Storyworthy Quotes

Storyworthy Review

Popular Quotes from Storyworthy Book

 

“Seek out the moments when you felt your heart move. When something changed forever, even if that moment seems minuscule compared to the rest of the story. That will be your five-second moment. Until you have it, you don’t have a story. When you find it, you’re ready to begin crafting your story.”

“Telling stories about your life lets people know they’re not alone; and it lets some of the people closest to you — like family and loved ones — see your life apart from the context of family and without the kind of revisionist hindsight we can sometimes fall into into concerning the ones we love most.”

“If you are conducting a one-hour meeting at your company, you have effectively stolen one hour from every person in the room. If there are twenty people in the room, your presentation is now the equivalent of a twenty-hour investment.

It is therefore your responsibility to ensure that you do not waste the hour by reading from PowerPoint slides, providing information that could have been delivered via email, lecturing, pontificating, pandering, or otherwise boring your audience. You must entertain, engage, and inform. Every single time.”

“How could you develop an ego or agenda to become internet- or podcast-famous (actual things, swear to god)? It’s a little like wanting to have the biggest house on the tiny-home scene.”

“ever be successful: All great stories — regardless of length or depth or tone — tell the story of a five-second moment in a person’s life.”

“That’s the trick. A simple one: Make sure that every moment in your story has a location attached. Every moment should be a scene, and every scene needs a setting.”

“Moments that once lacked meaning and relevance can suddenly be recognized as critical and essential to your life story.”

“The ideal connective tissue in any story are the words but and therefore, along with all their glorious synonyms. These buts and therefores can be either explicit or implied.”

“Crash & Burn The exercise is called Crash & Burn.”

“Essentially Crash & Burn is stream-of-consciousness writing. I like to think of it as dreaming on the end of your pen, because when it’s working well, it will mimic the free-associative thought patterns that so many of us experience while dreaming.”

“Rule #1: You must not get attached to any one idea.”

“So, regardless of how intriguing or compelling your current idea may be, you must release it immediately when a new idea comes crashing in, even if your new idea seems decidedly less compelling than the original one.”

“Rule #2: You must not judge any thought or idea that appears in your mind.”

“Everything must land on the page, regardless of how ridiculous, nonsensical, absurd, or humiliating it may be.”

“Rule #3: You cannot allow the pen to stop moving. I say pen because, although I do almost all my writing on a keyboard, I have found that engaging in Crash & Burn with a pen tends to trigger greater creativity (and there is some science to support this claim). But if you must use a keyboard, go for it.”

“That’s it. Set a timer for ten minutes, follow these three rules, and go.”

“If you go to the StoryworthytheBook YouTube channel, you can see me engage in this process, speaking it aloud as I do in my workshops.”

“Nevertheless, there are times when you might want to tell a success story, and when you do, there are two strategies that I suggest you employ. 1.​Malign yourself. 2.​Marginalize your accomplishment.”

“I always launch my Crash & Burn sessions with an object in the room, but you can start any way you want. On this day, there was a bowl of grapes on a table, so I started with the word grape. Slash marks indicate the moments when new ideas or memories came crashing in. Grape. Grape juice. White grape juice / When I was a kid I stepped on a broken Mello Yello glass bottle and cut my foot — got infected — happened by a pond / oh, the pond, Yawgoog had three different waterfronts and Ashaway Aquatic Center —”

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

“This is the magic of the present tense. It creates a sense of immediacy.”

“So dig. Search. Hunt. Fight for the five-second moment. Allow yourself to recall the entire event. Don’t get hung up on the big moments, the unbelievable circumstances, or the hilarious details. Seek out the moments when you felt your heart move. When something changed forever, even if that moment seems minuscule compared to the rest of the story. That will be your five-second moment. Until you have it, you don’t have a story.”

“Simply put, the beginning of the story should be the opposite of the end. Find the opposite of your transformation, revelation, or realization, and this is where your story should start. This is what creates an arc in your story. This is how a story shows change over time. I was once this, but now I am this. I once thought this, but now I think this. I once felt this, but now I feel this.”

“reflect upon my day and ask myself one simple question: If I had to tell a story from today — a five-minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day — what would it be? As benign and boring and inconsequential as it might seem, what was the most storyworthy moment from my day?”

“Make it your mission to find, see, remember, and identify stories, and you will begin to see your life in a new and more compelling light.”

“It’s called First Last Best Worst. All you need to play is pen and paper. As you can see from the worksheet that follows, the top row of the page (the x-axis) is labeled with the words “First,” “Last,” “Best,” and “Worst,” along with a column labeled “Prompts.” Along the left side of the page (the y-axis), the prompts are listed. The prompts are the possible triggers for memories. What was your first kiss? What was your last kiss? What was your best kiss? What was your worst kiss? For each of these prompts, you fill in the word or words that indicate the answers to those questions. That’s it.”

“After completing my chart, I analyze it. Specifically, I ask myself three questions: 1.​Do any entries appear more than once (the signal of a likely story)? 2.​Could I turn any of these entries into useful anecdotes? 3.​Could I turn any of these entries into fully realized stories? I”

“After completing my chart, I analyze it. Specifically, I ask myself three questions: 1.​Do any entries appear more than once (the signal of a likely story)? 2.​Could I turn any of these entries into useful anecdotes? 3.​Could I turn any of these entries into fully realized stories? I mark potential stories (or stories that I have already told) with an S. I mark potential anecdotes with an A. Below is the same sheet, now marked for possible stories and anecdotes.”

“Writing myself into existence. I think that’s what I was trying to do.”

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