tips for storytellers

Here is an extract from the Story Guide we produced for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

• Only tell stories that matter to you.
• Know your audience and the reaction you seek. This will help you shape your story.
• Put yourselves in the shoes of a particular member of the audience and imagine the ears they will be listening through.
• Tell a story about a particular time, place and event. Weave in small details that bring the whole scene to life using vivid language (generalised concepts will lose listeners).
• Paint pictures in the mind of your listener. People will remember sequences of images and not the words.
• Rehearse with a partner. Tell the story. Ask them to tell it back to help you assess whether your structure, messages and images are clear enough.
• Think about your relationship to the story. Are you a character in it? Are you telling somebody else’s story? Do you need to be clear that you have ‘borrowed’ the story? Do you need to tell it anonymously to protect the original teller or characters?
• Disguise locations and names where the material is sensitive.
• Think about what props you could use – images, sounds and objects.
• Think about whether you are going to introduce the story or just slide it into the proceedings without announcing it.
• Avoid too much explanation and heavy-handed lessons and morals that ‘close’ the story, rather than leaving it open to the listener to choose how to take it on.

‘People said my story worked best when I was describing the actual events and feelings in the relationship, and their minds tended to wander when I provided an analysis of what was going on. So they liked hearing about the action, conversations and feelings, but disengaged slightly when I interrogated the situation.’

photograph by mike baird