Great stories are not drawn out, long affairs. Great stories are told in small, quick chunks of information. This helps the audience process the story and also keeps them interested. Take breaths in between chunks and put in some energy to each chunk. Instead of saying in one long breath, “So I was standing at the bar giving her the eye and ummm.. she’s looking back at me and […]
Cook the Story
A great story is like a delicious pot of stew. Poor conversationalists tend to tell the story in its raw form – simply retelling events in an objective way. This is comparable to just throwing some meat in some water and calling it stew. Let’s look at an example:
“Last week I was riding the bus and this large man came in and sat next to me. It made me […]
Post Commentary – Wrapping Up
You can recover many bad stories by adding good post commentary. The post commentary allows you to reflect back on what happened and make witty comments about it. It also helps you wrap up the story and possibly segue to something else. Talk about what you think about the event currently, and/or what has happened since the story events took place, and any other way you want to wrap […]
Add Dialogue
Add dialogue whenever you can. Hearing you describe what someone said is never as good as actually imitating the person and saying real dialogue. The same goes for yourself. Don’t just say, “It was cool…,” tell us what you were thinking or saying at the time, “it was cool, I was like, “I’ll do this any day!”
Don’t hesitate to say what could have been said – conversation doesn’t actually […]
