Storyworthy

by Matthew Dicks

  Shoulders slump. Faces contort in anger. People groan. They shake their heads in disgust. They experience an emotional reaction very similar to the one I experienced that day.

  Why? They are surprised. They wanted my plan to work. They expected it to work. It sounds like something that should have worked.

  If I don’t explain my plan before I enter the gas station, no one is surprised if the kid says no. He should say no. Who gives away free gas? It’s only when I load up my audience with a complete description of my plan, as well as all my hopes and dreams, that they experience the surprise of the refusal.

  The same thing happens later in that story, when I say, “Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m collecting money for Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities.” It’s the most surprising moment of the story. People either gasp or laugh when they hear me say those words. If you’ll remember, I accentuate this surprise with a Breadcrumb and an Hourglass. I give a hint about what is to come (a crumpled McDonald’s uniform), and I make the audience wait forever to hear it by slowing my speech and adding enormous amounts of unnecessary description and repetition.

  Can you imagine how less surprising the moment would be if I had climbed into my car, spotted the crumpled McDonald’s uniform, and said, “I know. I’m going to go door-to-door pretending to be a charity worker.” Still surprising, perhaps, but not nearly so.

  Yet this is what many storytellers do. Rather than seeking ways to make the surprise even more surprising, they kill the surprise through a failure to accentuate it. They fail to take advantage of the power of stakes to make something that is potentially surprising truly surprising.

  Failing to hide critical information in a story.

  As storytellers, we must hide pertinent information from our audiences to allow the surprise to pay off later. I often refer to this as planting a bomb in a story that will explode when the time is right.

  In “This Is Going to Suck,” the bomb that I plant is the moment that I ask the nurse to call McDonald’s to tell my manager that I can’t make it to work. This is important. It’s critical to the story. It’s the reason why my friends know about the accident and make their way to the emergency room. But I don’t want my audience to foresee these events, so I hide this important moment in two ways:

  Hiding the Bomb in the Clutter

  We hide these important moments by making them seem unimportant. We do this by hiding critical information among other details. We make the important information seem no more important than the rest of the information by pushing it all together.

  In the case of “This Is Going to Suck,” I turn my all-important request for the nurse to call McDonald’s into just another detail by placing it amid a series of doctors’ and nurses’ interactions with me. Rather than highlighting the encounter, I add it to a long list:

  Nurses picking glass from my forehead

  Dental surgeons wiring teeth

  Doctors prepping my knees for surgery

  A nurse asking for contact information

  See what I did? It’s a critical moment in the story, essential to all that is to come, but I portray the nurse as just another medical professional doing another job. Oftentimes I will load a portion of a story with superfluous information simply to hide the one important bit of information that I need the audience to know but not yet recognize as important. I clutter the landscape so that the audience can’t tell what is important and what is not.

  Camouflage

  I also camouflage the bomb within a laugh. Laughter is the best camouflage, because it is also an emotional response, and audience members assume that the laugh is the result of the storyteller’s wanting to be funny.

  This is never the case. Comedians want to be funny. Great storytellers want to be remembered. For this reason, they deploy laughter strategically. I’ll talk more about this in the next chapter, but when it comes to preserving surprise, laughter is an excellent way to hide something important that needs to surprise the audience later on.

  In “This Is Going to Suck,” I ask the nurse to call McDonald’s (a fact I want to hide), so then I say, “[The nurse] looks at me as if I’m crazy, which I kind of am. I was dead twenty minutes ago and now I’m worried about work, but that drive-through does not run well without me, and they’re going to have to get someone in.”

  That laugh line draws attention away from the importance and relevance of this moment. It makes the moment feel like a storyteller’s attempt at a joke instead of the conveying of a critical bit of information.

  This is an exceptionally important concept in storytelling. If you can’t hide critical details and preserve the surprise, the audience sees it coming a mile away. In that case, you may as well not even tell your story.

  A couple of examples:

  I tell a story about the time my girlfriend’s father surprised me by serving me my pet rabbit on Thanksgiving.

  When I’m twenty years old, Bengi and I decide to buy a pair of rabbits and keep them in the house as pets in hopes that girls would think this sweet and like us more.

  It kind of works. Girls come over to see the rabbits and hang out for the rest of the day. I don’t know if they like me more, but they hang around our apartment longer and more often, which is great for me. My primary means of attracting girls has always been proximity. I stand as close to a girl as possible as long as possible, hoping to wear her down. I crack jokes and tell stories, and eventually the girl might turn my way.

  Sounds silly, I know, but remember this: Elysha fell in love with me while our classrooms were separated by about twenty-five feet of hallway. Proximity. It’s genius.

  Bengi and I train the rabbits to use a litter box, feed them rabbit food in cereal bowls, and basically give them the run of the house.

  A few months later, the rabbits begin chewing incessantly through the electrical cords on the TV and lamps, so we decide it’s time for them to move on. My girlfriend’s father keeps rabbits in a large hutch behind his house, so when he hears about my problem, he offers to take them off our hands. I’m thrilled.

  Then he feeds the rabbit to me at Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t know it at the time, but my girlfriend’s father is Portuguese, and the Portuguese eat rabbit the same way I eat chicken. Nor did I realize that my girlfriend’s father raised rabbits to sell to local restaurants. To him, a rabbit is nothing more than a food source.

  Still, he knew the rabbit was my pet. He understood the difference. He thought he was being funny. It was a terrible thing to do.

  The trick of the story is to not allow the audience to foresee me eating my rabbit until the moment I take my first bite of the stew. I need it to be a surprise. It’s not easy.

  I maintain the surprise in the story by hiding the rabbit in a laundry list of things I do to try to impress my girlfriend’s father, who is manlier than I will ever be. Bonding over his adoption of my rabbit is just one of many ways that I try to earn this man’s respect and admiration and perhaps become the kind of man I’ve always wanted to be.

  I hide the rabbit in the clutter of the story. I make my rabbit just one of the details (and an amusing one, using laughter as camouflage) instead of the most important element of the story, which it truly is. So when my girlfriend’s father asks, “What do you think about the stew?” the audience still doesn’t know that I’m eating my rabbit, because it doesn’t feel like a story about a rabbit.

  “It’s good,” I say. “I like it.”

  My girlfriend’s father smiles and says, “You should like it because . . .” That is the moment when the audience realizes that I am eating my rabbit, just one second before I realized it back in 1991. When I told the story for the first time, the audience gasped in horror. One of them shouted, “No! No!”

  By hiding the rabbit in the story, and by making it no less obvious than any other detail, I was able to maintain the surprise and give my audience the emotional reaction that the story demanded.

  In another animal-related story, a couple whose wedding
I DJed decided to name their dog after me because I was “the most fun person they had ever met.”

  I’m not kidding. It was one of the best days of my life.

  By the way, keep in mind that my DJ partner’s name is Bengi. The couple could have named their dog after the guy who is named after a dog, but instead they named their dog after me. I am an objectively fun person.

  At the end of the story, Matty the dog unbelievably moves into the apartment below mine. Matty the man ends up living above Matty the dog. What are the odds?

  I want my audience to be as surprised as I am when I discover this. Therefore, like the rabbit, the story can’t be about Matty the dog, and it’s not. It’s really a story about my pending divorce from my first wife and my belief that my life is probably over.

  When, at the end of the story, Matty the dog arrives at the apartment below mine, his leash isn’t being held by the bride’s husband. The groom is nowhere to be found. Instead she is standing beside the best man from the wedding.

  Yes. She left her husband for the best man, and she took the dog with her.

  It’s a story about realizing that perhaps I didn’t have it so bad after all. Somewhere in the world, there is a man who has lost his wife, his best friend, and his dog. Despite my pending divorce, I still had my best friend, Bengi, and I still had my dog, and maybe, just maybe, I still had a future.

  But the story doesn’t work without surprise. When the dog appears (along with the bride and best man), you need to be surprised that it’s Matty the dog. You need to be surprised that it’s the bride. You need to be surprised that it’s the best man. You can’t see any of this coming.

  So, as with the rabbits, I hide the dog early in the story as an example of why I am an objectively fun person even though my ex-wife is complaining that I am boring. “How can I be boring when a couple named their dog after me because I am the most fun person they know?”

  Just like that, the dog becomes a detail rather than a major plot point. I tuck the dog in between other details about the problems in our marriage, to obscure it even further.

  I also place the dog early in the story, as far away from the payoff as possible, and I use that line “The couple could have named the dog after the guy who is named after a dog, but instead they named the dog after me” to punctuate the moment with a laugh, further obscuring the importance that the dog will play later.

  Just a funny detail. Not the most important detail in the whole damn story.

  When I tell the story, the audience realizes that it’s Matty the dog at the last possible second, only after I’ve identified the woman who is moving into the apartment as the bride. The dog appears, and the audience smiles, realizing what’s happening. Matty the dog is moving in below Matty the man. This moment usually gets a laugh.

  But the surprises aren’t over yet, though the audience thinks so. It’s not until I fail to see the groom but rather spot the best man that the audience puts two and two together and the laughter quickly transitions into audible groans. Emotional response achieved by preserving the surprise in the story and maximizing it to its greatest effect.

  To review, the strategies for preserving and enhancing surprise in a story:

  1.Avoid thesis statements in storytelling.

  2.Heighten the contrast between the surprise and the moment just before the surprise.

  3.Use stakes to increase surprise.

  4.Avoid giving away the surprise in your story by hiding important information that will pay off later (planting bombs). This is done by:

  •Obscuring them in a list of other details or examples.

  •Placing them as far away from the surprise as possible.

  •When possible, building a laugh around them to further camouflage their importance.

  STORY BREAK

  The Return of Mathieu

  When you stand on a stage in front of hundreds of people and tell a story, strange connections can be made.

  It’s June 2013. I’m competing in a Moth StorySLAM at The Bitter End. I’m telling a story about my time student-teaching in Mrs. Rothstein’s first-grade class in Berlin, Connecticut. There was a boy in the class named Mathieu who refused to listen to a word I was saying. I was working in the class for about a week, and he had already made me feel stupid. I was embarrassed about my inability to get a six-year-old boy to obey me. I was starting to wonder if I was meant to be a teacher.

  I was running our morning meeting for the first time, and Mathieu was once again causing trouble. I finally decided to lay down the law. “If you don’t stop it, I’m going to call your mother!” I told him.

  Mathieu’s mother was dead. She had died earlier that year. I knew this, but in my fit of anger and embarrassment, I’d forgotten.

  I finish telling that story at The Bitter End and return to my seat. During intermission, a young man approaches me and says, “I know the Mathieu in your story!”

  “Not possible,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “It’s true.” He cites the unusual spelling of the first name (which was mentioned in the story) and other similarities between his friend and the Mathieu in my story.

  They both lost their mothers in the first grade. They both grew up in Connecticut. They both behaved badly in elementary school.

  “It can’t be,” I say. “It’s not possible. What are the odds?”

  But it was true. A week later, I am exchanging emails with the boy I had taught fourteen years earlier. I apologize for my stupid and callous remark. I hope that he didn’t harbor anger or resentment toward me.

  His response: “I don’t remember it at all. I don’t really remember you. I know some man came into our class in first grade for a little while, but then he left.”

  So much for leaving an indelible mark on those kids. Still, my fear that I had somehow scarred Mathieu for life was gone. That burden had been lifted.

  I lost the slam that night to an exceptional storyteller named Kate Greathead, but for once in my life, winning didn’t matter. Or almost didn’t matter. I lost by a tenth of a point, which always stings. But I had won something much greater that night.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Milk Cans and Baseballs, Babies and Blenders: Simple, Effective Ways to Be Funny in Storytelling (Even If You’re Not Funny at All)

  First, some hard truth: I can’t make you a funny person. Many people (always men) have taken my workshops in the hope that I could teach them to be funny. I can’t. I’m not sure if anyone can. But here’s some good news:

  •Stories need not be funny. Though many of my stories have funny moments, and some are funny throughout much of the story, they are not all funny.

  •Even if you’re not a funny person, you can still craft a story that contains funny moments.

  •Some of your stories will likely be funny even if you’re not funny at all. I tell the story entitled “Strip Club of My Own Making” about the time I stripped for a bachelorette party in the crew room of a McDonald’s. This is situationally funny, no matter what I do. The least funny person on the planet can’t make this story unfunny.

  •Stories should never only be funny. The best ones are those that use humor strategically. Ideally you want your audience to experience a range of emotions over the course of your story. You can’t achieve this if your audience is laughing for the entire time.

  This is the difference between storytelling and stand-up comedy.

  Imagine: You attend a fantastic night of stand-up comedy. The next day your coworker says, “Tell me some of the jokes you heard.” Oftentimes you can’t.

  Maybe you remember bits and pieces of a few, but unless you saw a comic like Louis C.K., who bases his comedy in storytelling (and was honored by The Moth for his promotion of it), you can’t reproduce many jokes, and probably none at all. The comic makes you feel good. You laugh all night. But the content doesn’t stick. A week later, you probably won’t remember a single thing from the show.

  A story, however, can stay with you for th
e rest of your life. There are books, movies, television programs, and hopefully oral stories that you will remember until the day you die. There are lots of reasons for this, but one is that great storytelling isn’t a single thing. Stories aren’t only funny. The best ones take you on an emotional journey, always landing somewhere in the heart, and that leaves an indelible mark that stand-up comedy cannot.

  Stand-ups want the audience to laugh at all times. Storytellers want the audience to laugh at the right times. Humor is an enormous asset in most stories, but it is not required and should be used strategically whenever possible.

  Let’s consider the humor in “This Is Going to Suck.” The story of my near-fatal car accident is not funny. No one would ever characterize it as funny, and yet I use humor four times in the story, in four very strategic ways, for four very different reasons:

  1. Start with a laugh.

  The first time I try to make the audience laugh is at the start of the story. Audiences usually laugh when Pat tells me that “Guys don’t buy Christmas presents for other guys. Especially surprise Christmas presents.” But even if they don’t laugh there, they will almost always laugh at the disclosure that I have also bought a surprise Christmas present for Pat.

  I try to make the audience laugh here, because it’s always good to get your audience to laugh in the first thirty seconds of a story. A laugh at the beginning does these three things:

  1.It signals to the audience: “I’m a good storyteller. I know what I’m doing. You can relax.”

  2.In a small, less formal situation, this early laugh will serve as a stop sign for potential interruptions. It serves as an unspoken signal that you have the floor. In fact, whenever faced with a person who cannot stop interrupting, I will often try to make the people around us laugh (never at the expense of the interrupter) to reassert my control over the space. “I made them laugh. I’ve got the floor. Let me finish, damn it.”

  3.An early laugh lets the audience know that regardless of how serious, intense, or disturbing the story I am telling may be, I’m okay now. “I made you laugh. Everything is fine. Whatever horror I’m about to tell you about, it’s in the past.”