over the course of our dinner, she had asked me some questions about myself. We’d known each other for a couple years by then, but we didn’t know much about each other personally. When I’m asked a question, I tell a story, so I told some stories that night. I was still more than seven years away from taking a stage and telling my first official story, but even back then, I was always ready and willing to share my life with others, warts and all.
Elysha told the woman, “That was the night I started falling for Matt. Listening to his stories, I realized that he wasn’t like anyone I had ever met before, and I knew I wanted to hear more. I liked the way he told a story.”
Beautiful, right? I found the perfect spouse through storytelling.
Right after the beauty of the moment washed over me, I quickly shifted to annoyance. By then I had been performing onstage and teaching storytelling for a few years. I had made a name for myself in the storytelling world. I’d attracted interest from businesses, universities, nonprofits, and performers. Knowing all this, why had she waited until now to inform me that my storytelling had been the key to her heart?
I told her that the story about falling in love with me through storytelling fit perfectly into my personal narrative and explained how useful it could have been to me for the past couple years of teaching and performing. “You’re telling me that I found the perfect wife through storytelling! That’s like a baseball player hitting a home run into the right-field bleachers that’s caught by the woman he eventually marries. It’s amazing! How could you keep this from me?”
“I’m not in the business of helping you construct your personal narrative,” she said.
She’s lucky I love her. But you see my point, right? Even before I was telling stories onstage and thinking of myself as a storyteller, the ability to tell a good story was helping me immensely.
Let’s also be clear that when I talk about storytelling, I am speaking about personal narrative. True stories told by the people who lived them. This is very different than the traditional fable or folktale that many people associate with the word storytelling. While folktales and fables are entertaining and can teach us about universal truths and important life lessons, there is power in personal storytelling that folktales and fables will never possess.
A folktale or a fable would never have convinced Elysha that I was the love of her life. My friends would not routinely invite me to play golf if I promised them a well-told folktale between swings. I would not be hired for a job by answering questions with folktales. Nonprofits, corporations, universities, and school districts would not be able to improve their image and messaging through fables. You can’t become the life of the party by telling a good folktale.
Most importantly, folktales and fables do not create the same level of connection between storyteller and audience as a personal story. I have never listened to someone tell a folktale and felt more deeply connected to the storyteller as a result. I may have loved the story and admired the storyteller’s skill and expertise, and I might have been highly entertained, but I have never felt that I knew the storyteller any better at the end of their story. The storyteller who tells folktales and fables is a highly developed, highly skilled delivery mechanism, often more entertaining than television, radio, or a YouTube video, but never revealing, vulnerable, or authentic.
Folktales and fables don’t require vulnerability. They do not demand honesty and transparency from the storyteller. They can never be self-deprecating or revealing, because the story is not about the storyteller. They are entertaining, possibly educational, and often insightful, but they do not bring people closer together.
We tell stories to express our hardest, best, most authentic truths. This is what brings thousands of people to hear stories at theaters and bars every night in cities all over the world.
They want the real deal. They want the kind of stories that just might make them fall in love with the storyteller.
As we prepare to embark on this journey together, keep in mind that there are a few requirements to ensuring that you are telling a personal story:
Change
Your story must reflect change over time. A story cannot simply be a series of remarkable events. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new. The change can be infinitesimal. It need not reflect an improvement in yourself or your character, but change must happen. Even the worst movies in the world reflect some change in a character over time.
So must your story. Stories that fail to reflect change over time are known as anecdotes. Romps. Drinking stories. Vacation stories. They recount humorous, harrowing, and even heartfelt moments from our lives that burned brightly but left no lasting mark on our souls.
There is nothing wrong with telling these stories, but don’t expect to make someone fall in love with you in a Chili’s restaurant by telling one of these stories. Don’t expect people to change their opinions on an important matter or feel more connected to you through these stories. These are the roller-coasters and cotton candy of the storytelling world. Supremely fun and delicious, but ultimately forgettable.
Matt’s Five Rules of Drinking Stories
1. No one will ever care about your drinking stories as much as you.
2. Drinking stories never impress the type of people who one wants to impress.
3. If you have more than three excellent drinking stories from your entire life, you are incorrect in your estimation of an excellent drinking story.
4. Even the best drinking stories are seriously compromised if told during the daytime and/or at the workplace.
5. A drinking story about a moment when you were over the age of forty is often sad, pathetic, and even tragic except under the following circumstances:
• It is absolutely your best drinking story of all time.
• The storyteller is over seventy. Drinking stories about the elderly are acceptable in any form, because they are rare and oftentimes hilarious.
Matt’s Three Rules of Vacation Stories
1. No one wants to hear about your vacation.
2. If someone asks to hear about your vacation, they are being polite. See rule #1.
3. If you had a moment that was actually storyworthy while you were on vacation, that is a story that should be told. But it should not include the quality of the local cuisine or anything related to the beauty or charm of the destination.
Your Story Only
You must tell your own story and not the stories of others. People would rather hear the story about what happened to you last night than about what happened to your friend Pete last night, even if Pete’s story is better than your own. There is immediacy and grit and inherent vulnerability in hearing the story of someone standing before you. It is visceral and real. It takes no courage to tell Pete’s story. It requires no hard truth or authentic self.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t tell someone else’s story. It simply means you must make the story about yourself. You must tell your side of the story.
Back in 1991, I was living with my best friend, Bengi, in an apartment in Attleboro, Massachusetts, that we called the Heavy Metal Playhouse. It was thanks to Bengi that I had a roof over my head. He was attending Bryant University but decided to live off campus during his sophomore year. I was graduating from high school at the time, and my parents expected me to move out and begin taking care of myself. But I had nowhere to go. I worried that I might become homeless.
While my classmates were counting down the remaining days of high school with great anticipation, I spent much of my senior year worried about where I would be living after the school year ended. Then salvation. On a warm spring evening, while Bengi and I were sitting in the cab of an idle bulldozer on the site of a future grocery store, he asked me if I wanted to live with him. I couldn’t believe it. I was ecstatic.
There was only one problem: I knew that living with Bengi would be hard, because