Telling more stories

Being able to tell a story is a critical skill.

I say this because I am not a very good storyteller.

At some point, whether it is in high school English or a general studies college class, we have learned about the basic structure of a story. There is the introduction, a rising action, a climax, a falling action, and a resolution. This, or at least what I have been told, makes the story’s basic structure that people love to listen to or read.

However, in my experience that doesn’t always seem to be true. To me, the best stories are not the ones that best follow a formula, but are the stories that allow me to empathize with the speaker. For example, my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Stanford had a keen understanding of how to grasp a young person’s attention. She had a lineup of stories that my classmates and I could never get enough of.

The most famous story was the moldy sandwich she would exchange with her friend (maybe it was her sister, I forget). It was this sort of running gag she had where, at random times, she would receive or send this moldy sandwich. The most captivating part was her description of how the sandwich was slowly getting worse over time until it was an unrecognizable mass of black in a sandwich bag. I think I had heard Mrs. Stanford’s story at least three times before I had seen the sandwich for the first time. The sandwich was exactly as she had described, just a lump of mold in a sandwich bag. But the most interesting thing about that moldy sandwich is that I got to see the results of this decades-long odd exchange in person.

For several years, I have been pushing around the idea of creating content. I have done a few YouTube videos and taken a few pictures, but I have never dedicated myself to writing. This is mostly attributed to the fact that I used to hate writing. What I realized is that I want to share. I can’t continue to procrastinate. Rather, my goal is to allow myself to become a better storyteller through one key action.

Tell more stories.