Storyworthy

by Matthew Dicks

  If I don’t tell my audience about my redemption, the world remains broken. I did a terrible thing, and it still weighs on my soul. It’s a much more difficult coat to remove. Days later you’ll find yourself thinking about what I did, because I will still be guilty of the crime in your mind. The world will still be broken.

  George is right. Audiences don’t want redemption. Redemption cleanses the palate. It ties up all loose ends. It makes the world whole again. It allows your audience to sleep well at night.

  I want my audience tossing and turning over my story.

  When I write novels, I try to end my story about ten pages before the reader would want the book to end. In that way, I’m also putting a coat on my audience. If the reader emails me with a question about the end of one of my books — what happened to Martin and Laura? Are they together? What did Emma say to Cassidy? Is Budo in heaven? Does Caroline ever reach out to the driver in the accident? — I know I’ve stuck them with a coat that they cannot shake. I am happy. They are curious about people who don’t actually exist. My story remains alive in their hearts and minds long after they have finished reading the last sentence.

  Storytellers end their stories in the most advantageous place possible. They omit the endings that offer neat little bows and happily-ever-afters. The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results. The best stories give rise to unanswered questions.

  I told “Charity Thief” again at a Moth StorySLAM in Boston a couple of years later. I was chosen to take the stage first that night, which is typically the kiss of death in a Moth StorySLAM. Score inflation makes it difficult to win a slam from the first few spots, and it makes it almost impossible to win from the very first spot of the night. I’ve only seen one person win a Moth Story-SLAM after having to take the stage first. It was me. That night.

  I left out the redemption.

  Storytellers tell the truth by not telling the whole truth.

  Lie #2: Compression

  Compression is used when storytellers want to push time and space together in order to make the story easier to comprehend, visualize, and tell.

  If the first scene of your story takes place on a Monday, for example, and the next scene happens on Friday, and you are concerned about the audience wondering about Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, you simply push time together and turn your Monday-through-Friday story into a Monday-through-Tuesday story.

  Placing scenes closer together also heightens the drama and suspense of a story. It makes the world seem more visceral and cinematic.

  I tell a story entitled “Bike off Roof,” which tells about the time I rode my bike off the barn roof as a child to get my mother’s attention. It doesn’t go well. My plan was to jump my bike off the roof and land on two wheels, but it turns out that physics doesn’t allow that to happen.

  In the story, I talk about planning and executing the jump as a single continuous scene. The entire story takes place over the course of a single afternoon.

  In reality, my sister and I planned the jump on one day and I executed it the next. But why stretch out a story over the course of two days when nothing of consequence happens between the planning and execution? It’s easier for an audience to see and understand my story if all the events take place within a single afternoon.

  My Saturday-Sunday story becomes a Saturday-afternoon story. (You can also find this story on the “Storyworthy the Book” YouTube channel.)

  Geography can also be compressed for the sake of comprehension and visualization. I tell a story entitled “The Basin” about damming a river in New Hampshire to drain the Basin, an enormous granite bowl carved into the hillside of a mountain by the river. The Basin is a minor tourist attraction, and after an encounter with an overconfident park ranger, who assures me that the water has been running through this granite formation for thousands of years without interruption, I decide to empty his precious Basin and prove him wrong.

  The geography of the story is complicated. The flow of the river and the location of the highway and my campground upstream can make the story difficult to follow, so when I tell the story, I push the geography closer together and eliminate unnecessary locations and barriers completely. I paint the picture of a single river running from my campground to the Basin, when in reality it was far more convoluted and wide-ranging.

  There is never room for needless complexity in a story. Remember that stories are like rivers (not unlike the river I dammed up to empty the Basin). They continue to flow even as your audience struggles to understand a time line or attempts to construct a complicated mental map in their minds. For this reason, simplicity should be prized at all points. Compression can often be helpful in this regard.

  Lie #3: Assumption

  Storytellers use assumption when there is a detail so important to the story that it must be stated with specificity, so the storyteller makes a reasonable assumption about what the specifics may be. This does not mean that a storyteller should assume all details. It is only when the forgotten detail is critical to the story that an assumption should be made.

  I tell a story about the time my brother and I dropped our Batman and Robin action figures through the rusted-out hole in the floor of my mother’s 1972 Chevy Chevette as she drove down the highway. We tied rope to the figures and let out the line until Batman and Robin were bouncing behind the car. Then we tied off the line on the gearshift and hopped into the way-back to watch them ricochet off the road and each other. It was the 1970s version of an iPad. Hours of entertainment on those long drives.

  One day Batman ricocheted off Robin and bounced into the opposing lane and hit a car, setting off a chain of events that launches the story.

  I can’t remember the model or make of the car that Batman hit, but it’s such a critical moment in the story that I want everyone in the audience to see the same thing at the same time, so I make an assumption. Since it’s the 1970s, I declare that the car was a station wagon, because that was a common vehicle on the roads in the seventies.

  I’d love to say it was a cherry-red Corvette instead of a station wagon, because it would make the story more interesting, but when I assume (and I don’t very often), I always make the most reasonable and likely assumption.

  Lie #4: Progression

  A lie of progression is when a storyteller changes the order of events in a story to make it more emotionally satisfying or comprehensible to the listener. In my experience, this is the least common lie told, and I have never done it myself, but I’ve recommended that other storytellers use it from time to time.

  My favorite example is from a storyteller who was placed in charge of her brother’s ashes following his death. Her brother was a Baltimore Orioles fan, so she hoped to spread his ashes on Camden Yards, the Orioles’ ballpark.

  This is impossible, of course. If ashes could be spread on professional baseball fields, stadiums would be heaped up with ashes and games could never be played.

  Still, she went to Camden Yards three days after the season ended and spoke to a groundskeeper outside the stadium. They shared an incredible, tear-filled moment, and then he let her spread her brother’s ashes on the foot of the Orioles’ dugout so that every time a player runs onto the field, he would carry a little bit of her brother with them.

  Beautiful. Right? Then she went to Baltimore’s inner harbor and spread more of her brother’s ashes on the doorsteps of his favorite strip clubs, so every time a man entered a strip club, he would carry a little bit of her brother with him.

  Then she ended her day at a tree where the family picnicked for years. Family members gathered for a brief ceremony, and the remaining ashes were buried there.

  Beautiful story, but told in the wrong order. The Camden Yards moment is the centerpiece to the story, and it will make you cry, so it needs to happen at the end of the story. It’s her true five-second moment. Nothing she says after that moment at the ballpark feels as important.

  The
strip-club moment should come just before that, because it’s always better to make people laugh before they cry. It hurts more that way.

  And she should open her story at the tree, where she can establish the family members and their relationship and set the scene for all that is to come.

  She isn’t adding anything to the story that doesn’t already exist. She’s simply reengineering the order of events for the benefit of the audience, who expect an emotional journey to follow a certain trajectory.

  Change the order of the story if the real-life order did not adhere to narrative expectations. The world does not always bend to serve our stories best, so we must sometimes bend reality instead.

  Lie #5: Conflation

  Storytellers use conflation to push all the emotion of an event into a single time frame, because stories are more entertaining this way. Rather than describing change over a long period, we compress all the intellectual and emotional transformation into a smaller bit of time, because this is what audiences expect from stories.

  For example, I fell in love with a girl named Heather in sixth grade. I looked across Mrs. Schultz’s classroom and saw Heather in a way I had never seen her before. It was the moment I went from a boy who thought nothing of girls to a boy who couldn’t stop thinking about girls. Heather was beautiful, funny, athletic, and best of all, she didn’t seem to give a damn about what others thought. I have often thought that confidence is the most attractive quality in a person.

  I loved Heather throughout all of sixth grade but was too afraid to do anything about it. I watched her from afar and dreamed of the day we might be together.

  In seventh grade, Heather and I went off to high school and joined the marching band. I was a member of the drum corps, and she transitioned from flute player to drum major. I saw her a lot. I stared at her as she conducted the band, because I needed to in order to keep time and play well, but also because I wanted to stare at her as often as possible.

  Later we both joined the track team and saw even more of each other. Still I did nothing.

  In eighth and ninth grades, I tried to talk to Heather. Tried to make her laugh. Prayed that she would take notice of me. She started dating a guy named Greg, which was one of the universe’s greatest tragedies.

  What were you thinking, Heather?

  Still I didn’t care. I still tried like hell to get her attention. In tenth grade, Heather and I were in biology class together. Being a fifteen-year-old boy, I was convinced that the best way to get a girl’s attention was to treat teachers terribly, disrupt class, and show as little interest in learning as possible. I honestly thought that acting like a criminal would finally make Heather realize all that she was missing. So I began treating Mrs. Murphy, our biology teacher, terribly.

  I tell a story about it. At the end, after describing how I failed miserably to get the attention of anyone except Mrs. Murphy, I say, “That was the moment when I realized that Heather would never be mine.”

  This is not entirely true. If I’m being honest, I never really thought that Heather would be mine. As much as I dreamed about the two of us being together, I strongly suspected that I had a snowball’s chance in hell of ever making it happen.

  Besides, even after my biology-class failure, I still held out hope for our union, struggling to get her to see me at band camp the following summer. But it’s a far more interesting story if I take all the emotional and intellectual transformation of the four previous years before biology class and the summer after biology class and squeeze it into that one class.

  That is conflation. I conflate the emotions of the moment. I transform a moment into the moment.

  Movies do this all the time. If you track the number of days that pass over the course of the average movie, the number is small. A lot of stuff is often jammed into one or two days of movie time, when in real life, no one ever has days so packed with action.

  Think again about the Ocean’s Eleven franchise. Danny Ocean and his gang plan their heist over the course of just a few days, struggling to complete the preparations for the robbery in time. In real life, the multimillion-dollar robbery of a casino might take years to plan, but years are boring. Days are thrilling.

  Conflation will also help you to keep your stories shorter, which is always a good thing. Shorter stories, onstage and in real life, are always more entertaining. Audiences would much rather hear about the moment I realized that Heather would never be my girlfriend than the process by which I slowly came to understand this.

  Feel the difference?

  One more caveat to all these permissible lies: using these lies strategically works great until someone who is directly involved in the story is standing beside you, listening.

  If I were to tell “Bike off Roof” in the presence of my sister, Kelli, she might interject and remind me that we actually planned my infamous jump off the barn roof the day before.

  This can be annoying beyond imagination. “Yeah,” I’d say. “I know, but it’s a better story if I just push those two days into a single day. Okay?”

  “Why?” she might ask.

  Now what? Do I try to explain to her that books are lakes and stories are rivers? Do I tell her that I want my stories to be easily visualized and understood? Do I lecture her on how Steven Soderbergh forces Danny Ocean’s crew to plan their casino heist in just a few days because that’s what an audience wants? Or should I just tell her that she’s not remembering it right? It’s never good.

  Elysha does this to me a lot. As I’m telling a story to friends at a party or students in a workshop, she’ll interrupt and tell me that I’m getting it wrong. I’ve forgotten the third wheel. Squished together the days. Failed to tell the real end to the story.

  Sometimes this is helpful, like when I mistakenly believed that I was the one who burned his hand on that frying pan. If I’m crafting a story, that’s a great time to help me get the story straight. Not when I’m in the middle of telling it.

  While I was telling the story of our daughter’s birth, Elysha interrupted to remind me that there were two doctors with us behind the curtain during her C-section instead of just the one I mentioned.

  I know there were two doctors back there. Both were anesthesiologists. But only one plays a role in the story. He looks over the curtain and says, “It’s a girl.”

  I remove the third wheel from the story to eliminate some of the mental clutter. Fewer superfluous people make for a better story. It’s easier to visualize three instead of four. And that other doctor never did anything as far as I’m concerned. So like Randy and Winston and the girl in the back of Tom’s car, he is removed.

  I understand Elysha’s intent. She doesn’t want the reality of her life altered by my telling of a story. She would prefer that her memories of that important day remain accurate.

  I understand. I want my memories of that day to remain accurate too. Except when I’m telling stories.

  STORY BREAK

  Doubt Is the Enemy of Every Storyteller

  For me as a storyteller — and perhaps a human being — one of the worst things that can happen is to have someone doubt my story.

  I have stood on stages all over the world and shared some of the most difficult and painful moments of my life. Embarrassing situations. Despicable decisions. Immoral acts. Heartbreaking, life-altering events. I’ve also shared the occasional triumph. Important revelations. Those tiny steps forward. I don’t hold back. I always share the truth. The uglier, the better.

  Nevertheless, five times in my life, someone has expressed doubt about one of my stories.

  At a Moth StorySLAM at Housing Works in Manhattan in 2014, I told the story of cheating in my high-school science fair and placing third, propelling me on to the state finals at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After leaving the stage, a man approached and said, “Good story, but I don’t know if it’s true.”

  After telling a story at Speak Up about the time I taught my students to lie so we could win a schoolwide penny drive,
a man said, “Funny story, but I have a hard time believing it.” On that night, my former principal — who played a key role in the story — was in the audience. I offered to bring the man to my former principal for verification, but he passed. Not surprising.

  A magazine editor once rejected one of my stories, claiming that she doubted that my moment of revelation was as succinct and powerful as I made it out to be.

  I won’t go into details regarding the other two incidents (though one story involves my best friend, who remains annoyed to this day about anyone doubting our adventure), but all five expressions of doubt cut me to the bone. Not only did they hurt me in the moment, but they led me to wonder if they are just the tip of the iceberg.

  How many more people out there doubt my stories?

  People who take my storytelling workshops quickly understand how and why I have so many stories to tell. I teach strategies and exercises designed to find and develop stories from our lives. I’ve dedicated my life to finding these storyworthy moments, and as my wife is fond of saying, I am often able to turn many seemingly small moments into fully realized stories. I’ve also admittedly led a storyworthy life.

  It’s not the life I would have necessarily chosen, but it is mine. It’s my truth. It’s me.

  To doubt my stories is to doubt my life. Doubting my stories means that the struggle and pain and terror and embarrassment that I have suffered is called into question. It means that my scars — both physical and emotional — are irrelevant. It renders the vulnerability I am willing to brave onstage meaningless.

  It hurts. It hurts more than you could imagine.

  I have been to hundreds of storytelling shows and heard thousands of stories, and I have heard a few that I doubt. Perhaps more than a few. But I always listen with an open heart and mind, and if I doubt the veracity of a story, I keep my mouth shut, because I don’t know for sure. I will never know for sure. And I know how much it hurts to have someone doubt a story that is true.