At the April meeting of the National Speakers Association Mountain West Chapter (NSA-MW), our guest speaker Bill Stainton , encouraged us to drive people up a tree and throw rocks at them. He assured us that people in trouble make for great stories, especially when it is someone else.
Bill is an expert in audience entertainment and the winner of 29 Emmys as a television producer, writer, and performer. He knows a thing or two about creating and telling stories that will engage your audience. His complex framework for creating great stories consists of having a beginning, a middle, and an end. You don’t win Emmys for the obvious . . . or maybe you do. What might not be so obvious however, is how one goes about developing the beginning, middle, and end of a good story.
In the beginning of the story, Bill explained the need to get the hero up a tree. In other words, it is important to introduce conflict into the story. He shared a number of ways to find conflict for your stories. One of the best ways to find material is to look at your own life. No one lives a perfectly charmed life. When things go wrong, as they often do, those incidents can be our best source of material. Life’s answers really are found within you, or at least in your chaotic, less than perfect life.
Once you have set up the story and have introduced a conflict, it’s time to start throwing rocks at your hero. This is the middle part of your story, the development and escalation of the conflict you introduced when you drove your hero up the tree. Believable exaggeration is the operative word here. Sometimes real life needs a little help to be entertaining. Up the stakes a bit, or a lot, by throwing more trouble at your hero.
Finally, you need to let the hero get down from the tree. A good story entertains us because we can relate to the hero and trouble they are in. We are infinitely interested in how other people deal with conflict in their lives. A story is a safe way for us to experience the conflict without the pain and frustrations of actually living through it ourselves. It is even more satisfying to see the conflict resolved. In the end, we want to get our hero back on the ground.
Bill shared five steps that anyone can use to create epic tales for your audience.
Step 1: Ask the magic question, “When did something go wrong?” We can draw on those experiences—like the time things didn’t work out or go the way we had hoped—to create our stories.
Step 2: Channel Joe Friday and stick with, “Just the facts, Ma’am.” This is the essential information your audience will need to know so that they can understand what is happening in the story. Any extra information you include must develop the story, not distract from it.
Step 3: Plant the crap. Determine your “oh crap” moment in the story. This is the point when things start to go wrong for the hero. It is the point in the story where the conflict is introduced and everything changes.
Step 4: Go rock collecting. To make the story more interesting each “rock” should escalate the conflict. Things go from bad to worse to terrible. Escalating the conflict works for drama or comedy. It keeps the audience engaged and wondering, “What will happen next?”
Step 5: UPS it—as in wrap up the package (your story) and tie it all together. Conclude the story with a resolution. The best place to find an ending is to look back in the story to where you have been. In classical story telling format, you bring your hero back home—or let them get down from the tree.
After spending the afternoon teaching the framework of storytelling, Bill spent the evening session focused on methods for delivering a great speech from the perspective of a television producer, writer, and performer.
As the producer of your speech, your responsibility is to make conscious choices about what you will say, how you will say it, and when you will say it. Good producers know a few tricks to keep an audience from getting up during a movie to use the bathroom. Bill called these “bathroom blockers,” points in the show that keep you glued to your seat because you don’t want to miss what is coming next—regardless of your biological needs. A good movie will have bathroom blockers dispersed throughout the entire show, building suspense, releasing it, and building it again. So will a good speech.
Every movie, show, or speech has content. In your role as a writer, you are the creator of that content. A cardinal rule of writing good content is clarity, which is achieved by the use of the right words to convey the intended meaning. Just as important as choosing the right words to use, is knowing what to cut out or not include. Leave out content that not does provide needed information, move the story forward or help develop a character.
The third role Bill elaborated on was that of performer. Once you have planned your speech and written the material, it’s time to perform it. Bill shared a number of techniques for creating a great performance. One for example, was knowing when to shut up—the art of the pause. He also had a few suggestions about when to move or when to be still. But perhaps the most valuable piece of advice was to rehearse.
Rehearsal isn’t simply reinforcing what you are going to do and say. Effective rehearsal is a deliberate practice of what you are going to say and how you will say it with the intent of improving your performance. You rehearse to improve the story and the delivery, not simply to make sure you remember what comes next.
By the end of the meeting, I think we all felt like we could tell a good story. At the very least, we could feel that our “less than perfect, nothing ever goes right for us life” was actually a good thing. There really is a silver lining to life’s storms—the makings of a great story your audience will love.