Finding stories worth telling

The belief that some people simply have more interesting lives does not survive examination — they have the same lives and notice more of them.

Where stories come from

The sources.

Things that went wrong, which are the richest source by a wide margin.

Moments when you were surprised, which indicate an assumption being corrected.

Times you changed your mind.

Conversations that stayed with you.

Things you got wrong and later understood.

Encounters with people unlike you.

Small absurdities.

And anything you have found yourself telling someone unprompted, which is evidence that it has a natural shape.

Why people think they have none

The obstacles.

Comparing your ordinary life against other people's edited highlights.

Assuming a story needs to be dramatic, when the best conversational stories are generally small.

Not noticing at the time, since interesting moments are only obviously interesting in retrospect.

And, most commonly, forgetting — since anything not recorded within a few days is generally gone.

Collecting

The practical habit.

Keep a note — a phone note is sufficient — and record anything that made you laugh, that surprised you, or that you found yourself thinking about afterwards.

A line is enough: enough to reconstruct it later.

Do it within a day, since the specific detail that made it vivid is the first thing lost.

Review the list occasionally, which is where connections appear.

And note the detail rather than the summary: not "the meeting went badly" but the specific thing someone said.

Noticing

Which is the underlying skill.

The material exists in ordinary days and is filtered out by attention that is elsewhere.

What helps: putting the phone away in transitional moments, which is when most noticing happens; paying attention to what people actually say rather than to the gist; noticing your own reactions, since surprise and irritation both mark something worth examining; and asking people questions, since other people's lives are the richest available source.

And travelling or changing routine, which produces noticing by removing familiarity.

Shaping raw material

Turning an event into a story.

Identify what is actually interesting, which is generally one moment rather than the whole sequence.

Start close to that moment.

Find the tension: what was at stake, what might have gone wrong.

Find the change: what was different at the end.

Choose one or two concrete details and discard the rest.

And decide the ending before telling it.

Other people's stories

A judgement.

Stories involving other people require care: changing identifying details, obtaining permission where the person is identifiable, and not telling stories that would embarrass someone who has not consented.

Stories about family and colleagues are the most common source of difficulty.

The useful test: would you tell it if they were present?

And borrowing someone else's story as your own is a specific and recognisable failure that people notice.

Building a repertoire

Practically.

Most people who tell stories well have perhaps twenty they use, refined over years.

Which is not dishonest — it is the same as a musician having pieces they play.

Categorise them roughly: funny, illustrative, professional, personal.

Know which ones suit which contexts.

And retire ones that have stopped working or that the same audience has heard.

Testing them

How they improve.

The first telling is generally too long and finds the point late.

Notice where attention drifted and cut that section.

Notice where the laugh or reaction came and consider whether it can come sooner.

Notice what you added spontaneously that worked, and keep it.

And accept that some stories do not work regardless of how they are told, which is information rather than failure.

The everyday application

Where this matters most.

The ability to answer "how was your weekend" with something other than "fine" is what makes ordinary conversation enjoyable.

Which requires only having noticed one thing and being willing to offer it.

And which is the difference between people who are easy to talk to and people who are not — considerably more than any technique of listening or questioning.