character? Is your explosion aligned with your objective? With just a few small
tweaks, Sharon was back in business, and you can be too.
Cutting the Small Stuff
“It’s missing something.”
That’s all my friend said in his email. We’d been working together to find
the perfect opening story for his upcoming presentation about financial
independence, and we had found one: the story of opening his first bank account
as a kid with his grandmother.
It had all the makings of a great story. He (as a child) was the identifiable
character (people love that, by the way, especially when you’re
in a leadership
position). There was a powerful lure into the co-creative process with details
such as sitting across from the banker, the checkbook, even the candies on the
desk. It was perfect.
My friend sent the draft to his team of editors for a final review, and that’s
where it all fell apart. The version they sent back still had the story,
but it fell
flat. So flat the audience would likely wonder why he told it in the first place.
“It’s missing something,” he said. He was right. What was missing? All the
details. The meticulous nuances that made the story an actual story. The editors
had gone through and scrubbed the document clean of the finer points, the
components our research shows are critical to a great story. A once vibrant tale
was now a generic shell of events: Boy wants to buy things, boy opens bank
account, boy understands money. Hollow and forgettable.
Whether you have a team of editors or you’re the one with the proverbial red
pen, beware the temptation to delete what matters most. After everything you’ve
learned here, I know there’s likely that voice in the back of your head that is
obsessed with brevity: 140 characters (now 280, by the way) and 15-second
clips. And this obsession means some of the most engaging parts of your stories
are still at risk.
If ever you feel your story might be missing something, take a look on the
cutting room floor to make sure you didn’t get rid of the most important parts.
As for the banking story, we reinserted the missing details and breathed life back
into it. Yes, it took a few more words, but they were the ones that mattered most.
The Best for Last
There is a lot to love about our method for crafting stories. It’s simple. It’s
straightforward. It works.
But my favorite thing, the thing that makes writing
this how-to chapter worth it (I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of writing how-to
chapters) is that using this method for crafting stories means any moment can
become a story. Any happening or realization from your past. Any incident that
happens on a Tuesday and makes you say, “Huh?”
Anytime you’re in the middle of a mess, you’re actually a story in the
making. No matter how small the moment, if you craft it in the way I’ve outlined
and match it to your message, you’ve got a possible story on your hands.
I was recently visiting my sister-in-law at her office in a San Francisco high-
rise. She walked me past each cubicle, and as she did, she introduced me as “that
storyteller I told you about.” Everyone smiled with recognition, and I felt a deep
sense of gratitude for having my sister-in-law’s support. We approached one
woman,
and my sister-in-law said, “This is my brother’s wife. She’s the one
whose book of stories I gave you a while back,” referring to a collection of
stories I’d written in 2012. The woman looked at me, and her face lit up.
“That story! That story about when you were in middle school and went
outside! I love that story. I think of it often. It really impacted me.”
I was taken aback for several reasons. First, I certainly wasn’t expecting this
kind of welcome on a tour of my sister-in-law’s office. But more importantly, I
couldn’t believe that story had that kind of impact. It was such a small one. A
tiny moment from when I was in sixth grade.
Sixth grade was a hard year for me. It was the first year of middle school. I was
slightly eccentric for my age in an environment where even a fraction of
differentness was grounds for ridicule. Looking back, I’m not sure I had a single
friend. And then,
as if by miracle, I was cast in a neighboring school district’s
high school play,
The Sound of Music.
I was Marta von Trapp, the second youngest child. As far as I was
concerned, that role saved my life.
While junior high kids seemed to despise me, the high school kids playing
nuns, Nazis, and a traveling-singing troop of siblings seemed to adore me. They
talked to me. They laughed with me. They encouraged me. They wanted to be
my friend. During the course of those few months I felt like myself again. I
could be silly and creative and no one seemed to care.
In a time when I almost lost myself, somewhere in the hills alive with music
I was safe. The show ran for two weekends, and on the last night I dreamed the
curtains would malfunction, making them impossible to close so the show would
go on. Forever. And I could be Marta for the rest of my life, or at least the rest of
sixth grade.
That
last night, I was invited to the cast party at one of the nun’s houses.
Despite the fact I was only eleven, my mother and father allowed me to go to a
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