Review: Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don't be deterred by the self-help seeming title of this book. It is much deeper, and much more useful. (Sorry, not a huge fan of self-help books!) This is the real deal, from an award-winning storyteller, teaching the reader how to tell stories using very specific techniques. He leads the reader through brainstorming exercises, how to remove unimportant elements, how to figure out the core 5 seconds of a story (even some surprising movie plots), how to end, how to pace, all of it. I teach a storytelling class every other year or so and this will probably be the textbook for our class next time. I also am in training to be a storytelling coach for our local program in town with the newspaper, and some of these examples were incredibly helpful. Storytelling has some differences from writing on the page, but writers might also find useful information in this book.

One trick I tried out immediately is the zigzag - using but instead of and. It was a revelation.

I find a little kinship here. George Dawes was present at one of his most important storytelling realizations, and Dawes was also at the very first raconteurs event I attended, where I was inspired to create a storytelling class in the first place, despite not knowing anything about how to do so at the time.

If you want a sample of a great story, try listening to one of his most awarded stories - "This Is Going To Suck."

Thanks to the publisher for providing access to this title via Edelweiss. It came out 12 June 2018.

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