The Storytelling Workbook: A nine-week programme to tell your story

By Anthony Tasgal

The Storytelling Workbook is a nine-week programme (based on Anthony Tasgal's 'rule of three') to help you learn to better tell your own narrative and present your story whether it be for your CV, your dating apps or your own personal writing. It is an entertaining, instructive and interactive guide to becoming a better storyteller across all facets of your personal and professional life.

Including a mix of case studies, advice and exercises, this workbook is structured into three sections: before, during and after. In the before section, you will learn to free yourself from reductionism, obsession with numbers, facts, data and 'messaging'; in the during section, you will concentrate on finding simplicity, meaning and depth; while finally, in after, you will come to understand how to write less and think more and ultimately to keep writing again and again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LID Publishing
• Release date: Apr 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781911671473

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Before we dive into the programme, let’s pause to see why all of these disparate domains have one set of factors in common.

This is that we are all swimming (some may be drowning) in a sea of overpopulation – of competition, of people, of facts – or bombarded by a relentless onslaught of rivals. Brands are searching for ways to stand out, job hunters strive to be the most desirable candidates, and presenters and persuaders aim to affect decision-makers in the most effective ways possible.

In all these varied spheres, what sings out loud and clear are the same essential qualities: we need memorability, saliency and differentiation.

Before we start, here is an epigraph for everything that follows. This is quite possibly my favourite quotation of all time (note: my children will inform you that that is about as reliable a measure as ‘my favourite band of all time’):

I have made this letter longer than usual because

I have not had time to make it shorter.

Though attributed to everyone from Mark Twain (one of the great quote magnets) to Benjamin Franklin, and even back to the Roman statesman, lawyer and speaker Marcus Tullius Cicero, it seems to have originated with the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, in a letter from a collection called Lettres Provinciales in the year 1657.

Its timeless truth: that it is incredibly difficult to write something short, concise and pithy, but virtually effortless to write anything long, sprawling and directionless.

One brief caveat.

As a lapsed classicist (anyone who has negotiated their way through my other books must have suspected this by now), I have always been under the sway of the rhetorical counsel of the ancients, notably the likes of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. So, I have retained the broad rubric of ‘storytelling,’ but much of the thinking is more akin to certain elements of rhetoric and oratory. I have done so because this would have almost certainly remained an unpublished manuscript if I’d called it The Rhetoric Workbook and you wouldn’t be here now.

A Grand Tour of Storytelling

In which we examine a number of quotes and clips, and a variety of endorsements of the storytelling instinct.

Storytelling Is All-Embracing

Let’s start with UK talk show host (and now author) Graham Norton, famous for a segment that ends each episode of The Graham Norton Show (2007–) called the Red Chair. Here, audience members are invited to sit on the chair and tell a personal story – the more embarrassing the better. If Norton and his celebrity panel are bored or irritated, they pull a lever and the audience member flips back and is tipped over. In a TV documentary, Norton revealed the secrets of a good lever-proof story:

To have a good story, you need structure.

And to have that you need three things.

Solid middle, a great opening and a brilliant ending

(cue audience story referring to a microscopic male

appendage), though not necessarily in that order.¹

Think about how many talent show programmes (Britain’s Got Talent or The X Factor, for instance) feature the participants’ stories. This is a way of giving us access not only to their skills but also to their journeys and goals.

The Mnemonic Power of Storytelling

The human being is a storytelling machine: our self is a story or series of stories that we tell about ourselves to construct our selves.

Let’s explore for a moment how our self, our memory and our stories all interweave and overlap. In doing so, we’ll consider some insights from the most famous living psychologists. And let’s acknowledge that our memories are not as perfect as we like to think.

Take US Senator Mitt Romney. In 2012, Romney gave a speech in Michigan that many found rather moving. In it, Romney recalled as a child attending a local Golden Jubilee – an event that celebrated the 50th year of the automobile. Romney’s father was the grandmaster of ceremonies at the event.

A bit of journalistic archaeology uncovered a teeny-weeny problem: this didn’t happen. The Golden Jubilee took place on June 1, 1946, which was about nine months before Romney was born.

How does this happen and what does it stay about our storytelling urge?

Before this, experimental psychologist Elizabeth Loftus designed a series of fiendishly clever experiments. Loftus is currently a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and was the highest ranked woman in a 2002 list of the top 100 living psychological researchers of the 20th century.²

In one famous study, Loftus demonstrated the power of priming and framing. Her team showed subjects a clip of a car crash and then asked them how fast one of the cars was going when it ‘hit’ (or ‘smashed into’ or ‘collided with’) the other car. The study found that estimates varied wildly depending on the verb used, suggesting that leading questions (and language) can distort and contaminate memory. This led Loftus to ponder whether it would be possible to implant entirely false memories.³

Loftus did not just uncover that it is possible to implant entirely new memories in the brain. She also found that we naturally embrace and embroider them, unknowingly weaving together threads of fantasy and truth that become impossible to disentangle. (More on weaving in Week