The Secrets of Storytelling: Public Speaking Part 2 of 2

Artistic License with Stories

Don't feel obliged to report the facts exactly as the event happened.  Here's where artistic license comes into play.  The essential events MUST have happened to you.  Otherwise, the story will not ring true for the audience.  Should they later discover the story did not happen, your credibility will be damaged. 

However, there is no reason why you cannot combine two events in a way that makes them seem like one event.  Steal a character from another setting in your life and insert them into your story.  Feel free to expand or contract the timeframe, leave facts out, heighten the stakes!  Exaggeration is a time-honored element in good storytelling.  Make your story more dramatic and support your core message more fully.  It's all right to "massage" true stories so that they support the point you are striving to make.

As Mark Twain said, "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."  The writer Saki, (H.H. Munro) in The Square Egg said, "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation."

Lastly, an excellent excerpt on the function of story from Chief Learning Officer magazine.

Storytelling has 10 essential functions or roles, any or all of which have application in the world of business.  It can be used to:

1. Explain origins.
2. Define individual or group identity.
3. Communicate tradition and delineate taboo.
4. Simplify complex issues and provide perspective.
5. Illustrate the natural order of things.
6. Overview complex history in a concise way.
7. Demonstrate moral and ethical positions and transfer and preserve our core values.
8. Illustrate relationships with authority.
9. Describe appropriate responses to life or model behavior.
10. Define rewards and detail the paths to salvation (or success) and damnation (or failure).

 The obvious first step is to consciously decide on what role you want your story to serve.  The next is to choose the most appropriate plot vehicle or theme to tell your story.  There's a considerable debate among scholars as to exactly how many plot lines exist, ranging from a high of 36 identified by Georges Polti in his 1921 book, The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, to the more utilitarian (if less insightful) one theme identified by Cecil Adams: "Stuff happens."

I prefer to opt for the middle position, lumping all potential plots into five large thematic buckets; the hero's quest, creation stories, stories of transformation, fall from grace and redemption, and the crossroads of life (used more in the sense of facing a critical decision rather than undergoing a transformation).

-How to Add Storytelling to Your Toolkit by Ryan Mathews, May 2008 www.clomedia.com

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