Reading Journal 2024: Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling
Author: Matthew Dicks
Simple, straightforward, immensely applicable and practical. The essential premise basically goes like this- we all have stories to tell, learning how to tell the stories of your life, and learning how to tell them well, is both necessary and important for your engagement of the world and your personal growth/development, and we all have the capacity to be good storytellers no matter who you are.
In this sense this is both an argument for the power of story and the necessity of storytelling as an art that connects us to humanity throughout history and to one another. He states upfront that there is no single, schooled theory or exact science in play here when it comes to storytelling, rather he simply wants to argue that the principles of the craft that he learned, even unexpectedly, can have tried and true practical impact on becoming better storytellers. And most of this book sticks with the practical, although the philosophy, or the why of why this matters, does sneak in through the process.
He defines story as personal narratives that are telling our stories from our point of view, which is the only point of view we really have. This is true even when we are telling stories about other people- we are still the one seeing and telling this story from our point of view as part of our story. This becomes a crucial point of observation when it comes to being good storytellers. Telling stories about others that pretend they are stories that are not from our perspective equals bad storytelling.
Even in this set up we get a why observation- “we tell stories to express our hardest, best, most authentic truths.” And as such, your stories must reflect change, as the reason we express such thoughts is because something unsettled us in some area in some way. For our stories to be true they must begin with one version of yourself and end up with another, even if this is simply capturing something of how we observe the world or others or ourselves. To do otherwise us to be reduced to an “anecdote.”
The first piece of practical advice- indulge the dinner test. Is the story you are sharing something you would tell off the cuff at a dinner table with friends or family? If not it is likely not a good story and/or constructed so as to lose its power. Many of the tools the author is going to employ will be about freeing yourself to be intentional about the story you are telling while retaining that sense of being off the cuff. This is as important for you as the storyteller as it is for the ones hearing the story. What you are building is the art of everyday conversation, and learning how to be aware of that gap between teller and hearer (and why that gap exists, remains, or is bridged through the art of storytelling good and bad). In other words, it is about the natural presence and practice of relationship through conversation.
One pushback he notes is that the reason people don’t engage the art of storytelling (or good storytelling) is because they don’t believe they have stories to tell, or worthwhile ones. This would be false. We all experience story worthy moments all the time and every day. We just don’t pay attention to those moments, and thus they tend to pass us by, often overshadowed by our addiction to what we percieve as the big moments that are worth sharing. We look at someone who has experienced these big moments and think they have good stories, and that leads us not to tell ours as they pale in comparison. The author does good work breaking down this fallacy, showing how those supposed big stories worth telling aren’t actually good stories unless they are about the small, important things, and showing how any small moment can be turned into a significant and important story.
This leads to what might be the most important practice in the book- learning how to journal your everyday life. A small amount of time spent each day jotting down moments, memories, observations, can change how you see your life, and how you tell the story of your life. It can help you see where you are in the world and why it matters. But here is the catch: this is not just a temporary homework assignment, it is about establishing a way of life. It is a lifelong commitment. It requires a posture of allowing life to upend you when you become aware of such moments, of learning not to judge your life using external measures, and of forging the process as a discipline.
As the author states, stories, as you find them, will fill in the mental maps of your life and show you how big that map is. And above all, it requires you not to feel awkward or ashamed or dumb about telling “your story”. Everyone does, whether they realize it or not. This is not an appeal to the ego, rather it is about learning how to engage perspective. And we naturally desire others to tell their stories precisely because this is how we get to know a person. The fact that we tell our stories often gets conflated with examples we all know but might not be able to articulate of bad storytelling. Bad storytelling hinges on this- telling our stories in ways that keep others out of our story and unable to relate/understand/experience. It is a communicative issue, not an issue of “talking about ourselves.” Talking about ourselves, and listening to others talk about themselves, should be about bridging relational gaps, not creating them or perpetuating them.
In the midst of this the author seeks to help us make sense of what good storytelling is by outlining a singular overarching and governing truth- all great stories tell of a five second moment in a person’s life. This is true regardless of length and depth. Why? Because this is where the change is rooted, and that change is usually rooted in a point of awareness. And with this as our “bedrock”, we can then move to the second basic truth- start with the ending. Why? Because your beginning will always be the opposite of the ending. Using these three basic points can help you turn any five second moment into a story. Once we know the ending, which should be the most obvious element of that five second moment, all else is in service to this. And in truth, the rest of the book is basically about the art of “keeping” people in your story by making certain things automatic to how you talk and share (avoid “ands” and lean into “buts” for example, or avoid rhetorical statements and questions and props and hand gestures as your goal is to keep the listener in their imagination not in yours).
The practicalities get more specific from here. Understanding how to use humor, learning how not to be afraid of leaving out unnecessary details or conflating different events into a singular one or condensing time lines. This is how all memories work after all. Doing such things does not change the facts or truths of a story, they simply make it communicable and understandable based on how our brains work.
There is a whole lot that I took away from this book. In truth, I have always been compelled by the idea of telling our stories and there is lots here that cuts through some of the fears and hesitancies (and fallacies) that I have often wrestled with. One of the biggest ones is the simple observation that everyone is ultimately talking about themselves, and we want each other to do this. We require it. Poor communication is the obstacle, not seeing the world from our our perspective or sharing that perspective. Talking about our selves, or our stories, is what we all need to be doing more of.
If I had one small critique it is that the author does tend to hide some important and relevant and defining assumptions on his way to trying to speak objectively about the functional aspects of storytelling. One of the biggest things that can derail people is feeling like their story is false or untrue or not believed. What makes matters worse is having this feeling translate to an awareness of a fact about the nature of who we are (or the self), about the untrustworthiness of memory, or the nature of illusions versus truth. Think about it this way: when we exist in a relationship with someone we experience it as a feeling of love. When love gets broken down and revealed as a material process involving biochemistry and mechanisms that can be reduced and manipulated, love loses its power in conjunction with this awareness. Same with the self or the will. Storytelling requires us to invest in these things as true and meaningful, to trust that they exist as transcendent qualities, and thus we must be able to move from the functional back to that transcendent quality for it to be meaningful. We have to forget about the functional. Certainly the author wants us to know and feel and experience this even as he is breaking down the functional aspects. If it doesn’t feel or sound authentic after all then it won’t feel what we call human, however undefinable that notion is.
Along the way he sneaks in some untold assumptions though regarding his worldview that seem to sit counter to the things he is arguing for regarding meaning and life and personhood. I’m less bothered by the worldview as I am by the fact that it seemed to be snuck in through the backdoor, even made to appear as something different than he actually believes. In this context that has a way of making the many stories he tells in this book as practical examples feel false and manipulative by nature of them hiding inportant convictions that might change my conception of what he is saying or arguing for. This is me though. Being able to see and hold on to and accept the why is important to me. Indeed, it is crucial to my ability to live. And when I get this invested in a book and a concept and a revelation (which I was) it can have a particular impact when i end up feeling like the underlying assumptions mislead what I was hearing and feeling and experiencing. Especially when I know if life is a game intended to be manipulated on a functional level that it leads me to many other points of contention and crisis and conclusions.
With that aside though, and being able to compartmentalize that appropriately in hindsight, there is much here that I would call potentially life changing in practice and even in theory.
The Stories of my Life 