Storyworthy. Matthew Dicks

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      Then he took a step to the left and kissed Pat, who was sitting beside me. He moved in to kiss a third guy, but by now everyone was on alert and able to get the hell out of the way.

      We stared at him, wide-eyed, wondering what had happened.

      Something important had happened. Something enormous. On that run, Bengi had somehow found a way to let go of every grudge he had ever held. Somehow he had decided that it wasn’t worth holding on to them anymore. He was a new man. He was a better man. He has been that new, better man ever since.

      This is Bengi’s story of transformation. It was a momentous moment in his life. A life-altering experience. One of his big stories.

      When I told Bengi that I had told the story to a workshop full of students, he said, “So you tell my stories now?”

      “No,” I said. “I told my side of your story. It was a story about a friend who saved my life, and yet he was also a friend who I didn’t think would be my friend forever because of this terrible hang-up about grudges. Then one night, my friend went for a run and somehow changed himself forever. That terrible part of him went away. He left it behind in the rain. Then he kissed me. I thought it was disgusting, but I also knew in that moment that we would be friends until our dying days.”

      “That’s a pretty good trick,” Bengi said. “You should include that in your book.”

      So I did.

      Don’t tell other people’s stories. Tell your own. But feel free to tell your side of other people’s stories, as long as you are the protagonist in these tales.

      My wife and I work with Voices of Hope, an organization dedicated to preserving the stories of the Holocaust. We work with the children of Holocaust survivors, teaching them to tell their parents’ stories.

      But these second-generation survivors don’t really tell their parents’ stories. They tell their own stories, dipping into the past somewhere in the midst of them to show how the experiences of their parents have changed their lives too. They share a bit of their parents’ histories, but the stories are grounded in the storytellers’ lives. The reason these stories work so well is that they are not history lessons or biographical sketches. They are the stories of the people telling them. The storytellers are the protagonists, so they are able to bring their own vulnerability, authenticity, and grit to the tales.

      There is the woman whose story opens on a living-room couch. Schindler’s List is coming on television, and she wonders if tonight will be the night when she finally watches this movie. She’s Jewish, and the child of a Holocaust survivor, and yet she’s never watched the film before, mostly because she worries that watching it will bring the stories of her father into greater focus. Her finger hovers over the power button on her remote control, paralyzed by indecision. Then she tells about some of her father’s experiences during World War II. She explains the horror he witnessed and the suffering he endured. Then she returns to the couch. The movie is about to come on. Will tonight be the night she finally watches this film? Can she finally bear witness to the horrors of her father’s youth? She ends the story by leaving the audience to wonder if this will be the night she finally finds the courage to watch.

      It’s her story, filled with honesty and vulnerability, but embedded within her own narrative is the story of her father.

      There is the woman who drove to her father’s apartment after he had fallen on the living-room floor and hurt himself. Waiting for an ambulance to arrive, she searches the freezer for something frozen to put on his back. The freezer is packed from top to bottom with food. “Not the Lean Cuisine!” her father yells from the living room.

      Why is her father’s freezer jam-packed with food? He nearly starved during the Holocaust. As she tells about dealing with an aging parent, she dips into her father’s experiences during the war, making us understand how his life today is still dictated by the past in so many ways. Then she returns to the present and closes the story at her son’s bar mitzvah. Her father, still in great pain from the fall, has made it to the temple despite that pain. A man who was once a starving Jewish teenager in Nazi Germany is now witnessing his grandchild’s rite of passage. This would have seemed impossible to that starving boy. Our storyteller talks about how happy she is to have her dad present at such a momentous occasion. “He can have all the Lean Cuisine he wants,” she says. “He’s earned it.”

      She’s telling a story about her own life as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, but through her telling, we learn much about her father as well.

      Then there is the woman who returns to the concentration camp where her mother was once imprisoned. As she makes her way through the camp, she juxtaposes what she sees on that day with what her mother witnessed during the war. The storyteller is standing at the front of her story, talking about what she sees and feels in the present, but her mother, now deceased, is right behind her, casting a long shadow over everything.

      Each of these storytellers does a brilliant job of telling their own stories, complete with all the elements of a well-crafted tale, and yet at the same time, we come away with a greater understanding of their parents and that terrible period of history.

      A story is like a diamond with many facets. Everyone has a different relationship to it. If you can find a way of making your particular facet of the story compelling, you can tell that story as your own. Otherwise, leave the telling to someone else.

      The Dinner Test

      Lastly, the story must pass the Dinner Test. The Dinner Test is simply this: Is the story that you craft for the stage, the boardroom, the sales conference, or the Sunday sermon similar to the story you would tell a friend at dinner? This should be the goal.

      The performance version of your story and the casual, dinner-party version of your story should be kissing cousins. Different, for sure, but not terribly different.

      This means that you should not build in odd hand gestures. When I see a storyteller mime the birth of an idea with hands that flutter like butterfly wings over their head, I think, “You would never do that at the dinner table. Why now? This isn’t a theatrical production. You’re just telling a story.”

      This means that when I hear a storyteller say that the purple pansies were particularly pleasant on their plush pillow of purple petunias, I think, “No one talks like that. This isn’t poetry. You’re just telling a story. No one would ever have dinner with someone who talked like that.”

      This means that when I hear a storyteller begin their story with dialogue like “Mom, I told you not to look under my bed!” or even a random sound like, “Boom!” I think, “I would not eat dinner with someone who started their story with unattributed dialogue. Why do storytellers think that this is a good idea?”

      Just imagine how this might sound:

       Me: Hi, Tom. How was your day?

       Tom: Not bad. Did I tell you about Liz and the dog?

       Me: No. What happened?

       Tom: (pauses for a moment and then begins) “Liz, I’m taking the dog for a walk around the lake!” The screen door slams as Fido and I run toward the water.

       Me: Check, please.

      If you wouldn’t tell your story at dinner that way, for goodness’ sake don’t tell it onstage that way. Storytelling is not theater. It is not poetry. It should be a slightly СКАЧАТЬ