Telling Your Story – Authentic, Laconic and Captivating

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You’re Telling Your Story

Storytelling is the art of taking a story,  your story or another’s and retelling that story.  Creating entertainment utilising all the skills of theatre to modifying your style to suit and engage with the audience, drawing them into the story until they drift into an altered state and become part of the story.  Retelling, reflection and practice improves your skills in the storytelling art.  There are guides everywhere on storytelling and although the general principles are relevant and if you have great storytelling skills all the better but that is not what we are doing here.  You are not Storytelling.  You are Telling a Story.

Instead of telling and re-telling the same story, you are telling your own individual personal story and most probably only telling that story once.  You can re-record and as skills improve maybe that is worth considering but hopefully by following a couple of basic simple techniques you can make one recording that tells a great story using the skills developed by the great storytellers.  Some of those general principles I have included here along with some of the skills of storytelling from the world of journalism.

It’s a story not a lecture

Telling your story is not like writing an essay as you were taught in school. Don’t mention what is to be said, then say it, then recap. With the traditional method of setting out the content of what is to be mentioned the story is over before you’ve started, there is no drama, you know how it is going to end.  The punch line is contained in the beginning and then you go on to repeat the detail of the content only to bore the listener because they know were it is all leading.  Let’s leave the punch line for the end where it belongs, let the story evolve, taking the listener on a  journey not knowing where they are going and the punch line will be revealed at the end.

Instead create an anecdote that builds the story, event by event as it happened.  Ideally a great story will have a variation on these elements:

* Beginning – sets the stage

* Body – starts and builds the story

* Sequence of events – helps to create a story

* Bait – Constantly raising questions(where is this going?) and answering them in a reflective way

* Climax – story builds to a high point

* Resolution – the punch line results in the reflection on the story

Once you have the story that you want to mention, think of the introducing question and your opening statement as mentioned in the previous episodes, then sit with it, mulling it over for a few days.  Reminiscing on the events, times and people involved.  Live with the story for a while as you may not have considered these points for some years and it’s a good idea to become re-familiar with it.

Don’t over think the story

Once you have the subject of the story in mind, then only prepare by having a clear opening and final statement, the rest is an anecdote and is best to be something that is told from the heart as natural and in your individual style as is possible.  Think that you are talking to someone you know in an intimate one on one casual conversation.  Allowing yourself to drift into a self-reflective state of reminiscing by just letting the story flow.  If the story is flowing well  from your memory, you should hopefully be naturally following the following general guidelines:

* Appropriate – Imagine who is listening