Do you want to know how to build a story like a professional? How can you make a story come to life in someone’s mind?
Matthew Dicks, an oral storytelling champion, shares his insights on how to find, write, and deliver a story. He teaches everything from how to build toward a satisfying conclusion, incorporate details, create emotional investment, keep the action moving, lie strategically, and incorporate humor.
Let’s take a look at Dicks’s lessons, along with the advice of other writers such as Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert McKee, and others.
1. Start at the End to Find the Beginning
The first step for how to build a story is to start from the end, rather than the beginning. Dicks explains that the brief moment of transformation you identified earlier should take place toward the end of your story. This ensures that the story builds toward a satisfying conclusion, giving the audience a clear sense of purpose and emotional payoff. It also allows you to guide the audience through your journey of transformation—but where does that journey begin?
According to Dicks, the beginning of your story should be the exact opposite of the ending. For example, if your story ends with a personal triumph, then it should begin by depicting self-doubt, confusion, or a challenge you’re struggling to overcome.
Additionally, Dicks recommends choosing a relevant moment that’s relatively near in time to the ending. If you start too far in the distant past, the story may feel unfocused or drawn out, and the audience may struggle to pay attention or make connections between the various details you include. To help your audience focus, keep your story brief and include only the most interesting and relevant details.
| How to Begin Your Story Dicks provides a simple formula for structuring your story: First, define the ending. Then, come up with a beginning that contrasts it as sharply as possible. Many writers agree that starting with the end in mind gives your story clarity and purpose. For instance, novelist Kurt Vonnegut famously advised writers to “start as close to the end as possible” to keep their stories focused and engaging. However, this approach doesn’t work for everyone. In On Writing, Stephen King argues that good stories are as unpredictable as life itself, so you shouldn’t write with a certain ending in mind. Instead, come up with an intriguing situation that can serve as the beginning of your story, and let the protagonist work their way out of it. This helps you develop an authentic storyline that feels true to life. Granted, King writes dark fantasy and science fiction—he can invent any ending he wants, and it doesn’t have to be based in reality. This makes it easier to allow a story to unfold naturally from its beginning. However, King’s advice may be applicable to personal narratives, too. Perhaps you want to tell a story about a transformation in your life that hasn’t reached its conclusion yet, like the evolving dynamics of a complicated relationship. In this case, you’d know how the story of your relationship began, but you wouldn’t yet know its ending. You don’t have to wait for the situation to resolve itself to tell your story. Instead, you could start with the beginning, include insights you learn as the relationship unfolds, and invite your audience to experience uncertainty alongside you. This is the structure that many stories in The New York Times’s “Modern Love” column take. |
2. Incorporate Physical Details
Once you know where to begin, start thinking about the physical details you can incorporate throughout the story to make it come alive in your audience’s mind. According to Dicks, each moment in your narrative must be grounded in a clear, specific location. This allows listeners to visualize the action as it unfolds—they can picture it as well as they could if they were watching a movie. Without physical details, your story might come across like a lecture or essay, which most people tend to tune out.
This rule applies even if you need to give the audience some historical context or explain something technical. Say you want to discuss your family history—instead of giving a list of facts about your ancestors, fold those details into anecdotes or flashbacks. For example, you could discuss the time you drank coffee with your grandmother in her living room while she shared old family stories and secrets.
(Shortform note: Incorporating physical details into your story is known as descriptive writing. To practice descriptive writing, experts recommend consulting your five senses—taste, touch, sound, smell, and sight. For example, in a story about a childhood summer, you might describe the scent of freshly cut grass, the warmth of the sun on your skin, or the distant hum of lawnmowers. If you have trouble coming up with physical details because the events in your story happened too long ago, try revisiting the scenes you’re writing about—either in person or via a Google Maps walkthrough.)
3. Create an Emotional Investment
Dicks emphasizes that stories are most impactful when they tug on an audience’s heartstrings in some way. He says you can accomplish this in three ways: by zeroing in on emotional details, by building suspense, and by leveraging surprise. Let’s explore each of these strategies in more detail.
How to Zero in on Emotional Details
Dicks recognizes that you might want to tell a story about the worst or most dramatic event in your life, like the time you escaped prison or survived a plane crash. However, these events are too extraordinary for most audiences to relate to. They may feel shocked, but they won’t feel connected to you. To overcome this problem, Dicks recommends zeroing in on your emotional experience during that event. Emotions are universal—not everyone has escaped prison, but everyone knows what it’s like to feel trapped and then, suddenly, free. By focusing on your emotional experience, you make it possible for the audience to empathize with you no matter how much your lives may differ.
(Shortform note: In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron explains that a protagonist’s emotional experience is the most vital part of any story. According to Cron, audiences use the protagonist’s emotions to distinguish between important information and extraneous details—if the character is highly emotional, the audience knows that something significant is happening, which prompts them to pay closer attention. Here are strategies from Cron for conveying your emotional experience effectively: First, describe external signs of emotion like body language and physical actions. For example, mention how you gritted your teeth when something made you angry. Second, reveal your inner monologue. For example, you might share thoughts like, “How could they betray me like this?”)
4. Keep the Action Moving Forward
Dicks emphasizes that every story needs momentum—otherwise, it’ll become stagnant, and the audience will lose interest. You can create momentum in two ways: by introducing conflict and by introducing consequences. For example, in a story about a breakup, your conflict might be the emotional turmoil and self-doubt that arise from the relationship’s end. A consequence could be your decision to move to a new city, which introduces new challenges and opportunities. According to Dicks, these forces help you clarify how the various events in your story are linked. They also signify change, indicating that the story is shifting direction or that a new development has emerged as a result of previous events.
However, as your story progresses, it’s vital that it remains focused. Dicks explains that a single story can’t effectively convey multiple meanings; it must focus on one central theme to be compelling. To find the meaning of your story, Dicks recommends telling your story aloud without worrying about structure or polish. Doing so allows you to re-experience the moment and often reveals why it has stayed with you. Once you identify your story’s focal point, make sure that each anecdote you include builds on that theme; cut out anything that seems extraneous.
| Robert McKee’s Tips for Forward-Moving Action Dicks argues that you should create momentum by introducing conflict and consequences, and one way to accomplish this is by emphasizing risk. In Story, McKee argues that every story should feature a protagonist (in this case, you) who risks losing what they care about most. This naturally imbues your story with conflict (your willingness or hesitance to take risks) and consequences (the results of the risky decisions you make). For example, say your story is about how you left your job to fulfill your childhood dream of becoming a musician. The conflict arises from your fears of financial instability, while the consequences might include disappointing your family or the joy of performing your first gig. McKee also provides a perspective you can use to discover your story’s central theme. McKee defines “theme” as a specific, truthful statement about the world that expresses cause and effect. So if you’re not sure what the theme of your story is, you can start by asking yourself what truth you want to convey through the narrative. For example, if your story is about overcoming adversity, your theme might be, “Resilience leads to growth.” McKee also recommends weaving an anti-theme into your story by including moments that seem to disprove the theme. This introduces a level of complexity that helps your story feel more believable, and it can also help you keep all your plot points connected to the theme.) |
5. Lie Strategically
According to Dicks, it’s OK to bend the truth slightly to make your story more compelling. Memory is imperfect anyway—you’re unlikely to remember things exactly as they happened. However, he emphasizes that any embellishments should enhance the audience’s experience, not mislead them. For example, if you’re telling a story about narrowly escaping a wild animal, it’s fine to enhance the suspense by describing the animal as growling menacingly even if it was silent. This embellishment adds to the story’s dramatic effect without altering the core truth. However, it’s not OK to falsely claim that the animal chased you for miles if it actually remained at a distance—exaggerating the danger you were in undermines the authenticity of your story.
(Shortform note: Creative nonfiction experts are divided as to whether it’s OK to lie when you share stories about your life. Some argue that the genre’s audience only reads (or listens to) nonfiction because they want to learn some truth about the world—so it’s not OK to embellish details, even if they make the story more compelling. Others agree with Dicks that memory is imperfect, and you can creatively improvise details you’ve forgotten. Still others advocate for a middle ground: Life experience is subjective, and you should strive to tell your version of the truth, even if that’s not something others would recognize as factual.)
6. Incorporate Humor
Dicks recommends weaving occasional humor into your story. It shouldn’t dominate the narrative—you’re a storyteller, not a comedian. But you can use humor to relieve tension or highlight the absurdity of a situation when that’s called for. To use humor effectively, try juxtaposing incongruous elements—things that don’t usually go together but create amusement when combined unexpectedly. For example, you might describe how you prepared meticulously for an important business presentation. But as you gave the presentation, you realized that your preteen upgraded your boring slides with a glittery unicorn PowerPoint template.
(Shortform note: Dicks suggests that you can use humor to create levity in the darker parts of your story, but what if you struggle to find humor in the situation to begin with? First, try identifying your own sense of humor. What do you find funny? Self-deprecating jokes? Satire? Witty one-liners? The kind of humor Dicks recommends, where you juxtapose incongruous elements, is known as irony. Whichever type of humor feels most authentic to you is the one you should implement in your story.)
