Tell It Shorter - How to Tell Very Short Stories
- JP
- May 26, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 10
It’s a thing now – storytelling events feature very short stories (either 99 seconds or two minutes). Storytelling organizations often have slams or competitions around these, with the audience voting on stories – I am not a fan of slams but have won a few of these mostly for short stories. Here are 10 essentials from a sometime award winner on how to do a very short story:
1. Think SMALL. Your goal is to focus the audience’s attention on a single experience, a moment, one thing. The entire story of your trip to Asia is not going to work. But how or where you lost your luggage or discovered first class travel in an accidental upgrade can work. The best short story is ONE THING expanded and amplified into something more.
2. Fewer characters and details are better – this is true for storytelling in general but for very short stories it's essential. Help your audience by keeping it as simple as possible. More detail and characters create a kind of public speaking friction for the audience - friction means I am thinking and working harder as a listener to keep up with you. This means I am not really listening and it's alot less fun for the audience.
Don’t TELL me what you feel or believe - SHOW me through use of description, metaphor and language….show don’t tell is the storytelling bottom line. I can tell you I really love my cat but if I tell you I wandered out in the cold with an open tuna can to find him after he got outside on a cold night - you’ll get the gist that I love my boy. That’s show don’t tell.
All the details don't matter. Your story, told aloud, is not a police report. Audiences won’t remember the details of your story - they will remember how they felt (curious, happy, invested or even disinterested). All your detail just doesn’t matter and the human brain can’t take it in. It’s noise.
Storytelling is not standup. Humour is great - I use it alot and it is appreciated but if there is no story, nothing changing or happening it's a standup bit a series of anecdotes and not a story. There is a place for standup: find your place, your thing and thrive. Please.
Its not a TED Talk: If you find yourself telling the audience what you learned, in detail, wrapping everything up in a bow, you are telling not showing and that’s not storytelling.
Avoid time travel...if you feel compelled to say 'fast forward' in your story the topic or focus of the story is too big, too broad, too much. Go smaller, find one moment, experience. The more specific it is the more relatable it will be to an audience....
Shock value openers? Sometimes performers start with shock value to get the audience's attention - I hate my grandma, wife, etc.....it's a tactic used in standup often, and sure a big banger of a opening line in storytelling is fine. But what follows is what really matters - and most often the big banger lines are followed by rambling anecdotes - again more observational standup - and that is not storytelling.
Where you start matters - start as close to the middle or the climax of the story as possible – we don’t need the preamble. This is true of most storytelling - all the preamble detail we remember as we construct the story really doesn't matter.
You may not know if it lands: Sure it's fun to hear the audience react (laughter, applause, gasps). Resist the temptation to over perform, to use standup shock value tactics - fringe festivals and stand up nights are full of these. A really good story is so much more than this. Sometimes it's the quiet story that has the most impact....
Examples of short stories:
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