I would like to get better at telling stories in conversations. Usually when I tell a story, it’s very fact-based and I can tell that it’s pretty boring, even if it wasn’t for me. Are there any tips/tricks/heuristics I can implement that can transform a plain fact-based story into something more exciting?
It’s okay to lie a little bit. If you’re telling the story primarily to entertain, people won’t mind if you rearrange the order of events or leave out the boring bits.
Open with a hook. My style is to open with a deadpan delivery of the “punchline” without any context, e.g. “Quit my job today.” This cultivates curiosity.
Keep the end in mind. I find that this avoids wandering. It helps if you’ve anchored the story by “spoiling” the punch line. We all have that friend who tells rambling stories that don’t seem to have a point. That said -
Don’t bogart the conversation. If you’re interrupted, indulge the interruption, and bring the conversation back to your story if you can do so gracefully. It’s easy to get fixated on your story, and to become irritated because everybody won’t shut up. People detect this and it makes you look like an ass. Sometimes it works to get mock-irritated—“I was telling a story, dammit!”—if doing so feels right. Don’t force it.
Don’t get bogged down in quoting interactions verbatim. Nobody really cares what she said or what you said in what order.
Don’t care about getting all the details correctly. (Your first and last points.)
I know a person whose storytelling is painful to listen, because sooner or later they run into some irrelevant detail they can’t remember precisely, and then spend literally minutes trying to get that irrelevant detail right, despite the audience screaming at them that the detail is irrelevant and the story is already too long, so they should quickly move to the point.
Perhaps this could be another good advice: Start with short stories. Progress to longer ones only when you are good with the short ones.
A good piece of advice lukeprog gave me is to structure your story around an emotional arc. E.g. a story about an awesome show you went to is also a story about what you felt before, during, and after the show. A story about the life-cycle of a psychoactive parasite is also a story about a conflict between the clever parasite and the tragic host; or a story about your feelings of fascination and horror when you first learned about the parasite.
Join a pen and paper RPG group, it is the old trick of if you want to be better at something, spend a lot of time doing it. Easy story telling practice sessions every week.
I would like to get better at telling stories in conversations. Usually when I tell a story, it’s very fact-based and I can tell that it’s pretty boring, even if it wasn’t for me. Are there any tips/tricks/heuristics I can implement that can transform a plain fact-based story into something more exciting?
It’s okay to lie a little bit. If you’re telling the story primarily to entertain, people won’t mind if you rearrange the order of events or leave out the boring bits.
Open with a hook. My style is to open with a deadpan delivery of the “punchline” without any context, e.g. “Quit my job today.” This cultivates curiosity.
Keep the end in mind. I find that this avoids wandering. It helps if you’ve anchored the story by “spoiling” the punch line. We all have that friend who tells rambling stories that don’t seem to have a point. That said -
Don’t bogart the conversation. If you’re interrupted, indulge the interruption, and bring the conversation back to your story if you can do so gracefully. It’s easy to get fixated on your story, and to become irritated because everybody won’t shut up. People detect this and it makes you look like an ass. Sometimes it works to get mock-irritated—“I was telling a story, dammit!”—if doing so feels right. Don’t force it.
Don’t get bogged down in quoting interactions verbatim. Nobody really cares what she said or what you said in what order.
Don’t care about getting all the details correctly. (Your first and last points.)
I know a person whose storytelling is painful to listen, because sooner or later they run into some irrelevant detail they can’t remember precisely, and then spend literally minutes trying to get that irrelevant detail right, despite the audience screaming at them that the detail is irrelevant and the story is already too long, so they should quickly move to the point.
Perhaps this could be another good advice: Start with short stories. Progress to longer ones only when you are good with the short ones.
Watch stand-up comedy. There’s lots of it on YouTube.
Just listening to and imitating the cadence of how professional comics speak is enough to boost one’s funniness by 2.3 Hickses.
A good piece of advice lukeprog gave me is to structure your story around an emotional arc. E.g. a story about an awesome show you went to is also a story about what you felt before, during, and after the show. A story about the life-cycle of a psychoactive parasite is also a story about a conflict between the clever parasite and the tragic host; or a story about your feelings of fascination and horror when you first learned about the parasite.
Join a pen and paper RPG group, it is the old trick of if you want to be better at something, spend a lot of time doing it. Easy story telling practice sessions every week.