytelling career by listening to storytellers on The Moth Podcast. Today people listen to my stories on that same podcast and on the radio. I still can’t believe it.

  But remember this: I didn’t go to school to become a storyteller, and I didn’t grow up in a family of storytellers. My parents were like the adults in a Peanuts television special. There was occasional mumbling from the other room through a cloud of secondhand smoke, but little more. My family didn’t communicate through story. We barely communicated at all. I grew up in a broken home with a family that had little time or inclination to fill our lives with conversation.

  I didn’t dream of becoming a storyteller. As I’ve made clear, I only started telling because my friends shamed me into giving it a try. In other words, I’m not special. I was not groomed to be a storyteller from an early age. Storytelling is not a part of my DNA.

  If I can do this, you can too.

  But my friends were wrong about one thing. They thought I would be a good storyteller because I’ve led an unusual and challenging life. They thought that my stories of homelessness and near-death experiences and encounters with the law would make me a great performer.

  In that regard, they were wrong. Terribly wrong. Fortunately for both you and me.

  You need not spend time in jail or crash through a windshield or have a gun jammed against the side of your head to tell a great story. In fact the simplest stories about the smallest moments in our lives are often the most compelling.

  We all have stories. You may not believe this yet, but you will. You just need to know how to find them in your everyday life and then capture them for future telling.

  Let me show you how.

  Part I

  Finding Your Story

  No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.

  — Daniel Kahneman

  Writing myself into existence. I think that’s what I was trying to do. And it’s cool to write a song and then have it come true.

  — Ani DiFranco

  It’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.

  — Alan Rickman

  CHAPTER ONE

  My Promise to You

  About a year ago, a man in one of my workshops asked, “Why am I here? I don’t want to stand on stages and tell stories. I don’t want to compete in story slams. I’m not an entertainer. I don’t get it.”

  It was a good question, particularly because the man in question hadn’t chosen my workshop. His wife had asked him to attend.

  He wasn’t the first person to attend a workshop for this reason. “My wife told me to take your workshop” is a surprisingly common reason given by men sitting before me in workshops.

  Perhaps you’re asking the same question. If you have no desire to stand on a stage and bare your soul, why learn to find and tell great stories?

  Not that long ago, I was asking the same question. Two years into my storytelling career, Elysha and I founded that Hartford-based storytelling organization that I’d once talked about with friends. We call it Speak Up. Together we produce shows throughout New England to sellout audiences numbering as high as five hundred people.

  About a year into Speak Up’s existence, I started teaching storytelling too. But as with my journey to becoming a storyteller, my career as a teacher of storytelling began against my will. As our Speak Up audience grew and people wanted to learn to tell stories, they began asking me to teach them the craft.

  I balked. I had no interest. But they were persistent. Many wanted to take a stage and tell a story. Others saw storytelling as a potential asset in their careers as attorneys, professors, salespeople, or therapists. Still others thought storytelling might help them to make friends and improve their relationships. Buckling under the weight of their pressure, I announced that I would teach one storytelling workshop.

  One and done.

  Ten people spent six evenings with me in a conference room at the local library. I taught them everything I knew about storytelling. I told stories and explained my process for crafting them. I listened to their stories and offered feedback.

  As with storytelling itself, I quickly realized how much I enjoyed teaching the craft. Deconstructing the elements of a good story. Building a curriculum around what I knew and was still learning. Listening to stories and helping to find ways to shape them better. Turning my students into the kinds of people who can light up a room with a great story.

  My “one and done” workshop has grown into something I do regularly and with zeal today. I travel the world teaching the art and craft of storytelling.

  The people I teach are varied and di
verse. I teach performers and would-be performers who want to become better storytellers. Some have never taken the stage before, and others are grizzled veterans looking to improve their skills. Many of these former students have gone on to take the stage at The Moth, Speak Up, and other storytelling shows. In August of 2016, one of my students beat me in a Moth GrandSLAM competition for the first time. I finished second, and she finished first. Perhaps I taught her a little too well.

  I teach attorneys, salespeople, and business leaders who want to improve their presentation skills, sales pitches, and branding.

  I teach novelists, essayists, screenwriters, television writers, poets, archivists, and other creative sorts who want to refine their understanding of story.

  I teach professors, schoolteachers, ministers, priests, and rabbis who want to improve their lectures and sermons and hold the attention of their audiences.

  I teach storytelling to people who want to improve their dating skills. I teach people who want to be more interesting at the dinner table. I teach grandfathers who want their grandchildren to finally listen to them. I teach students who want to tell better stories on their college applications. I teach job applicants who are looking to improve their interview skills. I teach people who want to learn more about themselves.

  People have quit therapy and opted to participate in my storytelling workshops instead. While I don’t endorse this decision, it’s apparently working for them. Wives send their befuddled husbands to my workshops, hoping that storytelling will spark something inside them. Later they tell me how their husbands have opened up like never before. One woman told me that her husband has opened up “a little too much.”

  People take my workshops again and again to discover more about themselves and find ways to connect with other people through their own personal narratives. A married couple once spent their anniversary attending one of my all-day workshops because they knew it would be a chance to laugh together and learn about each other. They brought champagne.

  I teach the children of Holocaust survivors who want to preserve the stories of their parents and grandparents. I teach psychiatrists and psychologists who want to help their patients reframe their lives through story. I teach politicians, labor organizers, health-care advocates, and educational reformers who need to change hearts and minds.

  I promise that whatever you do, storytelling will help. While I am often standing on a stage and performing, there are few things I do in life that aren’t aided by my ability to tell a story. Whether I’m teaching the metric system to my fifth graders, pitching Speak Up to a new venue, selling my DJ services to a prospective client, or making small talk at a professional development seminar, storytelling helps me achieve my goals. Storytelling makes me a better dinner companion. It compensates for my inability to hit a golf ball accurately. It makes me far more palatable to my in-laws.

  No matter who you are or what you do, storytelling can help you achieve your goals. That is why you are reading this book. That is why that man was sitting in my workshop that day.

  In these pages, you will find lessons on finding, crafting, and telling stories that will connect you to other people. Make them believe in and trust you. Compel them to want to know more about you and the things you care about.

  You’ll find specific examples of well-told stories. Exercises designed to locate meaningful, compelling stories in your life. Step-by-step instructions for crafting those stories.

  I hope to entertain as well. As much as I want you to learn to become a storyteller, I can’t help but tell some stories along the way. In addition to teaching you how to tell an effective, entertaining, and moving story, I hope to give you a peek into my life as a storyteller. My plan is to pull back the curtain and show you some of the highs and lows of my storytelling career. In short, I plan to tell you some stories.

  I also want you to trust me. There’s no codified curriculum when it comes to storytelling. No universally accepted laws or rules, no canonical absolutes. Storytelling is more art than science. It’s an ancient form of communication and entertainment that has been practiced since humans first developed language, but the rise in the popularity of personal storytelling is relatively new. There are no official schools of thought. No hard-and-fast formulas.

  But I tell my students this: If you apply my strategies and methods to the craft, you will become a highly successful storyteller. Not every storyteller agrees with my strategies, but every student who has followed my instruction has become an effective, entertaining, successful storyteller.

  My instruction works. You too can be a great storyteller. It’s time to learn how.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What Is a Story? (and What Is the Dinner Test?)

  A couple years ago, a woman asked Elysha why she first fell in love with me. Fortunately I was standing right beside her when the question was asked.

  I waited for Elysha to say something about my rugged good looks, quick wit, or enchanting eyes. “I thought it was this situation,” I said, motioning up and down my body.

  “It’s never been this situation,” Elysha informed me.

  Instead she told the woman that it was storytelling that first made her fall for me. She told the story of the night when she and I went to Chili’s for dinner — our first meal alone — before our school’s talent show.

  Just so we’re clear: This was not a date. Maybe I wanted it to be a date, but at that time, I thought Elysha was out of my league. I still think this today. Please don’t tell her.

  Elysha and I were fellow teachers and slowly becoming friends, but we were both involved with other people at the time. We were technically unavailable. Also Chili’s was one of the closest restaurants to our school.

  My point: I didn’t take Elysha on a first date to Chili’s. I’m not that guy.

  Okay?

  Elysha explained to the woman that over the course of our dinner, she had asked me some questions about myself. We’d known each other for a couple years by then, but we didn’t know much about each other personally. When I’m asked a question, I tell a story, so I told some stories that night. I was still more than seven years away from taking a stage and telling my first official story, but even back then, I was always ready and willing to share my life with others, warts and all.

  Elysha told the woman, “That was the night I started falling for Matt. Listening to his stories, I realized that he wasn’t like anyone I had ever met before, and I knew I wanted to hear more. I liked the way he told a story.”

  Beautiful, right? I found the perfect spouse through storytelling.

  Right after the beauty of the moment washed over me, I quickly shifted to annoyance. By then I had been performing onstage and teaching storytelling for a few years. I had made a name for myself in the storytelling world. I’d attracted interest from businesses, universities, nonprofits, and performers. Knowing all this, why had she waited until now to inform me that my storytelling had been the key to her heart?

  I told her that the story about falling in love with me through storytelling fit perfectly into my personal narrative and explained how useful it could have been to me for the past couple years of teaching and performing. “You’re telling me that I found the perfect wife through storytelling! That’s like a baseball player hitting a home run into the right-field bleachers that’s caught by the woman he eventually marries. It’s amazing! How could you keep this from me?”

  “I’m not in the business of helping you construct your personal narrative,” she said.

  She’s lucky I love her. But you see my point, right? Even before I was telling stories onstage and thinking of myself as a storyteller, the ability to tell a good story was helping me immensely.

  Let’s also be clear that when I talk about storytelling, I am speaking about personal narrative. True stories told by the people who lived them. This is very different than the traditional fable or folktale that many people associate with the word storytelling. While folktales and fables are entertaini
ng and can teach us about universal truths and important life lessons, there is power in personal storytelling that folktales and fables will never possess.

  A folktale or a fable would never have convinced Elysha that I was the love of her life. My friends would not routinely invite me to play golf if I promised them a well-told folktale between swings. I would not be hired for a job by answering questions with folktales. Nonprofits, corporations, universities, and school districts would not be able to improve their image and messaging through fables. You can’t become the life of the party by telling a good folktale.

  Most importantly, folktales and fables do not create the same level of connection between storyteller and audience as a personal story. I have never listened to someone tell a folktale and felt more deeply connected to the storyteller as a result. I may have loved the story and admired the storyteller’s skill and expertise, and I might have been highly entertained, but I have never felt that I knew the storyteller any better at the end of their story. The storyteller who tells folktales and fables is a highly developed, highly skilled delivery mechanism, often more entertaining than television, radio, or a YouTube video, but never revealing, vulnerable, or authentic.

  Folktales and fables don’t require vulnerability. They do not demand honesty and transparency from the storyteller. They can never be self-deprecating or revealing, because the story is not about the storyteller. They are entertaining, possibly educational, and often insightful, but they do not bring people closer together.

  We tell stories to express our hardest, best, most authentic truths. This is what brings thousands of people to hear stories at theaters and bars every night in cities all over the world.

  They want the real deal. They want the kind of stories that just might make them fall in love with the storyteller.