Storyworthy

Foreword by Dan Kennedy

Overview

Most people think a story worth telling needs a dramatic life to go with it, so they wait for something big to happen. Meanwhile the smallest moments pass by, never recognized as material, never captured, never kept.

Small moments, not extreme ones

A hard life does not make someone a storyteller. The smallest moments often make the best stories. Everyone has stories, and the work is to find them in ordinary life and keep them for later. The material is already there.

Daniel Kahneman's idea is that people make decisions through stories, not numbers. Ani DiFranco says writing is how she becomes herself, and her songs later come true. Alan Rickman saw storytelling as a human need that grows stronger when people feel ruled by fools and powerless over their own futures.

Key Takeaways

• You don't need a dramatic life to tell a story; ordinary moments give you plenty, and the work is to notice them and keep them.
• Stories are how people judge and persuade, not just decoration on top of data and numbers.
• Writing can bring a self into being, and the stories a person tells can shape the life that follows.
• Storytelling is a basic human need that sharpens when people feel badly governed and powerless, and it gives them dignity and a sense of agency.

Chapter 1. My Promise to You

Overview

You may have no desire to stand on a stage or perform. So why learn to find and tell stories at all? If storytelling is only for entertainers, what could it offer your work, your relationships, or your everyday conversations?

A man in one workshop asked why he was there, because his wife had enrolled him. His question points to the real promise: finding, shaping, and telling personal stories helps people reach goals far beyond the stage.

A Reluctant Teacher

Speak Up, a Hartford-based storytelling organization founded with Elysha, has drawn sellout crowds of up to five hundred. Audience members asked for lessons, and the author resisted before teaching one workshop: ten people, six evenings, a conference room at the local library. The teaching now reaches performers, from beginners to veterans. Some of them later appeared at The Moth and Speak Up. It also reaches attorneys, salespeople, and business leaders. It reaches novelists, screenwriters, professors, and clergy. And it reaches people seeking better dates, dinner conversation, or interviews.

In August 2016, a student beat him at a Moth GrandSLAM, taking first while he took second. Some people have left therapy for these workshops, a choice he doesn't recommend. Wives have sent husbands who afterward became more forthcoming. A couple spent their anniversary at an all-day workshop and brought champagne. Other students include children of Holocaust survivors preserving family stories, psychiatrists and psychologists helping patients reframe their lives, and politicians and advocates changing hearts and minds.

The Promise

The same skill helps with teaching fifth graders the metric system, pitching a venue, selling DJ services, making professional small talk, compensating for poor golf, and getting along with in-laws. There is no settled curriculum or single rulebook, and storytelling is more art than science. But the method here is practical: lessons, examples of strong stories, exercises for locating meaningful material, and step-by-step instructions for crafting it. The promise is that every student who has followed the instruction has become effective, entertaining, and successful.

Key Takeaways

• Treat personal storytelling as a skill you can use for teaching, pitching, interviewing, and family life.
• Work through the lessons, model stories, and exercises in order rather than waiting for a single rulebook to emerge.
• Expect the payoff offstage: clearer explanations, stronger professional small talk, better dates, and more forthcoming relationships.
• Follow the method to the end, since the instruction is meant to produce capable, engaging storytellers, not just informed ones.

Chapter 2. What Is a Story? (and What Is the Dinner Test?)

Overview

Everyone tells stories, yet most of what passes for storytelling is entertaining noise that leaves listeners unchanged. The hard part is telling a real story apart from a polished anecdote, and knowing what a story needs to create a genuine connection rather than just amusement.

Personal narrative means true stories told by the people who lived them, not fables or folktales. Folktales entertain and teach universal truths, but their tellers stay hidden, never revealing themselves or taking a risk. Personal stories require honesty, openness, and putting yourself on the line. Elysha told a woman that storytelling first made her fall in love with Matt. Their first meal alone was at Chili's before a school talent show. It wasn't a date, since both were teachers seeing other people. She asked questions. He answered with stories about himself, and she wanted more. Years before performing onstage, storytelling was already working.

Change

A story must show change over time. It starts with one version of the self and ends with something new. The change can be tiny, and it doesn't have to be an improvement, but it has to happen. Stories without it are anecdotes: romps, drinking stories, vacation stories, bright and fun but finally forgettable.

Matt's Five Rules of Drinking Stories

1. No one cares about your drinking stories as much as you do.
2. They never impress the people you want to impress.
3. More than three excellent drinking stories in a life means you misjudge excellence.
4. Even the best is compromised in daytime or at work.
5. A story from after forty is often sad or tragic, unless it is your all-time best or the teller is over seventy, when such stories are acceptable.

Matt's Three Rules of Vacation Stories

1. No one wants to hear about your vacation.
2. If someone asks, they are being polite. See rule 1.
3. A storyworthy vacation moment can be told, but leave out cuisine and destination charm.

Your Story

Tell your own story, not someone else's. Listeners would rather hear what happened to you last night than what happened to Pete, even if Pete's story is better, because when you tell it, it's raw and real and you're exposed. Another person's story works only as your side of it, with yourself at the center. In 1991, Bengi offered Matt a room in the apartment they called the Heavy Metal Playhouse. Bengi held grudges. One stormy night he ran into the rain even though he feared water, came back soaked and changed, kissed Matt and a friend, and let go of every grudge. Matt tells his side: a friend saved his life.

Voices of Hope teaches children of Holocaust survivors to tell their parents' stories, but they tell their own. One woman waits for an ambulance beside her fallen father and finds his freezer packed with Lean Cuisine, because he nearly starved during the Holocaust. She ends at her son's bar mitzvah, where her father has come despite pain.

The Dinner Test

The Dinner Test asks whether the stage, boardroom, or sermon version sounds like the story you would tell a friend at dinner. The two should be close, but not identical. No fluttering gestures, purple prose, or unattributed dialogue. Storytelling is not theater or poetry, but a slightly more crafted version of what you would tell friends over beers. Tellers and audiences pretend the story is made up on the spot. Tellers memorize beats, opening and closing lines, and laugh lines, not the whole script. The best stories sit between the unprepared and the memorized.

Key Takeaways

• Tell stories from your own life. If you borrow someone else's material, put yourself at the center and show what you had at stake.
• Build each story around who you were before and who you are after. If nothing has changed, keep it short and don't dress it up as a performance.
• Pick material that shows real change, and leave out drinking recaps, vacation itineraries, cuisine, and destination charm unless the moment itself earns the telling.
• For a stage, boardroom, or sermon version, keep the voice close to what you would use with a friend over a meal. Rehearse only key beats, first and last lines, and places where laughter should land.
• Show what the experience cost you or revealed about you, instead of hiding behind polish or borrowed drama.

Chapter 3. Homework for Life

Overview

Storytellers who depend on dramatic events eventually run out, and the stories that remain seem to land less often than the small, ordinary ones. Small moments are all around us, but they slip by without us noticing and then they're gone. How do you catch them before they disappear?

Elysha told him the pediatrician's advice: when Charlie throws food, take all his food away. She knew this would be hard for her husband because he had been hungry as a boy, a secret he had never told her. She had pieced it together from years of stories, and she had also noticed that he packed Clara's lunch with more food than a child could eat, then quietly unpacked it after he left. At the table he realized she knew his heart better than he did.

Why Small Moments Work

That dinner story is well told, but the material was not rare. Moments like it are everywhere, ordinary and easy to find, and most go unnoticed and unrecorded. By 2013 he had been performing stories for two years and needed more material. A near-death experience, an arrest, and sharing a room with a goat all made good stories, but the small dinner-table scene connected better. Audiences may not have died and been revived, but they know secrets, hunger, shame, and the wish to give children more than they had.

Homework for Life

He assigned himself Homework for Life:

• At day's end, ask what five-minute story from today he would tell onstage.
• Record a sentence or two in an Excel spreadsheet with two columns, date and story.
• Keep it small enough to maintain daily and to catch old memories as they surfaced.

Keeping it small is what made the habit stick: miss one day and two become easy; miss two and a week disappears. The spreadsheet also let him sort and revisit moments worth telling.

Recovered Memories

The practice also brings back memories he had forgotten. Standing in rain with Kaleigh, he suddenly sees Measleman, the beagle mutt named after the doctor who performed his father's vasectomy. The dog follows his father everywhere. The memory brings a realization: when his mother left for another man, his father lost wife, children, home, horse farm, horses, and his dog, which became the property of the man who took his family. For the first time he sees his father's loss as a man, not a boy. His list of untold story ideas now exceeds five hundred. Other storytellers claim they have no more stories. He finds that impossible to understand.

What the Practice Returns

A 52-year-old workshop student called him in tears after three months. She had felt like another face in the crowd, sure she would go out quietly and no one would notice. Recording daily moments made her feel important, part of a larger story, a real part of how the world works. She woke eager to see what would make the day different. The practice also changes how time feels. Days creep by. Weeks feel like months. Any spreadsheet entry takes him right back to the moment.

Commitment and Faith

It takes two things. First, commitment: five minutes each night to reflect. Second, faith: the change comes slowly, over a month, six months, or a year.

One principal missed three days of the practice and was furious at losing them.

The Last Person

One morning nine-year-old Clara asked to be picked up. His arms shook and his torn ligament throbbed, but she whispered that being held close felt wonderful. He realized he was the last person who would ever lift her as a small child. Without the practice, the moment would have been lost.

Key Takeaways

• Build the habit around an ordinary moment from the day that you would be willing to tell aloud, rather than waiting for something dramatic to happen.
• Keep the record deliberately small, a dated line or two, so the practice survives long enough to become automatic.
• Write down scenes that seem minor; they often unlock older memories and later reveal a meaning you could not see while living them.
• Capture moments that mark a last time with someone you love, since those pass without announcement.
• Give the practice months rather than days, and judge it by whether your ordinary days start to feel more visible and worth noticing.