A day spent mainly listening as the Labbers went through a rehearsal of the presentations they are going to be doing tomorrow and I ended feeling encouraged. Not so much at the prospect of the presentations tomorrow, though I think they will be interesting and in some cases thought-provoking for our guests, but encouraging because these stories are beginning to firm up and we have three more days to set about them.
If I had one thing to say to the Labbers tonight it would be stop thinking about your stories so much from the inside and put yourself in the shoes of the people tomorrow who are going to be hearing them from the outside. Why will they be fascinated by what you have to tell? What makes your stories interesting not to you, but to people who don’t know what you have been up to this past few weeks? How do you tell it to them in such a way that it compels?
For all the work we do, there is some part of storytelling that is very simple. Sit someone down and tell them a story for five minutes that catches, and then keeps, their interest. If you can do that you not only have a story, you also have a workable structure. If you can’t do it, what is it that you have? Your structure can be conventional or radical, you still have to find a way to tell it that grips the listener either way. Remember where we started last week: stories are for the people who hear them, not the people who tell them.
Three days left and stories to tell, over and over and over……
