Are there really people out there telling the same old tired stories about the ship vs. the lighthouse or the Chevy Nova in Latin America? Both are myth, by the way, which doesn’t necessarily disqualify a great story. What does disqualify a story is that...
The reason most peoples’ stories are hard to listen to is that they have trouble divorcing themselves from the facts of their everyday lives. They’re slavishly devoted to chronology and detail. Sometimes, to tell a good story, you have to tell a lie or...
President Obama did something very important and powerful in his announcement yesterday about gay marriage. He talked about his family and, specifically, his children: “There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and...
I was meeting with a law firm the other day, trying to figure out what set them apart from the competition — their “key differentiators.” As we went over their various strengths, someone observed that “everybody else can say the same...
Every once in a while in your career you get to work on a dream project. One that’s challenging, rewarding and uses your talents to the utmost. But it requires a client with the guts to do something truly remarkable and the discipline to stick to it. This is the...
A while back I gave some tips for tightening stories. One of them was to watch out for “and then” syndrome. That is, if you find yourself saying “and then” a lot, what you have “may not actually be a story, but just a long sequence of...
