Storyworthy

Storyworthy Plot Summary

Introduction

We all have stories worth telling, even when we believe our lives are too ordinary or unremarkable. The truth is that extraordinary moments of connection, realization, and transformation happen to each of us daily—we just need to learn how to recognize and capture them. These moments, often lasting mere seconds, contain the essence of who we are and what matters most to us. They're the building blocks of powerful stories that can move hearts, change minds, and create lasting connections with others. The journey to becoming a compelling storyteller doesn't require dramatic life experiences or natural-born talent. Instead, it demands developing a storyteller's lens through which you view your daily life, recognizing the significance in seemingly ordinary moments, and mastering techniques to transform those moments into engaging narratives. As you develop these skills, you'll discover that storytelling isn't just about entertaining others—it's about living more fully, experiencing time more richly, and connecting more deeply with yourself and those around you.

Chapter 1: Find Your Five-Second Moments of Transformation

At the heart of every powerful story lies a brief moment of transformation—a five-second interval when something fundamentally shifts in your understanding, perspective, or sense of self. These aren't necessarily dramatic events like car accidents or winning awards, but rather small, meaningful moments that reveal something essential about you or your world. Matthew Dicks illustrates this principle through his story "Charity Thief," where he recounts impersonating a charity worker to steal money from homeowners when stranded without gas money. While the deception itself might seem like the story's focus, the true heart occurs in a brief exchange with a widower who, after giving him money, shares the painful story of losing his wife to cancer. In that fleeting moment, Dicks realizes he knows nothing about true loneliness—a profound transformation that changes his perspective forever. This five-second realization, not the elaborate scheme that preceded it, gives the story its emotional power. Finding these transformative moments in your own life requires developing what Dicks calls a "storytelling lens." He recommends a practice called "Homework for Life"—a daily five-minute reflection where you ask yourself, "If I had to tell a story from today, what would it be?" Then record a sentence or two capturing that moment in a spreadsheet or journal. This isn't about writing the entire story—just enough to remember it later. Through this consistent practice, you'll begin noticing meaningful moments as they happen rather than letting them slip away unrecognized. The beauty of identifying these five-second transformations is that they naturally reveal the structure of your story. Once you've pinpointed your moment of change, you've found your ending. Then, work backward to find your beginning—ideally the opposite of your ending. If your story concludes with discovering you're not alone, begin with feeling utterly isolated. This creates a satisfying narrative arc that shows genuine transformation. Remember that these moments often appear mundane on the surface. One of Dicks' most powerful stories centers on his wife simply saying at the dinner table, "I know you were hungry as a child"—revealing she had noticed how he overpacked their daughter's lunch each morning to ensure she would never experience the food insecurity he had known. This small moment of being truly seen became a profound story about love, vulnerability, and connection. To find your own five-second moments, start tonight by asking: "What was my story from today?" The answer might surprise you—and contain the seed of a story that could touch hearts and minds in ways you never imagined.

Chapter 2: Create a Daily Storytelling Practice

Developing a consistent storytelling practice transforms not just your ability to tell stories, but how you experience and remember your life. The foundation of this practice is what Matthew Dicks calls "Homework for Life"—a daily reflection exercise that helps you identify and capture meaningful moments before they fade from memory. The process is remarkably simple: each evening, take five minutes to reflect on your day and ask, "If I had to tell a story from today, what would it be?" Then record a sentence or two capturing that moment in a spreadsheet or journal. Dicks shares how this practice helped him preserve a precious moment with his daughter Clara. One morning, while holding his nine-year-old in his arms as the house was quiet and bathed in warm light, his arms began to shake from fatigue. Just as he considered putting her down, Clara whispered, "It's just so nice to be held this close." Recognizing this as a fleeting moment of childhood that would soon be gone forever, he ignored his tired muscles and held her longer. Without his daily reflection practice, this beautiful moment might have been forgotten entirely. This isn't about documenting everything that happens each day—it's about training yourself to notice the meaningful moments that might otherwise slip away. Over time, your collection of daily moments becomes a treasure trove of potential stories and reveals patterns in your life you might never have noticed otherwise. Dicks discovered through this practice that he frequently feels invisible in social situations—a pattern he hadn't recognized before that became a recurring theme in his storytelling. The impact of this practice extends far beyond finding material for stories. Many practitioners report that time begins to slow down for them as they become more present and attentive to each day. A workshop participant once called Dicks in tears to share how the practice had transformed her self-perception. At 52, she had always felt unremarkable, believing she would "go out quietly, unnoticed." But after three months of recording daily moments, she felt like "a critical cog in the gears of the universe" for the first time in her life. To implement this practice effectively, consistency is key. Set a specific time each day for reflection—perhaps before bed or during your commute home. Keep your recording system simple, whether it's a spreadsheet, journal, or note-taking app. Don't worry about capturing "important" moments; instead, focus on what moved you, surprised you, or made you think differently, even briefly. Remember that Homework for Life requires both commitment and faith—commitment to the daily practice and faith that it will eventually transform your perception. Five minutes a day is a small investment for such profound returns: an endless supply of stories, a richer experience of life, and a treasure trove of memories that might otherwise be lost forever.

Chapter 3: Build Cinematic Scenes in Your Listener's Mind

Great storytellers create vivid movies in the minds of their audience, transporting listeners into fully realized worlds where they can see, feel, and experience the narrative unfolding. The key to achieving this cinematic quality lies in a surprisingly simple technique: always provide a physical location for every moment of your story. Matthew Dicks demonstrates this principle with two versions of a story about his grandmother. The first version begins with a character description: "My grandmother's name is Odelie Dicks. She's a crooked old lady in both body and mind." While informative, this approach fails to engage our imagination. The second version, however, places us in a scene: "I'm standing at the edge of my grandmother's garden, watching her relentlessly pull weeds from the unforgiving soil." Immediately, we can visualize the setting—we're transported into the story rather than merely hearing about it. With just one sentence establishing location, the narrative comes alive in our minds. This distinction becomes crucial when handling backstory or exposition. In "Charity Thief," Dicks needs to convey extensive background information about his family situation. Rather than stepping outside the narrative to explain, he anchors this information in a specific location: "I'm parked in the lot of a Citgo station in New Hampshire, sitting behind the wheel of my car, hands still gripping the steering wheel." By maintaining this visual anchor, the audience remains immersed in the story even during necessary exposition. The same principle applies when explaining technical or historical information. Instead of pausing your story for a lecture, incorporate the information into a scene. When a storyteller needed to explain photosynthesis, Dicks suggested creating a flashback to a biology class where the process was first learned, weaving the explanation into the narrative fabric rather than interrupting the flow. This approach works because our minds naturally construct visual scenes when given spatial coordinates. Even with minimal description, audiences will fill in details from their own experiences—creating the garden, the gas station, or the classroom in their minds. To implement this technique in your own stories, review your narratives and ensure every moment has a clear location. When transitioning between scenes, clearly signal the new setting. If you need to include historical or technical information, embed it within a scene rather than stepping outside the narrative. Avoid common mistakes that break the cinematic spell: don't ask rhetorical questions, don't directly address the audience, don't use phrases like "this is a story about..." and avoid anachronisms that remind listeners they're hearing a story rather than experiencing it. The ultimate goal is to make your audience forget where they are, forget that you exist, and travel completely into the world of your story. As one audience member told Dicks after a performance, "Listening to you tell a story is like listening to an audiobook"—exactly the immersive experience every storyteller should aim to create.

Chapter 4: Use Strategic Surprise to Generate Emotion

The secret to eliciting genuine emotional responses from your audience—whether laughter, tears, anger, or awe—lies in the strategic use of surprise. Unlike real life, where emotions can arise from many sources, in storytelling we have only our words to create emotional impact, and surprise is our most powerful tool for achieving this. Matthew Dicks demonstrates this principle through his story "This Is Going to Suck," about a car accident that nearly took his life. When describing the collision, he first establishes a peaceful, hopeful scene—driving through a snowy landscape, passing homes that look like Christmas postcards, feeling optimistic about the holiday season. This beautiful setup creates maximum contrast with the horrific collision that follows, making the impact more shocking and visceral for the audience. Later in the story, Dicks describes feeling utterly alone in the emergency room, emphasizing that no one knows his name and his parents haven't arrived. This careful setup makes the revelation that his friends have filled the waiting room even more emotionally powerful. By building anticipation in one direction, then delivering an unexpected turn, he creates the conditions for a genuine emotional response. One powerful technique Dicks employs is what he calls "planting a bomb"—hiding critical information within your story that will pay off later. In "This Is Going to Suck," he mentions asking a nurse to call McDonald's to tell them he can't make his shift, but he hides this detail among other medical interactions and adds humor to camouflage its importance. This seemingly minor detail becomes crucial later when we learn his McDonald's coworkers initiated a phone tree that filled the waiting room with friends. The audience experiences genuine surprise because the information was present but not emphasized. Another effective approach involves using stakes to heighten surprise. By loading the audience with your hopes and expectations before a pivotal moment, their emotional investment increases. When expectations are upended, the surprise becomes more impactful because the audience was emotionally committed to a different outcome. Dicks calls this technique "Backpacks"—sharing your hopes and fears before an important moment, making the audience emotionally invested in the outcome. To harness the power of surprise in your own stories, avoid common mistakes that diminish its impact. Never open with thesis statements like "This is a story about the time my friends became my family"—this telegraphs the ending and robs the audience of discovery. Similarly, don't summarize emotions ("I was devastated") when you can show the circumstances that create those emotions. Trust your audience to experience the feelings alongside you rather than telling them how to feel. Remember that the most powerful emotional moments in storytelling come from these carefully crafted surprises—not from telling the audience how to feel, but from creating the conditions where they can't help but feel. When you master this technique, your stories will resonate long after the telling has ended.

Chapter 5: Master the Balance of Vulnerability and Performance

Effective storytelling requires a delicate balance between raw vulnerability and polished performance. While authenticity forms the foundation of meaningful stories, crafting those experiences into compelling narratives requires deliberate choices about what to include, what to omit, and how to structure your story for maximum impact. Matthew Dicks calls these deliberate choices "the five permissible lies of true storytelling"—not actual falsehoods, but strategic adjustments that serve the audience and the story's essential truth. The first of these is omission. In "Charity Thief," Dicks omits a hitchhiker named Randy who was present during much of the actual experience. Why? Because Randy's presence would distract from the intimate moment between Dicks and the widower—the true heart of the story. Similarly, he removes two earlier houses he visited before the pivotal blue door. These omissions serve the story's core truth rather than diminishing it. Another "permissible lie" involves compression—pushing time and space together to make stories more comprehensible and dramatic. Dicks shares how his story "Bike off Roof" compresses a two-day event (planning the jump one day, executing it the next) into a single afternoon. This makes the story easier to visualize and more dramatically satisfying without changing its essential truth. Nothing significant happened between planning and execution, so stretching the story across multiple days would only dilute its impact. The author also discusses the strategic use of assumption—filling in forgotten details with reasonable guesses based on context. When unable to remember what kind of car Batman hit in a childhood story, he reasonably assumes it was a station wagon—common for the 1970s setting—rather than inventing a more dramatic vehicle. Similarly, progression involves changing the sequence of events for emotional impact, while conflation compresses emotional transformation into a shorter timeframe when the actual realization developed gradually. These adjustments should always benefit the audience, never the storyteller. Dicks emphasizes that we never lie to make ourselves look better or to mitigate our failures. In fact, our most compelling stories often come from moments of shame, failure, or vulnerability. The goal is to create the clearest path for the audience to understand and connect with the essential truth of our experience. When crafting your own stories, remember that memory itself is imperfect. Each time we recall an event, we unconsciously alter it. Acknowledge this reality while striving to preserve the emotional truth of what happened. Most importantly, never add elements that weren't present in the original experience—that crosses the line from crafting to fabricating. The art of storytelling lies in this balance: being truthful about what matters most while shaping the narrative to create the most meaningful connection with your audience.

Chapter 6: Transform Big Stories into Universal Connections

Counterintuitively, the most dramatic events of our lives—accidents, illnesses, achievements, adventures—are often the hardest stories to tell effectively. These "big stories" can create distance rather than connection, as few people share these extreme experiences. The secret to telling these stories well lies in finding the small, universal moments within these larger events—the human elements everyone can relate to regardless of their personal history. Matthew Dicks demonstrates this principle through his story "This Is Going to Suck," about a near-fatal car accident. Despite the dramatic elements—his head crashing through a windshield, his heart stopping, being brought back to life—the story doesn't focus on these aspects. Instead, it centers on the moment when, feeling utterly alone in the emergency room, he discovers his friends have filled the waiting room while his parents are nowhere to be found. This smaller moment of connection amid abandonment resonates universally, even with people who've never experienced a life-threatening accident. When Dicks receives feedback about this story, no one ever mentions the accident or his brush with death. They talk about the emergency room scene, about friendship filling the void of family. The dramatic elements serve merely as the vehicle to deliver the audience to this more relatable human moment—just as the blown tire in "Charity Thief" is simply the means to get him to that blue door where a meaningful connection occurs. This approach applies to all types of extraordinary experiences. Dicks tells a story about his son Charlie's birth, which involved a dangerous placental abruption. Rather than focusing on the medical drama, he centers the story on unexpected beauty—watching his three-year-old daughter, who desperately wanted a sister, fall instantly in love with her brother despite her initial disappointment. This moment of "love at first sight" becomes the universal heart of an otherwise unique medical experience. To apply this principle to your own big stories, look beyond the dramatic events themselves to find the smaller, more intimate moments within them. Ask yourself: What part of this experience might someone who hasn't lived through it still understand? Where was the moment of connection, realization, or transformation that transcends the specific circumstances? Even the most extraordinary experiences—climbing Mount Everest, surviving a plane crash, achieving remarkable success—become powerful stories when they reveal something universal about human nature. Remember that the dramatic elements provide context and stakes, but the emotional core should be accessible to anyone. As Dicks notes, "We all have our own Mount Everests to summit. Some just happen to be the real thing." By finding the universal within the extraordinary, you transform even your biggest stories into moments of genuine connection.

Summary

The art of storytelling transforms ordinary moments into extraordinary connections. Throughout this exploration of storytelling techniques, we've discovered that our most powerful stories often come not from dramatic events, but from small moments of realization—those five-second transformations that reveal something essential about ourselves and our world. As Matthew Dicks reminds us, "When you begin looking for the story of your day, you begin living a more storied life." The journey to becoming a compelling storyteller begins with a simple step: take five minutes today to identify one moment from your day worth remembering. This daily practice will gradually transform how you experience your life, helping you recognize the extraordinary hiding within ordinary moments that too often slip away unnoticed. As you develop your storytelling lens, you'll not only find endless material for meaningful stories, but you'll also discover a richer, more connected way of moving through the world—seeing the significance in small moments and recognizing the universal threads that bind us all together in this human experience.

About Author

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Matthew Dicks

Matthew Dicks is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, Something Missing, Unexpectedly, Milo, The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs, and the upcoming novels The Other Mother and Cardboard Knight, as well as the nonfiction Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Art of Storytelling. His novels have been translated into more than 25 languages worldwide. Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend was the 2014 Dolly Gray Award winner and was nominated for a 2017 Nutmeg Award in Connecticut. Matthew was also awarded first prize in 2016 and second prize in 2017 in the Magazine/Humorous Column category by the CT Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of the rock opera The Clowns and the musicals Caught in the Middle, Sticks & Stones, and Summertime. He has written comic books for Double Take comics. He is a columnist for Seasons magazine and has published work in Reader's Digest, The Hartford Courant, Parents magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He was awarded first prize for opinion writing in 2015 by the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists. When not hunched over a computer screen, Matthew fills his days as an elementary school teacher, a storyteller, a speaking coach, a blogger, a wedding DJ, a minister, a life coach, and a Lord of Sealand. He has been teaching for 20 years and is a former West Hartford Teacher of the Year and a finalist for Connecticut Teacher of the Year.Matthew is a 35-time Moth StorySLAM champion and 5-time GrandSLAM champion whose stories have been featured on their nationally syndicated Moth Radio Hour and their weekly podcast. He has also told stories for This American Life, TED, The Colin McEnroe Show, The Story Collider, The Liar Show, Literary Death Match, The Mouth, and many others. He has performed in such venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Wilbur Theater, The Academy of Music in North Hampton, CT, The Bynam Theater of Pittsburgh, The Bell House in NYC, The Lebanon Opera House, Boston University, and Infinity Hall in Hartford, CT.He is a regular guest on several Slate podcasts, including The Gist, where he teaches storytelling.Matthew is also the co-founder and creative director of Speak Up, a Hartford-based storytelling organization that produces shows throughout New England. He teaches storytelling and public speaking to individuals, corporations, and school districts around the world. He has most recently taught at Yale University, The University of Connecticut Law School, Purdue University, The Connecticut Historical Society, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Miss Porter's School, The Berkshire School, and Graded School in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Matthew is the creator and co-host of Boy vs. Girl, a podcast about gender and gender stereotypes. Matthew is married to friend and fellow teacher, Elysha, and they have two children, Clara and Charlie. He grew up in the small town of Blackstone, Massachusetts, where he made a name for himself by dying twice before the age of eighteen and becoming the first student in his high school to be suspended for inciting riot upon himself.

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