Storyworthy Notes
Genre📚
Nonfiction: Self-help/storytelling
Summary🗒
Learn to effectively find, craft, and tell better stories in public. From starting your narrative to adding the perfect stakes, Storyworthy gives the peak behind the curtain on all the ways writers hook/scare/excite or depress you.
Who is this for?🤷♂️🤷♀️
Everyone
Teachers (super useful)
Writers
Top 3 Quotes💬
“Moments that once lacked meaning and relevance can suddenly be recognized as critical and essential to your life story.”
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
“All great stories — regardless of length or depth or tone — tell the story of a five-second moment in a person’s life.”
Notes📝
(All quotes taken from the book)
Key elements of a good story🔑
Change🎭
Every compelling story exercises change on the storyteller or main character. You must start somewhere, and end up in a completely different place. This is called an arch.
I was once rich, but now I am poor.
I was once ignorant, but now I know.
I was once ordinary, and now I am spiderman.
Think of any classic movie or book: they all start with the characters in one place, and by the end, they are in a different place emotionally/physically/intellectually. Stories about happy people who stay happy, and achieve great things are boring. Similarly, stories about sad people who stay sad, and live pathetic lives are uninteresting. At the core of every great story is change.
“This change is what makes stories satisfying. It’s how storytellers are able to move an audience emotionally.”
Narratives without change (drinking stories/short anecdotes) are the junk food of storytelling: fun and exciting for the time, but ultimately forgettable.
Five-second moment😧
“Every great story ever told is essentially about a five-second moment in the life of a human being…the purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible.”
Now we're getting to the good stuff. So with a story containing change, we need a moment that makes the shift as clear as possible. This is your five-second moment. The author, Dix, claims that all stories can essentially be dwindled down into these small moments where the main character realizes some universal truth.
“That was the moment I realized I love her.”
“It was only then that I pieced together how important my family is.”
“On that day, I fell in love with sports.”
Star Wars is not about the force or Jedi or lightsabers, it's about the moment a boy faces his father, desperately trying to convert him into good. Crime and Punishment isn’t about axes or murders, or police, rather it's a story about the moment a man realized he can find redemption after committing a crime. Even as thrilling as the meth, guns, and sex is on Breaking Bad, the show is actually about the moment a man realizes he let greed take over his head.
“This is how most big stories operate. At least the good ones. Big stories contain tiny utterly human moments; we may be fooled by whips and snakes and car chases. But if it’s a good story, our protagonist is going to experience something deep and meaningful that is going to resonate with the audience.”
The five-second moment is not always at the end, but because it's the most powerful and important part, it should come as close to the end as possible.
Starting Your Story🎬
Now that you have your five-second moment, starting your story is relatively simple: all you have to do is ask yourself “what's the opposite of this moment.”
That is where you start your story.
If your five-second moment is about you realizing you are not lonely, then the beginning of your story needs to contain moments when you are very isolated. If your story is about the time you found a passion for reading, the start should be about your hatred or indifference to it.
In a way, once you realize this universal truth about storytelling, it ruins a lot of media for you. If the newest Stephen King movie starts with a happy family who just moved into an ordinary neighborhood. You know for a fact the movie will end with the family being distraught or disconnected and that neighborhood will be the furthest thing from normal. Try this with any book/movie/show, it's crazy.
If the newest Star Wars movie starts with a naive normal boy who is ignorant of the galaxy and has no one in his family. You know for a fact the movie will end with him having force powers, related to jedi-lineage, and being a leader for either the rebels or the empire.
Other key ideas on where to start:
Begin your story as close to the ending as possible; shorter is always better.
Start your story in motion, every great movie or show does this.
Don’t start with a thesis statement or rhetorical question.
Open with a physical location, this allows the movie to start rolling in your audience’s minds; like a movie, simply giving a few details on a physical place gives a reference point for anyone to start mentally picturing your ideas.
Storytellers take advantage of all these techniques to begin their narratives.
Stakes: how to keep your story compelling⚔️
Now that we have a foundation on what makes a good story; we need stakes. Stakes are what keep your audience listening to your next sentence. They are the axes in Crime and Punishment, the lightsabers and stormtroopers in Star Wars, and the guns or narcotics in Breaking Bad.
“[Stakes] are the difference between a storyteller that grabs an audience by the throat and holds on tight, and one that an audience can take or leave.”
Here are five effective tools a storyteller can use to up the stakes in a story:
1. Elephant🐘
Every worthwhile story needs an Elephant, preferably towards the very beginning. An Elephant is the biggest thing in the room; it is large and obvious and everyone can see it. It grips the audience instantly and says “look at me, this story is going to blow you away.” Usually, it gives the idea of what's to come in the story but doesn’t spoil any surprises; giving your audience something to wander about.
Examples of Elephants:
The Dark Knight begins in the middle of a bank heist from the joker.
Before Stranger Things even shows you its opening credits, it starts with the mysterious disappearance of Will Byers.
The first line of Fahrenheit 451 is literally “It was a pleasure to burn.”
Elephants are like the hook to your story. They grab people, and say “interesting right? Keep listening to see where this goes…”
Here's an added bonus; change the color of your elephant. Start off with your story looking like it's about one thing, and then switch up the meaning. Don’t completely change the elephant, that’s clickbait; change its color.
2. Backpacks🎒
Backpacks are a good way to directly put your audience in a specific moment of your story. When you put a backpack on your audience, you place them in your perspective and explain what you as the storyteller or character was thinking at that moment. This increases the stakes, by having your audience anticipate what will happen next.
Heist movies almost always use this tool; in Oceans 11, Danny Ocean draws out and delivers to the audience every minute detail of his plan to rob the Bellagio hotel. When it invariably goes awry, the audience (alongside Danny’s crew) feels tense, fearful, worried, or shocked.
Backpacks bring your audience into the moment and make them feel a similar emotion as the character or storyteller at that moment.
One key rule to note: never use a backpack if the plan goes perfectly. This creates no payoff, and the audience is left wondering why you took so much time explaining your plan.
“Perfect plans executed perfectly, never make good stories…It’s an odd thing, the audience wants characters or storytellers to succeed, but they don’t really want characters to succeed. It’s struggle and strife that makes stories great.”
3. Breadcrumbs🧩
Breadcrumbs are the trail of details the storyteller leaves for the audience that hints at a future event. They are tiny, utterly minute details, which point towards something happening.The key here is to give enough of them to keep your audience guessing, but not too much where it’s obvious.
Murder mystery writers love breadcrumbs. They lay out these tiny details: “the suspect was in the same room”, “she was holding a knife when the lights went out”, or “he had a clear motive to kill them”. These breadcrumbs up the stakes by keeping the audience guessing in that they point halfway to the answer, but not completely.
In a way, breadcrumbs are the reverse backpack; they do the opposite of having your audience anticipate the future, instead, they are left wondering what will happen and (if executed correctly) are surprised by the event.
4. Hourglass⏳
Ooh, this one’s my favorite. As a storyteller, you use an hourglass when you reach the moment in your story the audience has been waiting for. It could be the huge reveal of who the killer was, the “I am your father”, or a huge confrontation that the narrative is building to. Once you get to this moment, the moment where each and every member in your audience is dying for your next word, do one thing: slow down.
It's so simple, but I've never noticed this in movies or books. Once a storyteller reaches a moment of climax where they know they have a hold on the audience, take your time; over-describe things that don’t need extra details, and slow the pace of the story to a halt. Your audience is already on the edge of their seats, have them dying for every next word.
Examples:
At the end of Kill Bill vol.2, rather than Uma Thurman outright slaughtering Bill she sits down with him to have a casual dinner conversation. The audience is tense as the whole first two movies have led up to this very moment, “finally she is going to kill Bill”. But no, Tarantino tightens his grip on the drama, slows things down, and tortures his audience.
“Find the moment in your story that everyone has been waiting for, then flip that hourglass, and let the sand run.”
5. Crystal Balls🔮
These are probably the easiest to deploy. A crystal ball is when the storyteller or character plants a false idea in the audience’s head of what might happen. This (like the last four tools) can spark wonder into their heads as they impatiently anticipate what will happen, but then ultimately surprises them with something unexpected.
And the reason crystals balls are the easiest to use is that we already do this in everyday life
“The moment I got the phone call, I knew I was getting fired. Turns out they picked me for a promotion.”
“Whenever she was talking to me I thought she would ask me out. I later found out she was just playing a prank with her friends.”
“The second I entered the office I knew this would be another standard 9-5. It wouldn’t be till weeks later that I found out the unusual things about this company.”
“We spend our lives predicting our future, anticipating what will come next. Often these predictions about future events are incorrect. And quite often, they become part of the stories we tell. We want people to know what we were thinking as well as what we were saying and doing.”
Only use crystal balls when the future you are predicting has two things in common: it is plausible within that situation, and it raises the stakes by making the audience imagine something interesting.
Homework for Life: how to find your stories📝
So now that you know what makes a good story, how do we find them in our own lives?
The author, Dix, describes his method for remembering and finding all the stories in his life. He says that at the end of every day, he sits down and writes down something in that day which is story-worthy. You may think this is pointless, but every three or four entries you're going to find a tiny moment from your regular Tuesday that is absolute gold for a story; a moment that would have otherwise been forgotten in the millions of other tuesdays.
This is called homework for life.
Conclusion🎬
That's about all you need to tell an interesting story; once you have a beginning which contrasts your five-second moment with clear change, all you have to do is add stakes. Deploy elephants, hourglasses, breadcrumbs, backpacks or crystal balls. Do what it takes to keep your audience engaged.
Also try Homework for Life if you are struggling finding stories to tell.
Doing these basic things will ensure you have something that will resonate with your audience and stay with them long after you deliver it.
There is more in this book, but these are the most important bits and pieces I found important.
