What this covers
The world's top storyteller, Matthew Dicks, reveals why most stories fail and his proven BABC framework that hooks any audience.
In this video, we walk through the storytelling techniques you need to make yourself impossible to ignore.
00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:08 What makes a good story 00:04:37 Stories vs anecdotes 00:06:09 A Story: The Spoon of Power 00:15:22 The art of story architecture 00:19:08 Create compelling stories 00:34:10 Common mistakes & how to fix them 00:52:41 Strategic Listening 01:01:12 Can you lie in stories? 01:02:50 'And' stories vs. 'but / therefore' stories 01:07:45 Finding engaging stories in everyday life 01:17:45 Structuring a story 01:21:40 Storytelling for an Unforgettable Brand 01:29:00 Learn confidence 01:36:20 Writing vs telling a story 01:49:33 Teach kids to love writing 01:52:55 Define success
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Matthew Dicks argues that effective storytelling is a learnable craft built on structure, not talent; stories require identifying change over time, beginning in contrast to the ending, and maintaining audience engagement through stakes, suspense, surprise, and strategic information control.
- Most people confuse reporting events with actual storytelling; a true story demonstrates internal or external change, not just sequence of events
- Story structure begins at the end (the change/realization) and works backward to find the opposing beginning, creating the arc
- Audience engagement depends on four elements—stakes, suspense, surprise, and humor—that can be systematically applied regardless of content
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Overcoming fear of public speaking and vulnerability requires repeated exposure; like jumping off a high diving board multiple times until the fear diminishes, people must tell vulnerable stories multiple times to lose the fear.
“even when I was up there, and I knew everything was going to be fine, and I'd seen a million kids do it before me, it was still terrifying. And eventually, I just had to go off and hit the water. And the second time, it was still terrifying... I often think that's what I'm trying to get people to do.”
Thelma and Louise ends with the characters choosing to drive off a cliff holding hands rather than face prison, and the film ends with the car mid-flight without showing impact, which allows the audience to imagine survival and creates a more powerful ending because it doesn't resolve everything neatly.
“Thelma and Louise is a it's from the 1980s. Two women sort of get mistaken for having committed a crime that they did not commit and they essentially get chased by the police and it's looking really bad for them and it's a story about two women coming together, female friendship. And at the end, they have a choice of looking back and ending up in prison or driving off a cliff together holding hands. And they drive off the cliff holding hands. Now, the interesting thing about that movie is it ends with the car mid-flight. We don't actually see it hit the ground, which allows the audience to think maybe they survived.”
When you have boring parts in a story that are necessary (like explaining data), use either humor or suspense to paint over the problem and get back into the engaging parts; novelty can also work by doing something in a way that's never been done before.
“I tell stories where sometimes I know there's a boring part. I hate it. But I'll get to a point in the story and I'll say, 'Eh, for 45 seconds I have to explain this thing to them and I don't want to explain this thing thing to them, but I have to. So, I'm either going to make it suspenseful or I'm going to make it funny. Those are probably the two go-to strategies that I use.'”
A business person struggling with bottlenecks can solve problems more effectively by looking at data to find the one key metric that determines success or failure (like Facebook's discovery that seven friends in ten days predicts retention), then focusing all effort on that single lever.
“at Facebook early on when they were failing to gain traction, they looked at their data and they realized that if a user accumulated seven friends, made seven friends or seven connections on Facebook in 10 days, they were likely to stay on the platform. And if they didn't do that, they were likely to leave the platform. And so Facebook recognizing that data point focused all of their energies on how can we get a user to find seven friends in 10 days.”
Most people don't tell stories; they report on their lives chronologically, which is fundamentally different from storytelling because storytelling requires showing change over time—either a realization (I used to think X, now I think Y) or transformation (I was one kind of person, something happened, now I'm authentically different).
“most people don't tell stories. Most people think of a story as some stuff happened over the course of time and now I'm going to tell you about that, usually chronologically, and that will amount to a story. And that really is just reporting on your life.”
An anecdote is a brief, amusing incident that doesn't linger in memory and doesn't require change over time, whereas a story is something that stays with you for days, months, or even a lifetime because it connects to emotion and reflects back on your own life experiences.
“an anecdote doesn't have to have change over time. It's essentially one of those, 'Hey, this funny thing happened to me. Isn't this crazy?' But it tends not to linger. You know, a story ideally is the kind of thing that when I tell it to you, you're thinking about it for days, weeks, months, or maybe for the rest of your life.”
The spoon story is structured using a scene-based architecture where each scene is defined by location and contains a progression of events, making the story easier to remember without memorization because you anchor memory to places rather than exact words.
“I'm always thinking about the scenes that I'm going to tell. So, scenes are predicated on location. So, if I think about that story, if I'm going to remember it rather than memorize it, I'm going to know I'm going to be on the playground and I'm going to chase Jamie and I'm going to run him down the playscape and through the woods, but he's going to keep the spoon. That's the first scene.”
Humor is a powerful but underused tool in business communication; it changes brain chemistry, makes audiences feel closer to the speaker, perceives the speaker as more intelligent, improves cognition and mood, and primes the brain to receive information better.
“humor is a really powerful tool that gets underused completely in business all the time. Humor changes brain chemistry in really meaningful ways, you know? Causes you to uh feel closer to me, causes you to perceive me as intelligent even if I'm not intelligent, makes you feel better about the world, actually improves your cognition.”
Comic book research shows that characters with less visual detail generate more emotional connection than photorealistic characters because audiences fill in the unrealized picture with their own background and needs, creating stronger attachment.
“there's some really interesting research on comic books. They found that when you compare comic book characters, the comic book characters that have less visual detail are the ones people feel more connected to. So, if I draw a a with two dots for eyes and a, you know, a little mouth. You're going to be feel more emotionally connected to that than if I created a photorealistic version of a comic book character.”
For young daughters, Thelma and Louise is a better film to watch than Wonder Woman or Mary Poppins because the female protagonists retain agency throughout and choose their own fate, even if that fate is death—agency is preserved rather than displaced onto male saviors.
“So, so if you're a parent, you have a young daughter, what's a good movie to watch with her that is not like that that'll see the unconscious properly about the woman sort of not needing anybody else and saving the day? Thelma and Louise.”
The best storytellers never memorize their stories; instead they 'remember' them by understanding the beats and sequence of events, allowing sentences to differ each telling while maintaining core narrative elements, which enables them to read the audience and adapt in real-time.
“I say we play a game with our audience. They pretend that we're making it up and we pretend that we're making it up. When the truth, I think for the best storytellers, lies somewhere in the middle, which is to say you probably should never memorize anything that you say. I've never memorized a story or a speech that I'm going to deliver, but what I say is we remember them.”
Independence Day is a memorable movie despite not being objectively great because it tells the underlying story of characters trying to gain the respect of people who matter to them—a deeply relatable human desire that resonates regardless of the alien invasion spectacle.
“That is so perfectly constructed. That is a movie about people, there's multiple protagonists in that movie, people who are all failing to get the respect of the people they value most...If you don't think Will Smith isn't going to space at some point in that movie, you're crazy. The president is being accused of being weak...If you don't think at the end of that movie, he's going to somehow be fighting an alien actually in his plane, right? You're crazy.”
Wonder Woman undermines its feminist messaging by having the female protagonist only able to defeat the villain after her male love interest sacrifices himself, whereas male heroes (Luke Skywalker, Iron Man) defeat villains through their own agency without requiring male inspiration.
“At the end of Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman, she's battling the bad guy. He's some sort of god or something. Hades. Hades. And they're fighting and while that's going on, Wonder Woman's boyfriend, for lack of a better word, is in a plane and he's flying some poisonous bomb into the sky. And she's losing to Hades. She's about to be killed by Hades and then off in the sky, she sees her boyfriend and he dies. The plane blows up. He's risked his life to save her and all the people in the in the area, right? And it's at that moment that she finds the strength to rise up and defeat Hades.”
Mary Poppins (2018) similarly undermines its narrative by having all the female and child characters fail to save the family, ultimately requiring an older male character with money to appear and solve the problem, which sends the message that only external male resources can rescue those in distress.
“Mary Poppins could be the hero of the day, she doesn't. Instead, quite literally, the door opens and a man walks in, the guy who played Bert in the original movie...The door opens and he basically says, 'I have all the money you need. Here you go.' Everyone fails to save the day and then the door opens and a white guy with a bunch of money walks in and says, 'Here you go. Here's what you need.'”
When a storyteller removes themselves from emotional engagement with their audience (by reading from pages or memorizing speeches), the audience perceives this and feels less connected; authentic connection requires the storyteller to be present and slightly imperfect, genuinely responding to the room.
“A speech does not live on the page. It lives in life. It lives in the air. It lives in your voice...Everything is remembered but not memorized. If I was to look at a page or even memorize a page, you would know it right away.”
Stories work best when they end with a moment that is ambiguous or 'frayed' rather than neatly resolved 'in a bow,' allowing audiences to continue wondering about the outcome and reflecting on the story long after it ends.
“When a story is not complete, when there are still unanswered questions at the end of a story, when the audience can sort of play it out a little bit on their own, those stories tend to hang with an audience much more.”
Vulnerability in storytelling is extraordinarily powerful because when a storyteller shares something they're worried might be judged—shame, stupidity, foolishness—audiences respond with acceptance rather than judgment, and audiences are grateful because they recognize their own similar experiences.
“Often times, when people share something like that, they're worried they're going to be judged for the stupidity, the shame, the ridiculousness. But we just all walk around with that. We're all walking around with some thing that we are we think we're the only one who does, and it's never true.”
Parents teaching children to write should focus on making writing enjoyable and generating love of writing, not correcting spelling, grammar, or handwriting; once children love writing, they'll improve mechanics naturally.
“I tell them a bunch of things. One of the things is, if you're talking about spelling, grammar, or handwriting, you're making a terrible mistake. You're making writing un-fun. When kids are little, they're writing with pen and paper, and then when they get older, they're typing.”
Stakes, suspense, surprise, and humor are the four Mount Rushmore ways to maintain audience interest regardless of content type, and if a presentation lacks all four of these elements, the audience won't listen no matter how informative the content is.
“to maintain entertainment throughout it, I'm always thinking stakes, suspense, surprise, and humor. Those are sort of the four Mount Rushmore ways to maintain interest regardless of what you're doing”
Romantic comedies work because they explicitly state the stake at the beginning: two people who dislike each other will eventually fall in love, which predicts the ending; the audience knows the outcome but still wants to experience the journey that gets there.
“Romantic comedies are the easiest to play with in the beginning. If you see a movie like When Harry Met Sally, they actually say they hate each other at the beginning. I hate you, Harry. They do not get along. They they travel cross country and they can't stand each other the whole road trip. We know at the end they're going to end up together, right? There's no way you can't know that.”
Closed captions on videos give away jokes before they're delivered, which destroys the punchline because the audience reads the joke in text before the speaker delivers it verbally, revealing the setup-punchline structure too early.
“That's why I hate close captions. My kids watch everything with close captions all the time. And I can't stand it cuz it gives the joke away all the time. Right? You see the joke before the person says the joke.”
Parents should maintain a 6-to-1 ratio of positive to corrective comments when responding to children's writing; criticism should come last and be minimal, with most responses focused on what worked and what was extraordinary.
“In teaching we try to achieve a six to one ratio. Six positive comments for every corrective comment that we're going to offer. And try to make that your home, too. So, just say good things so they keep writing.”
If a speaker makes the audience laugh in the first 30 to 60 seconds of a talk, the audience relaxes because they believe the speaker knows what they're doing; this dispels the underlying fear that the speaker will fail, allowing audiences to trust and engage more deeply.
“if I make you laugh in the first 30 to 60 seconds of a story, you now feel at ease because an audience always has that concern, this concern that this is going to get awkward for us because you're not going to do a good job.”
The most common mistake in storytelling is beginning stories by explaining and teaching background information rather than launching into the story at the actual moment of interest, which causes audiences to disengage before the story even begins.
“The other problem people have is I just believe the beginnings of stories are essential to grabbing people's attention. And people waste the beginnings of stories explaining and teaching us things, rather than launching stories in the proper place.”
When Harry Met Sally begins with the characters hating each other and ends with them in love; Star Wars begins with a boy dreaming of space adventure and ends with him choosing faith over technology; Independence Day begins with its protagonists being disrespected and ends with them being respected—these opening states predict the ending states in nearly all well-structured films.
“If you see a movie like When Harry Met Sally, they actually say they hate each other at the beginning. I hate you, Harry. They do not get along...We know at the end they're going to end up together, right?”
Writing and speaking are fundamentally different media; writing can be more grammatically correct, but speaking has rhythm, intonation, and presence that written words cannot replicate, so speeches should be remembered (not memorized) and delivered in voice rather than read from a page.
“A speech does not live on the page. It lives in life. It lives in the air. It lives in your voice.”
Die Hard is memorable because it maintains focus throughout on the protagonist's desire to reunite with his wife; by repeatedly returning to this motivation and showing the wife in repeated peril, the film ensures the audience's emotional investment never wavers, unlike lesser films where the relationship is only mentioned at beginning and end.
“If you think of Die Hard, Die Hard's a movie about a man who's trying to get back his wife. And his wife has decided that her career is going to take precedent at this moment, right? And he's decided his career is going to take precedent, and so they're apart. And essentially, he's just trying to get back to his wife. The whole movie is he's just trying to get back to his wife, and they have placed terrorists in front of him.”
When telling a story, the storyteller should leverage the audience's imagination rather than describe details; mentioning location (kitchen, playground, classroom) is sufficient because audiences already have rich internal models of common places, and over-description steals bandwidth that should be reserved for story engagement.
“What I believe is leveraging the imagination of audiences. So, I said to you, I'm standing behind my school, the school where I teach. But that's all I said. I know that you know what that looks like. You don't know what my version of it looks like, but that doesn't matter to me.”
Using the negative form ('X is not Y') creates more dynamic language than positive assertions ('X is Y') because it presents a dichotomy and requires the audience to choose between opposites, generating more energy than a single-option statement.
“what something is not is more powerful than what it is. If I say, 'Shane is smart,' that's fine. But, if I say, 'Shane is not stupid,' can you feel that that is a better way to say that?”
Writing sentences in reverse of traditional topic-sentence-first structure—leading with examples or evidence before the summarizing statement—maintains audience engagement better because readers don't immediately know where the paragraph is going.
“A common mistake with storytellers all the time is I teach them, 'You've been taught to write in a boring way, which is topic sentence and supporting details.' That's a disastrous way to write because you're right. Once you present the topic sentence, people know you're going to provide some evidence, and unless I'm like a nerd who wants to know the efficacy of the evidence, I'm moving on.”
When telling a story, the goal is not for the listener to think 'that once happened to me,' but rather to think 'I once felt that way' or 'I once thought that way' or 'maybe someday I could feel or think that way'—connecting to emotions and thoughts rather than events.
“When I tell a story, I'm not hoping that you are thinking that once happened to me. What I'm hoping is you're thinking I once felt that way. I once thought that way, or maybe someday I could feel or think that way. That's the goal. That's sort of that under story that we're always looking to tell.”
The test for whether a story is working is: 'If the power goes out right now, will people care?' If listeners want you to get the microphone back on to finish the story, you've succeeded in engaging them.
“when we're speaking, we just have to ask ourselves all the time, 'If the power goes out now, will people care?'”
The spoon of power story demonstrates how when you take something ordinary and without perceived value—a simple kitchen spoon—and infuse it with meaning through storytelling, it becomes something incredibly powerful that can change people's lives and relationships.
“when we tell a story about something like a spoon, something as simple as that, it suddenly becomes not a spoon anymore. And the better we are at telling stories about ourselves, the people we love, the products we make, the services we offer, you know, all of those things, the more we are able to tell excellent stories about those things, the more we're able to infuse those things with with whatever we want them to be infused with.”
People's lives are filled with stories everywhere, and small, seemingly insignificant moments often contain more relatable meaning than extraordinary events; recognizing this allows storytellers to develop a continuous stream of material rather than running out of stories.
“if we start to recognize that our lives are filled with stories, that they're everywhere, that we don't need enormous moments in order to carry the day, and instead small moments are actually some of the most powerful moments we can ever share.”
A personal metaphor for the business lesson about bottlenecks is that a married couple struggling with their relationship discovered that kissing every morning was the single solution that changed everything, demonstrating that complex problems sometimes have simple singular solutions.
“There was a point years ago when I was struggling with my marriage. You know, my wife and I were just not getting along and we had gone to couples therapy and it wasn't seeming to work and one day he sat down with his buddy and his buddy said, 'Are you kissing your wife every morning?' And he said, 'No.' And his buddy said, 'Kiss your wife every morning.' ... somehow there was a lack of physical closeness and intimacy that was missing in the relationship and a kiss in the morning started to change everything for them.”
Star Wars (A New Hope) is structured around a religious story, not a space adventure: a boy dreams of flying spaceships and using technology, but instead he meets a spiritual guide (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and learns about the Force, ultimately defeating the Empire not through technology but through faith, which is why the story resonates emotionally.
“If we think about the first Star Wars, you know, A New Hope, we meet a boy on a planet who's dreaming with his friends about flying in space someday and using blasters and spaceships to defeat an empire. That's the beginning of it, right? So, we have to know that that's not what's going to happen over the course of this movie. What happens is he meets Jesus in the form of Obi-Wan Kenobi because it's really a religion story. It's about a boy who thinks he's going to fly in a spaceship and defeat the empire and instead he finds religion, something called the force.”
You can remove elements from a story if they don't serve the narrative (like a person who didn't do anything during the event, or condensing time from two days to one), but you should not remove your own mistakes or shortcomings to make yourself look better—in fact, you should enhance them because vulnerability is what audiences crave.
“the extent of lying in a story amounts to I'm allowed to take things out of stories that are inconvenient for the story, not inconvenient for me, but because they make the story not run as well.”
The difference between a well-crafted story and a poorly-crafted one fundamentally rests on whether the storyteller believes 'no one wants to hear anything you ever have to say unless you give them a reason to listen,' and the more deeply this belief is embedded, the more appreciated, remembered, and impactful the storyteller will be.
“no one wants to hear anything you ever have to say unless you give them a reason to listen. When someone stands on the stage and shares a story, they're essentially saying, 'Here's my humanity. What do you think of it?'”
Matthew Dicks defines personal success as constant evolution and change; stasis is metaphorical death; success means being engaged with new challenges, trying new things, and creating different circumstances rather than remaining in established patterns.
“For me, success is always that at some very future tomorrow, I'll be doing something different than I'm doing today. I I think stasis is death.”
Business people often resist bringing their personal lives into business presentations because they believe it's inappropriate, but this resistance is why business stories are forgettable and business presentations are round, white, and flavorless.
“I'm always fighting with business people on this because they never want to bring their personal life into the business world, which is why they're round white and flavorless. Why they're all forgettable.”
A metaphor for business communication works when the speaker finds a personal story that shares the same theme, meaning, or message as the business lesson, allowing the personal story to carry and reinforce the business concept through emotional resonance rather than abstract explanation.
“what we want to ask ourselves when we're trying to do business, when we're trying to send a message, right? We're trying to look for theme, meaning, or message...Whenever we can take the content from our business world and bring it into the personal world and allow people to feel it in a way that is really human and not profit-driven, then suddenly we have stories that people want to hear”
When a kid writes something, they're essentially saying 'Here's everything I have that represents me. What do you think?' so critical feedback can feel like personal rejection and discourage future writing.
“When a kid writes something on a page, whether it's an essay or a story, they're saying, 'Here's everything I have that represents me. What do you think?' And if you go, 'Well, I didn't really understand.' Right right there you're just like I'm you're stabbing the person they are.”
For keynote speeches, identify one central message rather than multiple points; a keynote should tell multiple stories that support one thesis rather than trying to convey three unrelated ideas.
“when they say, 'I'm trying to say three things,' I say, 'Well, you can't. You got to say one thing.'”
You should not lie in stories; when people discover you've lied, they no longer trust you, and that trust is essential for people to share vulnerabilities with you and for your stories to have impact.
“Is it okay to lie when we tell stories? I don't think so... When we lie in our stories, we can no longer be trusted.”
Most people are 'consumers' of content who allow stories to wash over them without analysis, whereas 'strategic listeners' actively dissect storytelling choices (what made me laugh, what made this story great) to extract and reproduce those techniques in their own work.
“There's listening, which everyone thinks they're good at and many people are not. And then there's active listening, which is as far as I can tell you look at the person and nod while they speak, but I'm not sure if that actually yields anything. So what I say is strategic listening, which is what I'm relentlessly doing all the time.”
Around age 21, during an armed robbery where he was threatened with loaded and unloaded guns at gunpoint, Matthew Dicks experienced a transformative moment where fear and anger disappeared and he only felt regret for things not yet accomplished; this experience fundamentally shifted his perspective on what matters in life.
“Most of it happened for me when I was, you know, around the age of 21. I was in an armed robbery. I was managing a McDonald's restaurant. After closing, three men broke through the glass and came into the into the restaurant. And I knew I was in a lot of trouble because the police had come and they had told me about these guys, they had already killed two people.”
Speaking to an audience (interactive, responsive, adapted to them) differs from speaking at an audience (delivering the same prepared speech regardless of who's present); audiences can sense the difference and respond more positively to being spoken to.
“Someone who has a sort of memorized speech... That's speaking at an audience. Meaning nothing's going to change... When I'm done, I will take a few questions and I will go home. Right? That's at. If you're speaking to an audience... what I'm hearing tonight will not be the same thing he says tomorrow night.”
A 'crystal ball' is a prediction the narrator makes out loud about what will happen next, which activates the audience's natural tendency to be prediction machines; audiences then remain engaged waiting to see if the prediction comes true, similar to how earnings guidance works in business.
“crystal balls are something we use in life all the time. It's essentially just a prediction. It's an out loud prediction about something that's going to happen cuz human beings are prediction machines.”
An 'hourglass' is a pacing device where the storyteller intentionally slows down language and description when the audience is most engaged and waiting for resolution, extending the moment of suspense and increasing emotional impact when the climax arrives.
“an hourglass uh the idea that once you know you have the audience's attention and they're dying for the next sentence, you make them wait as long as possible. You flip the hourglass over and let the sand run.”
Matthew Dicks grew up as the oldest of three children (later five) in a home with minimal parental support, requiring him to be self-sufficient at a young age—finding food, caring for siblings, attending parent-teacher conferences; this early responsibility likely contributed to his characteristic independence and lack of concern for others' judgment.
“My brother and sister would tell you that when Matt was a kid, he just didn't care what other people thought, either. And maybe that was is in me a little bit. I was the oldest of three and then later five growing up in a home that sort of didn't have very much parental support.”
A story should be structured around scenes defined by location; each scene is predicated on a physical place, and scenes should be connected sequentially so that removing any scene breaks the story, distinguishing true stories from disconnected 'and' stories where scenes are interchangeable.
“I'm always thinking about the scenes that I'm going to tell. So, scenes are predicated on location. So, if I think about that story, if I'm going to remember it rather than memorize it, I'm going to know I'm going to be on the playground and I'm going to chase Jamie and I'm going to run him down the playscape and through the woods, but he's going to keep the spoon. That's the first scene.”
The BABC story structure (starting in the middle, flashing back to the past, then returning to the present) allows storytellers to compress long time periods into what feels like a shorter story by beginning with current stakes and weaving the past in rather than chronologically narrating a 40-year span.
“I used a BABC model, which is a model that I started in the middle actually of the story. I started with my son is going to camp, and I know he has to take a swim test, and I know it might not be easy for him. The real beginning of the story happens in 1983.”
Suspense is fundamentally 'the strategic exclusion of information alongside the strategic inclusion of information'—telling some of what happened but not all of it, which is why crossword puzzles are effective suspense devices.
“It's simply the strategic exclusion of information alongside the strategic inclusion of information. That's what suspense is. It's I'm going to tell you some of it, but not all of it. It's a metal object rather than saying spoon. Right?”
When working with authors on keynotes or book talks, the focus should be on stories about the creation/research process, not on summarizing or explaining the book's content, because audiences are interested in the author's journey and process rather than getting a summary.
“if you ever hear me give a book talk, it's never about even the content of the book. I almost don't tell you anything about what's inside the book. I tell you about the journey to write the book.”
Using paragraph breaks and sentence fragmentation as typographic tools can replace intonation and pacing in written text; a powerful final sentence is more impactful when isolated in its own paragraph than when embedded in the previous paragraph.
“I can craft the sentences and the paragraphs to look such a way that it can provide some of the humor and some of the suspense... I don't want to see the joke before the person says the joke. But that's how sometimes people write... the punch is the last one. And I say, 'Take the punch out and make it its own paragraph.'”
Structure is more important than sentence quality; a well-structured story with limited vocabulary can outperform a poorly-structured story with perfect grammar and sophisticated language.
“Structure is everything. It's as long as you've structured your story properly, meaning you've started at the right spot in the beginning and landed in a place of meaning, and you haven't filled it with unnecessary nonsense, it almost doesn't matter what the sentences are that you're choosing.”
Dicks once adapted a story mid-performance at the Brooklyn Historical Society after looking at the audience and realizing his planned raunchy story wouldn't land; he removed humor and leaned into heart instead, and won the storytelling competition.
“I went there with a story to tell for a Moth Story Slam... When I got in and looked at the audience, they were basically all blue-haired old ladies... because I don't memorize my stories, I spent 15 minutes pulling out all the humor that I knew wouldn't land and leaning into the heart instead. And I won that slam.”
Dropping the subject from sentences (saying 'went to the store' instead of 'I went to the store') can quicken the pace and intensity of prose by eliminating unnecessary syllables and getting directly to the action.
“It's also the reason I drop subjects all the time in sentences. So, rather than saying I went to the store, especially if I'm emailing people, I'll say, 'Went to the store.' Rather than I went to the store cuz I want to punch right away. I want to get into the sentence quicker. I don't want them to feel the action of it.”
An 'elephant' in storytelling is the initial thing that grabs audience attention and makes them wonder what comes next; it doesn't have to be what the story is ultimately about, but it establishes the opening stake that makes the audience want to hear the next sentence.
“The elephant is sort of the most important one. It's essentially what has grabbed the audience's attention initially. It doesn't actually have to be what the story is about, but oftentimes people begin a story without anything interesting that's going to grab the audience.”
A 'backpack' in storytelling is when the narrator reveals their plan or hope in advance, loading the audience with emotional investment in that plan's success, so that when the plan fails or succeeds unexpectedly, the audience feels the surprise intensely because they've been mentally primed to expect a different outcome.
“Backpacks are the idea that often times we're telling an audience what our plan is and then we're going to tell them the results of the plan, but we want them to sort of be loaded up with our hopes and dreams along the way.”
When constructing a story, the storyteller should always start by identifying the end point (the change or realization), then work backward to find the contrasting beginning, ensuring that the beginning and ending are in perfect opposition to create the arc.
“we start at the end. Because we want to know what we're going to say...What's the thing you're trying to say? And often times they say, 'Well, we're trying to say a bunch of things.' And I say, 'Well, if you say a bunch of things, you're not saying anything.' You have to have something that you're aiming at at the end.”