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CHAPTER TWO

What Is a Story? (and What Is the Dinner Test?)

A couple years ago, a woman asked Elysha why she first fell in love with me. Fortunately I was standing right beside her when the question was asked.

I waited for Elysha to say something about my rugged good looks, quick wit, or enchanting eyes. “I thought it was this situation,” I said, motioning up and down my body.

“It’s never been this situation,” Elysha informed me.

Instead she told the woman that it was storytelling that first made her fall for me. She told the story of the night when she and I went to Chili’s for dinner — our first meal alone — before our school’s talent show.

Just so we’re clear: This was not a date. Maybe I wanted it to be a date, but at that time, I thought Elysha was out of my league. I still think this today. Please don’t tell her.

Elysha and I were fellow teachers and slowly becoming friends, but we were both involved with other people at the time. We were technically unavailable. Also Chili’s was one of the closest restaurants to our school.

My point: I didn’t take Elysha on a first date to Chili’s. I’m not that guy.

Okay?

Elysha explained to the woman that 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 unlike anyone I had ever met, Bengi was a person who held on to grudges. Cross him in any way, and he did not forget. I suspect that it was the result of being an only child and not facing the constant adversity that comes with sibling rivalry. Growing up as the oldest of five, I was awful to my siblings. I made their lives miserable. I tricked my brother Jeremy into believing that the yellow bits in the Kibbles ’n Bits dog food were real cheese and convinced him to eat them fairly regularly. I constantly short-sheeted his bed. Sold his Star Wars action figures to raise cash. Locked him out of the house every other day. Jeremy had every reason to despise me.

To his credit, Jeremy occasionally enacted his own revenge. When it came time to vote on a new patrol leader in our Boy Scout troop, Jeremy orchestrated a coup that placed himself in the leadership position that I had once held and left me powerless to stop him. For a time, I despised him for making me look like a fool.

But when you grow up with siblings, you learn to forgive and forget. You have no other choice. As an only child, Bengi lacked that ability. Instead of forgiving, he would rank his friends on lists according to how he was feeling about them that day, which made things difficult given that we shared many of the same friends. His inability to forgive made it difficult to be around him at times. Sometimes impossible.

Then salvation. One night we were sitting in the living room of the Heavy Metal Playhouse with friends, waiting for The Simpsons to come on, when things finally came to a head. Voices were raised. Heated words were spoken. In a fit of anger, Bengi stormed out of the house and into a downpour. He told us he was going for a run.

Bengi was not a runner at the time, and he suffered from a paralyzing fear of water. He couldn’t swim, and he wouldn’t even consider going out in the rain without a hat to keep the water from his eyes.

Yet he was off, hatless and frantic. He left me sitting along with our friends in the living room, contemplating what might happen when he returned. I wondered if Bengi and I might stop being best friends. He was ideal in so many ways, but I worried that his insistence on holding grudges might be the wedge that would eventually drive us apart. It saddened me. I sat on that couch and resigned myself to the idea that this might be the beginning of the end for us. Eventually my friends and I returned to watching television as we awaited his return.

Less than an hour later, the door burst open, and a dripping, panting, red-faced Bengi entered the house. He looked different. Waterlogged clothing and plastered hair, but he was also smiling. Really smiling. He looked relaxed. He looked happy. Then he walked over to me, bent down, and kissed me on the lips.

It was gross. He was wet and panting and hot. And it wasn’t a peck. It was a real kiss. His yucky man lips pressed against mine.

Then he took a step to the left and kissed Pat, who was sitting beside me. He moved in to kiss a third guy, but by now everyone was on alert and able to get the hell out of the way.

We stared at him, wide-eyed, wondering what had happened.

Something important had happened. Something enormous. On that run, Bengi had somehow found a way to let go of every grudge he had ever held. Somehow he had decided that it wasn’t worth holding on to them anymore. He was a new man. He was a better man. He has been that new, better man ever since.

This is Bengi’s story of transformation. It was a momentous moment in his life. A life-altering experience. One of his big stories.

When I told Bengi that I had told the story to a workshop full of students, he said, “So you tell my stories now?”

“No,” I said. “I told my side of your story. It was a story about a friend who saved my life, and yet he was also a friend who I didn’t think would be my friend forever because of this terrible hang-up about grudges. Then one night, my friend went for a run and somehow changed himself forever. That terrible part of him went away. He left it behind in the rain. Then he kissed me. I thought it was disgusting, but I also knew in that moment that we would be friends until our dying days.”

“That’s a pretty good trick,” Bengi said. “You should include that in your book.”

So I did.

Don’t tell other people’s stories. Tell your own. But feel free to tell your side of other people’s stories, as long as you are the protagonist in these tales.

My wife and I work with Voices of Hope, an organization dedicated to preserving the stories of the Holocaust. We work with the children of Holocaust survivors, teaching them to tell their parents’ stories.

But these second-generation survivors don’t really tell their parents’ stories. They tell their own stories, dipping into the past somewhere in the midst of them to show how the experiences of their parents have changed their lives too. They share a bit of their parents’ histories, but the stories are grounded in the storytellers’ lives. The reason these stories work so well is that they are not history lessons or biographical sketches. They are the stories of the people telling them. The storytellers are the protagonists, so they are able to bring their own vulnerability, authenticity, and grit to the tales.

There is the woman whose story opens on a living-room couch. Schindler’s List is coming on television, and she wonders if tonight will be the night when she finally watches this movie. She’s Jewish, and the child of a Holocaust survivor, and yet she’s never watched the film before, mostly because she worries that watching it will bring the stories of her father into greater focus. Her finger hovers over the power button on her remote control, paralyzed by indecision. Then she tells about some of her father’s experiences during World War II. She explains the horror he witnessed and the suffering he endured. Then she returns to the couch. The movie is about to come on. Will tonight be the night she finally watches this film? Can she finally bear witness to the horrors of her father’s youth? She ends the story by leaving the audience to wonder if this will be the night she finally finds the courage to watch.

It’s her story, filled with honesty and vulnerability, but embedded within her own narrative is the story of her father.

There is the woman who drove to her father’s apartment after he had fallen on the living-room floor and hurt himself. Waiting for an ambulance to arrive, she searches the freezer for something frozen to put on his back. The freezer is packed from top to bottom with food. “Not the Lean Cuisine!” her father yells from the living room.

Why is her father’s freezer jam-packed with food? He nearly starved during the Holocaust. As she tells about dealing with an aging parent, she dips into her father’s experiences during the war, making us understand how his life today is still dictated by the past in so many ways. Then she returns to the present and closes the story at her son’s bar mitzvah. Her father, still in great pain from the fall, has made it to the temple despite that pain. A man who was once a starving Jewish teenager in Nazi Germany is now witnessing his grandchild’s rite of passage. This would have seemed impossible to that starving boy. Our storyteller talks about how happy she is to have her dad present at such a momentous occasion. “He can have all the Lean Cuisine he wants,” she says. “He’s earned it.”

She’s telling a story about her own life as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, but through her telling, we learn much about her father as well.

Then there is the woman who returns to the concentration camp where her mother was once imprisoned. As she makes her way through the camp, she juxtaposes what she sees on that day with what her mother witnessed during the war. The storyteller is standing at the front of her story, talking about what she sees and feels in the present, but her mother, now deceased, is right behind her, casting a long shadow over everything.

Each of these storytellers does a brilliant job of telling their own stories, complete with all the elements of a well-crafted tale, and yet at the same time, we come away with a greater understanding of their parents and that terrible period of history.

A story is like a diamond with many facets. Everyone has a different relationship to it. If you can find a way of making your particular facet of the story compelling, you can tell that story as your own. Otherwise, leave the telling to someone else.

The Dinner Test

Lastly, the story must pass the Dinner Test. The Dinner Test is simply this: Is the story that you craft for the stage, the boardroom, the sales conference, or the Sunday sermon similar to the story you would tell a friend at dinner? This should be the goal.

The performance version of your story and the casual, dinner-party version of your story should be kissing cousins. Different, for sure, but not terribly different.

This means that you should not build in odd hand gestures. When I see a storyteller mime the birth of an idea with hands that flutter like butterfly wings over their head, I think, “You would never do that at the dinner table. Why now? This isn’t a theatrical production. You’re just telling a story.”

This means that when I hear a storyteller say that the purple pansies were particularly pleasant on their plush pillow of purple petunias, I think, “No one talks like that. This isn’t poetry. You’re just telling a story. No one would ever have dinner with someone who talked like that.”

This means that when I hear a storyteller begin their story with dialogue like “Mom, I told you not to look under my bed!” or even a random sound like, “Boom!” I think, “I would not eat dinner with someone who started their story with unattributed dialogue. Why do storytellers think that this is a good idea?”

Just imagine how this might sound:

Me: Hi, Tom. How was your day?

Tom: Not bad. Did I tell you about Liz and the dog?

Me: No. What happened?

Tom: (pauses for a moment and then begins) “Liz, I’m taking the dog for a walk around the lake!” The screen door slams as Fido and I run toward the water.

Me: Check, please.

If you wouldn’t tell your story at dinner that way, for goodness’ sake don’t tell it onstage that way. Storytelling is not theater. It is not poetry. It should be a slightly more crafted version of the story you would tell your buddies over beers.

When telling a story to an audience, we play a game with them: we pretend that we are speaking completely off the cuff. Extemporaneous storytelling, unprepared and unrehearsed. This is not usually true. While most storytellers don’t memorize their stories (and I strongly advise against it), they are prepared to tell them. They have memorized specific beats in a story. They know their beginning and ending lines. They have memorized certain laugh lines. They have a plan in place before they begin speaking.

As a player in this game, the audience also pretends that the story is extemporaneous. Off the cuff. Unprepared and unpracticed. This is what the audience wants. They want to feel that they are being told a story. They don’t want to see someone perform a story.

The audience and the storyteller find a common space in between the extemporaneous and the memorized, and this is where the best stories ideally reside.

My hope is that all my stories occupy this space. If they do, they will pass the Dinner Test. The stories that I tell onstage for thousands of people should be similar to the versions that I would tell for just one person. I would be less methodical at the dinner table, of course. I would allow for interruptions. I might be more inclined to offer an amusing observation or an aside. But essentially it should be the same story.

This is the Dinner Test. It will guarantee that you don’t sound “performancy” or inauthentic. It will ensure that your audience will think of you as a regular human being. It will prevent you from sounding like the occasional Broadway actor who finds his way downtown to The Moth to tell a story, complete with dramatic flourishes and over-the-top vocalization. We hate those people at The Moth. We also hate people who behave that way in real life. Don’t be one of those people.

Okay, now you know what a story is and is not. Time to find some good ones.