How to Become a Master Storyteller (What Nobody Teaches You!)

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  A story is change over time; everything else is just reporting on your life.

  Most people think a story is things that happened, told in order. Dicks calls that reporting, which only your mother or spouse is obliged to hear. A real story shows a realization (‘I used to think one thing, now I think another’) or, more rarely, a transformation. An anecdote is cotton candy: a funny golf or airport moment people enjoy and forget. A story is one of the best meals of your life, remembered for years. The aim isn’t ‘that happened to me too’ but ‘I once felt that way.’

• 02

  No one wants to hear what you have to say unless you give them a reason to listen.

  That belief should be ‘in your bone marrow’ whether you’re telling a story, showing data or giving a keynote. You compete with every piece of information on the internet. Dicks’s test: if the power went out now, would anyone care? Once, alone at a blackout screening, he never returned to finish the film. Another time, with his daughter, they wanted to drive to another theater to see the ending.

• 03

  Remember stories; never memorize them.

  Speaker and audience play a game in which both pretend the story is made up on the spot. Dicks knows the beats and scenes but not the sentences, so he can read the room. Memorizers are ‘word callers’ who speak at an audience, not to it. He carries five spare anecdotes to win back a drifting crowd. Once he paused mid-speech to tell a phone-checker, ‘I really hope your kid is on the way to the hospital.’ Former Moth director Catherine Burns told him the imperfection is the beauty: doubling back shows the story is for this room.

• 04

  Describe almost nothing; borrow the audience’s imagination.

  People want what you felt, said and did. ‘Classroom’ or ‘kitchen’ calls up a fully furnished image already in the listener’s mind, more powerful than any description. Every needless detail, like piercing blue eyes, steals bandwidth the audience must spend tracking it. Dicks cites research finding that readers connect more with simply drawn comic characters than photorealistic ones because they fill in the rest themselves.

• 05

  Start at the end, then make the beginning its opposite.

  First decide what changed: what is the one thing you’re trying to say? A keynote saying three things says nothing. For a marketing deck, he asks for the last three slides first. The opening must be the opposite of the ending: the story that ends with the most powerful teaching tool he owns begins with ‘just a spoon.’ Films do the same. In When Harry Met Sally, the leads start out hating each other. In Independence Day, every protagonist begins disrespected by those they value most and ends earning their respect.

• 06

  Keep attention with stakes, suspense, surprise and humor.

  An ‘elephant’ is the big, obvious question (will Matt get the spoon?), as when Steve Jobs opened in 2007 with ‘I’ve been waiting two and a half years to share this with you.’ A ‘backpack’ loads the audience with your plan before it fails, as in Ocean’s 11. ‘Breadcrumbs’ hint at what’s coming. ‘Hourglasses’ slow down at the peak, like bullet time in The Matrix or an orange chair mentioned purely for delay. ‘Crystal balls’ are spoken predictions, like earnings guidance. Suspense is strategic exclusion plus inclusion: say ‘a metal object,’ not ‘spoon.’

• 07

  Use humor early, and right before the knife.

  A laugh in the first 30–60 seconds tells an anxious audience you know what you’re doing. Humor makes you seem closer and smarter and rescues dull data or demos; he has tech teams invent amusing fake companies. A laugh just before something painful sharpens the contrast, like dumping someone at the end of the best date of their life. His wife’s favorites are his ‘laugh, laugh, cry’ stories.

• 08

  Connect scenes with ‘but’ and ‘therefore,’ never ‘and then.’

  ‘And’ stories, including most sales decks, are scenes you could shuffle or remove without loss. ‘But/therefore’ links make every scene load-bearing: it’s the spoon of power, therefore I must have it; I chase him, but he escapes. ‘But’ is the most powerful word in storytelling. Saying what something is not (‘Shane is not stupid’) adds energy, so clients spend a week describing things only by what they aren’t.

• 09

  Don’t lie—but cut, condense and enlarge your own stupidity.

  Dicks hates ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story’: once you lie, you can’t be trusted. He removes a friend who did nothing in the car, compresses two days into one and moves locations closer together—only to serve the story, never to flatter himself. He will exaggerate his own foolishness, because vulnerability is what audiences crave.