Storyworthy

by Matthew Dicks

  STORY BREAK

  Zombie Brother

  My brother, Jeremy, went missing back in 2007. He quit his job, changed his phone number, moved. Disappeared without telling a soul. After a long and extensive search, no sign of him could be found.

  Jeremy frequently spent time in the South, photographing Civil War battlefields, often on his own. As the years rolled by and we heard nothing from him, I reached the conclusion that my brother was probably dead. Through accident or misdeed, something terrible had happened to him. He was gone forever.

  I went from telling people that I didn’t know where my brother was to telling them that he had disappeared to explaining that Jeremy was presumed dead.

  In 2012, I was preparing to perform at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. I was sitting in the café, nibbling on a bagel alongside my father-in-law and my editor, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Don’t I know you?”

  I turned. It was Jeremy. Just minutes before I was to take the stage and perform for hundreds of people, my dead brother had come back to life.

  Our reunion was made possible by a woman who had read my first novel and decided to learn more about me online. She found a blog post explaining the presumed fate of my brother.

  She knew Jeremy. A year earlier, she had been working for him. She called Jeremy and told him that I’d been looking for him. During his disappearance, many things had changed in my life. I had published my first two novels and had begun performing onstage. My daughter, Clara, was born.

  The woman knew that I was performing at the 92nd Street Y and convinced Jeremy to attend the show and reconnect with me.

  He did. We spent about fifteen minutes in the café, catching up as quickly as possible.

  Then I took the stage. Before telling my story, I explained to the audience what had just happened. I needed to say it aloud so I could move on to my story. They were as shocked as I was. My father-in-law says it was the only time in his life that he has seen me speechless.

  I told a story onstage that night in which my brother played a role (of course). When I was finished, I found Jeremy standing in the back of the room. His first words to me were, “You messed up that story! You left out the best part!”

  He was right. I can’t remember everything.

  My brother and I have been in frequent contact ever since.

  About a month after meeting in New York, Jeremy invited us over for dinner at his apartment, about an hour from my home. We invited the woman who reconnected us as well. Jeremy cooked a meal identical to what my mother would have cooked when we were children. We ate and laughed and shared stories.

  When Jeremy bent over to pick up Clara to hug her at the end of the evening, I warned him that she would cry. Clara cried whenever anyone except for Elysha or me picked her up.

  She was silent as Jeremy held her in his arms. Smiling, even. It was a damn miracle.

  When my son, Charlie, was born later that year, Jeremy was the first person I called from the delivery room.

  You never know who you’re going to meet at a storytelling show.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Five Permissible Lies of True Storytelling

  It’s time for me to come clean: I lied to you.

  “Charity Thief” is full of lies. You may argue by the end of this chapter that they aren’t really lies, but I like the word lie because it grabs people’s attention. I’m a storyteller. Words matter.

  But yes, it’s true. They aren’t exactly lies, but rather slight manipulations of the truth. Alterations in the fabric of reality. Shifts in time and space.

  But I’ll continue to call them lies throughout this chapter, because three-letter words are convenient to type, and again, lies get attention. Alterations in the fabric of reality is the kind of wonky phrase used by a president who is facing impeachment.

  Three important caveats before we proceed with the five types of permissible lies in storytelling:

  Important Caveat #1

  As storytellers, we only lie for the benefit of our audience. We never lie for our own personal gain. We don’t manipulate the truth, alter the fabric of reality, or shift time and space for our own benefit. We’re not in the business of making ourselves look better, appearing more noble, or mitigating our shame or failure. We lie in our stories only when our audience would want us to lie — only when the story is better for our doing so.

  Important Caveat #2

  Memory is a slippery thing, and as storytellers, we must remember this. Research suggests that every time you tell a story, it becomes less true. Each time you remove a memory from the file cabinet of your mind and play with it for a while, you are unconsciously making changes, so when you return that folder to the file cabinet, the memory is permanently altered. We tell stories as well as we can remember them, but we must acknowledge that this is probably inaccurate in many ways.

  I tell a story about the night that my first child was conceived entitled “Sex with Corn.” It’s a story about my secret desire to avoid becoming a parent because I grew up as the eldest of five, filling in the role of parent so often because my parents were never present. As a boy, I felt perpetually overwhelmed and forever alone. I never wanted to feel this way again.

  But I loved my wife and agreed to at least one child so that she would marry me, and after two years of marriage, the time had come to finally make a baby. Thanks to the stupid internet and some baby-making website, Elysha knew the exact night when she was ovulating. Rather than a month-long carpet bombing of my wife’s uterus, I was relegated to a single, surgical strike. Even the fun had been stolen from making a baby.

  On that night when the internet told us to have sex, Elysha burned her hand terribly on a pan while making dinner. A blistering second-degree burn. As sympathetic as I was to her pain, I was also thinking, “Great. No sex tonight. Another month before I have to become a father.” A one-month reprieve doesn’t sound like much, but on that day, with fatherhood looming, twenty-eight days of freedom felt enormous.

  Later that night Elysha came to bed clutching a bag of frozen corn.

  “Honey,” I said. “No.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Just make it quick.”

  Not only had she given me an order that I was perfectly capable of following, but it was the moment I realized for the first time that I wasn’t going to be overwhelmed and alone this time around. As a father, I would have Elysha standing beside me, a woman willing to have sex with me while clinging to frozen vegetables. If she could do that, she could do anything.

  Why do I tell you this? When I was first preparing this story, I thought I was the one who had burned his hand. When Elysha overheard me preparing this story, her reaction was loud and immediate. “What did you say? You didn’t burn your hand! I did!”

  I thought she was crazy. I was certain that I was one with the blistering wound. We went back and forth for a while. Fortunately, I write a blog that basically documents my life, so we were able to go back to that evening’s entry and discover that Elysha was right. She had burned her hand. This, of course, made sense, since I almost never cook, and when I do, it’s eggs or macaroni and cheese.

  I also distinctly remember the moment of realization in our bedroom. “I won’t be alone when I’m a father. Elysha will be with me.” That makes no sense if I was the one with the burned hand.

  Still, I was sure that my hand had been burned. That is how I remembered it.

  Memory is a slippery thing. Our stories are true as we remember them, but even someone like me, who remembers more of his life than most people, doesn’t remember accurately. We must accept this.

  One of the things I often do when working on a story is contact the people involved for pertinent details. My sister, Kelli, has a memory for our childhood that rivals my own. She can tell you what she wore on the first and last day of school from kindergarten through her senior year of high school. She has been an enormous resource when recalling details, and others have been as well. Afte
r hearing me perform for the first time, my brother’s first comment to me was “You forgot the best part of that story!”

  It was true. I added the part he mentioned, and the story is much better for his reminder.

  My point is this: We want to tell true stories of our lives, but no story is entirely true. Intentionally or otherwise, our stories contain mistakes, inaccuracies, slippages of memory. All I am asking you to do is to be strategic in some of your inaccuracies, and only when it’s done for the benefit of the audience. Okay?

  Important Caveat #3

  As storytellers, we never add something to a story that was not already there. We can manipulate the story in ways I will explain, but never, ever do we add something that did not already exist in the moment. We are not fiction tellers. We are truth tellers. We may not tell the whole truth, and we may manipulate that truth from time to time, but we start with a pile of facts and figures, and we never add to that pile. It’s our job to take the raw content of a story and craft it into something entertaining, compelling, moving, and satisfying. Making something up is cheating, and great storytellers are not cheaters.

  The Five Permissible Lies of Storytelling

  Lie #1: Omission

  Every story contains omissions. If you were to tell every single thing in the story, it would never end. We all omit elements from our stories, but great storytellers do this strategically and for a variety of reasons.

  Here are a few of the strategic omissions in “Charity Thief,” as well as the reason for each omission.

  Randy

  I pick up a hitchhiker that day. His name is Randy, and he might be the craziest person I’ve ever met. I pick him up in hopes he will trade gas money for a ride, but he has no money.

  “Why would I be hitchhiking if I had money?” he asked.

  Randy is with me for much of the story. When I am standing on the porch as that man tells me about his dead wife, Randy is standing across the street, hiding behind a tree, wondering what the hell is going in.

  I remove Randy from the story because if you know that he is behind the tree as I speak to the man, then you are behind the tree with Randy instead of on the porch with me. Randy is hilarious and bizarre and would make my story funnier and maybe even more entertaining, but he doesn’t help me get my audience on the porch with me and the widower. Randy distracts. He does not serve my five-second moment, so he gets cut right out.

  People are the most frequently omitted aspects to stories: third wheels and random strangers who distract audiences from the matter at hand. If a person doesn’t fill a role in your story, simply pretend that person wasn’t there.

  My friend Tom tells the story about a girl named Liz whom he admired from afar in college for quite a while. One night he finally gets the courage to ask her to dance, and they end up dancing the night away.

  At the end of the evening, he asks to drive Liz home. She smiles and agrees. On the way, they finally have a chance to talk. Liz asks Tom what he’s doing at school.

  “I’m a junior,” Tom says. “Working on my education degree.”

  “A junior?” Liz says. She sounds confused. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty,” Tom says. “Why?”

  It turns out that Liz is twenty-seven. She works at the school. She’s just spent the evening dancing with a student in front of her colleagues. She’s embarrassed. She feels that she’s been tricked. She’s in a rage. She yells at Tom for the remainder of the drive.

  When they arrive at Liz’s apartment, she throws open the car door and storms up the walk.

  “Can I call you sometime?” Tom shouts.

  “I think you’re a little young for me!” Liz shouts back and marches to her door.

  Tom then tells the audience, “And when people ask how I met my wife, that is the story I tell.” Great. Right?

  One problem. There’s a third person in the car. Tom is driving another girl home too. She’s in the backseat. When Tom first told me the story, he included the third wheel, and instead of a story about him and Liz, it unintentionally becomes a story of a girl in an incredibly awkward situation in the backseat of a car. You cannot help but sympathize with this poor girl. Instead of being in the front seat with Tom and Liz, the audience is in the backseat with the third wheel.

  The third wheel needs to come out of the story so the audience can be where Tom needs them to be: in the front seat, right between him and Liz.

  Eliminate people from stories when they serve no purpose. Pretend they aren’t there. Ghost them.

  The Other Houses

  That blue door is the third door I knock on that day. I knock on two doors before that. At the first house, I’m given three dollars by a woman who looks as if she doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. At the second home, I get another five dollars. If you remember the story, I needed about eight dollars to get home.

  So why do I knock on the third door?

  Randy. He thinks we’ve stumbled upon a new career. He talks me into knocking on one more door. “We’ll buy candy and soda!” he says. “It’ll be amazing!”

  That’s when I meet the widower.

  Why do those other two houses come out of the story? They don’t help me get my audience on that porch with me and the widower. They are superfluous and unnecessary. They only add unnecessary repetition to the story. They don’t make you understand my five-second moment any better.

  Winston

  Remember the half-naked mountain man named Winston? I would love to tell you about Winston. He’s the owner of Winston’s Garage. He’s half naked because he’s wearing cutoff overalls and no shirt, and his overalls are handmade. They are lined with pockets that are each sized and shaped for a different tool. Small, medium, and large pockets for each of his screwdrivers. A holster for his wrench. A Velcro strap for his hammer. He is plastered in tools like some bizarre suit of armor.

  I buy the spare tire from Winston for $110. Every penny to my name. But when I ask him to drive me back to my car, he says, “That’ll be another $10.”

  “But Winston,” I say. “You know you just took all of my money.”

  He smiles. “Good thing tires are round.”

  Rolling that spare tire for five miles down a New Hampshire highway might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’d love to tell you about Winston and that damn tire, but none of it helps the audience land in my five-second moment on a front porch with a widower.

  Sadly, Winston must go. Someday I may tell a separate story about him and his haggling me out of all my money, but that story will be about a different five-second moment.

  Redemption

  Storytellers are also allowed to end their stories wherever they want, thus omitting endings that are undesirable. In “Charity Thief,” I end the story early. In truth, I return home from New Hampshire feeling terrible about what I have done. I’ve taken twenty-eight dollars from three homeowners, faked my mother’s death, and lied to a man who deserved better.

  So I make a deal with myself: Every time I receive a dollar bill in change as a customer of McDonald’s, I’ll put that dollar into the collection container until I pay back my twenty-eight dollars.

  I do this. I pay it back quickly, but I still feel awful about what I have done. In truth, a part of me still feels terrible to this day. So I continued to put dollar bills in the container every time I received one as change. I did this for years. It became a bit of a habit, until one day, I was standing beside Elysha at a McDonald’s, and she watched me slide another dollar into the canister.

  “Why do you always put a dollar in the canister every time you’re here?” she asked.

  I told her the story. At that point, I had paid back $604. Ever since placing that first dollar in the canister, I had been keeping count, waiting for the dollar amount that would finally alleviate me of my guilt.

  When I was finished with my story, Elysha put her hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s okay, Matt. You can let it go.” I did.

  The real endin
g of that story — with my redemption — is terrible. It ruins the story. But I didn’t realize this when I first took the stage at Housing Works in New York City to tell the story at a Moth StorySLAM. I told a version of the story that included the ending, and George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth and one of the judges that night, assigned me a decidedly lower score than the other judging teams. At that point, I knew who George was but had yet to meet him. I had wanted to impress, but apparently I had failed.

  It cost me the victory. I finished one-tenth of one point out of first place.

  As I left the bookstore that night, I stepped onto the wet cobblestones of Crosby Street and sighed. I was disappointed about how close I had come to winning. I thought I had told the best story that night.

  Suddenly I felt hands on my shoulders. I was spun in place and found myself facing George Dawes Green for the first time in my life.

  “You ruined that story!” he said.

  “What?” I replied, suddenly frightened of the man whom I admired beyond measure.

  “You ruined that story,” he repeated. “Don’t ever tell that ending again. No one wants redemption. Everyone wants the clown.”

  Then he released me from his grip, turned, and went back into the bookstore.

  I stood there in the drizzle, my mind reeling.

  I thought long and hard about what George had said on the three-hour drive home, and by the time I pulled into my driveway, I agreed with what he had said. The story is better without the redemption.

  Here is what I think: A story is like a coat. When we tell a story, we put a coat on our audience. Our goal is to make that coat as difficult to remove as possible. I want that coat to be impossible to take off. Days after you’ve heard my story at the dinner table or the conference room or the golf course or the theater, I want you to be thinking about my story. I want that coat to cling to your body and mind.

  The longer that story lingers in the hearts and minds of our audience, the better the story.

  When I tell my audience about the $604, I make it easy for the audience to remove the coat. “I did a terrible thing, but then I more than made up for my transgression. The world is back in order. All debts are paid.”