Applied storytelling in the lecture hall (and elsewhere)

Challenge 2: Your “storybank”

The context

You’ve spent a week keeping an eye out for stories. Hopefully you found that once you started looking, you found stores everywhere: things that happen at work, news events, conversations with colleagues.

You may have noticed that there is a challenge, too, however: stories are fleeting. If you don’t document them, they’ll fade from memory, and when you’re looking for a great story, you’ll have to start from scratch.

This week, we’ll think about where to store your stories for easy retrieval.

The challenge

This week, start a Personal Story Bank. You can use a small notebook, your smartphone, or a note-taking app like Evernote or OneNote. For what it’s worth, I use Scrivener.

How to record stories effectively:

• Give your story a short title—DON’T write it out in full (this helps preserve its natural flow when told). Your aim to remember the story highlights so that you can tell it naturally. We are not trying to turn you into a parrot.
• Include key details:
  • Situation – when, where, who, what was happening at the start.
  • Complication – what happened to disrupt the status quo
  • What happened – this is your story arc – can be short or long, with ups and downs.
  • Resolution
  • Message that you want to get across.
• You might want to use the Friends Naming Method —e.g., “The one where I almost missed out on funding.”.

To get started, consider three stories that you picked up last week. Then, aim to add one new story to your “storybank” each day.

Think about when you might want to use this story and use tags/keywords or something similar to make it easy to find the story you need when you are planning a lecture or a talk.