How do you choose which life stories are the best ones to share? Which types of stories are the most relatable to audiences? How can you discover the point of a story to make it more significant?
Well-written stories have an underlying core message that’s relatable to audiences. However, when you’re putting together a story, it can be difficult to identify which parts of your story will resonate with audiences.
Here are Matthew Dicks two strategies for identifying your most storyworthy moments.
How to Find the Core of Your Story
In his book Storyworthy, Dicks explains that it’s common to assume your audience wants to hear about the most dramatic moments of your life. However, your most storyworthy moments tend to appear relatively insignificant. These are moments where you gain some fleeting insight that creates a meaningful internal change. For example, while stuck in traffic, you might realize that your frustration isn’t really about the delay but about how you’ve been rushing through life without taking time to breathe. Audiences can relate to these minor moments more easily than grand, dramatic events because they mirror the subtle but profound transformations we all go through in everyday life.
| How to Identify Internal Transformations To find the core of your story, Dicks recommends that you identify a moment in your life that resulted in a meaningful internal change. In Life Is in the Transitions, Feiler describes five kinds of life events you can draw from for inspiration: Relationship changes: This category includes events like the births and deaths of loved ones, marriages and breakups, and experiences like sexual abuse and addiction that affect how you relate to people. Health changes: This category includes all types of physical and mental illnesses, injuries, and recoveries. Identity changes: This category covers life events that impact your self-image and how others perceive you, like immigration and shifts in socioeconomic class. Perspective changes: This category covers experiences that shift your worldview, including major sociopolitical events, extended travel, and education. Career changes: This category encompasses work-related transformations, including career pivots, joblessness, and retirement. Keep in mind Dicks’s suggestion that you zero in on subtle transformations. You can use Feiler’s categories to jog your memory, but be careful not to gravitate automatically to the most dramatic life events you’ve experienced. Instead, try to identify fleeting moments of insight that fall under each category. Here’s an example for the relationship changes category: Maybe your most storyworthy moment isn’t the horrible fight that led you to break up with an ex, but an offhand comment they made that helped you realize they’d changed for the worse. |
Let’s explore two of Dicks’s strategies for identifying your most storyworthy moments and the point of a story.
Strategy #1: Daily Reflection
According to Dicks, you should take a few minutes to write notes about your most impactful experience of the day, every day. Create a list or spreadsheet where you can keep these notes. Your notes don’t have to be long or detailed; just write enough to capture the essence of the moment and why it stood out to you. This strategy allows you to see the meaning and beauty in everyday moments you might have previously overlooked. It also helps you see yourself as meaningful and gives you a sense of your place in the grand scheme of things. All of this serves as excellent storytelling fodder.
In addition, Dicks explains that this strategy can help you identify patterns in your life that you can turn into stories. For example, if you look back over your notes and see that you’ve frequently written about small acts of kindness from strangers, you might realize how these moments have shaped your worldview. In this way, you can turn a singular moment into a story that reveals something about the meaning of life.
Strategy #2: Write by Stream of Consciousness
Dicks recommends that you set aside a few minutes each day to write by stream of consciousness. This means that you capture all your thoughts, feelings, and ideas as they occur, even if they don’t make sense or aren’t phrased perfectly. He emphasizes that you shouldn’t judge your thoughts, edit your writing, or get stuck explaining one idea in detail. The goal is to let your thoughts flow freely, allowing unexpected connections and insights to surface. By avoiding self-censorship, you give yourself the freedom to explore your mind’s raw material and tap into deeper layers of creativity.
Dicks explains that this unfiltered writing process can help you uncover memories or experiences you may have forgotten or overlooked. When you’ve finished writing, you can review what you’ve written and extract any compelling anecdotes, memories, and thoughts that could be developed into a story.
| Journaling for Storytellers Dicks offers two strategies for discovering your storyworthy moments: daily reflection and stream-of-consciousness writing. Both of these strategies are an intrinsic part of journaling—the practice of writing about your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Mental health experts have long touted journaling as an effective self-care tool, but storytellers sing its praises, too. For example, the writer Anaïs Nin stated that keeping a diary helped hone her creative talents and inspired many of her semi-autobiographical novels and essays. Here are some strategies you can use to get the most out of your journal: Journal daily: Dicks recommends daily reflection so you can process your life as it happens and keep track of your most memorable experiences. Other experts echo this advice, arguing that daily journaling allows you to explore your emotions while they’re still fresh. As a storyteller, you can use these emotional details later to breathe life into your stories. Journal in stream-of-consciousness style: Most journals are private, which makes them the perfect place to practice writing without judgment, self-criticism, or editing. According to Dicks, this style of writing is essential for uncovering raw, unfiltered thoughts and emotions and deeper insights. Review your journal: Your journal is a record of your life story—and as Dicks notes, reflecting on your previous experiences helps you identify storyworthy patterns. However, experts recommend that you exercise caution as you read over previous entries. If you wrote about trauma, you might relive those experiences and feel distressed. Journal about your life philosophy: Dicks explains that discovering the meaning of your life and your role in the grand scheme of things can help you tell great stories. To explore these ideas, consider journaling about your life philosophy—your beliefs about what it means to live well (and how your life measures up to those beliefs). The authors of Life Worth Living, a book about cultivating your life philosophy, argue that you can only develop one through careful contemplation. Your journal is a great place to reflect on your values and sense of meaning, and you can use your entries to write stories that illustrate your beliefs and how they’ve shaped your experiences. |
