Want to tell your story and make real connections? Learn the secret…

What’s the big secret? … The story is not about you!

How can your story possibly not be about you? You’re the one who lived through the events, right? Sure you did. However, once you turn what happened into a story, it becomes about your audience – not you.

This is often the hardest thing for a teller of personal stories or memoirs to wrap their head around. It is also the most crucial thing. Let’s unpack it…

When you tell a story, you’re giving away a gift. Think about the times you have chosen a physical gift for someone else: you considered what sort of gift would be right for that person, yes? You took into account their interests and tastes rather than your own.

But have you ever made the mistake of buying a gift for someone based on what you would like to receive? Remember that blank expression that crossed their face when they unwrapped it, before they managed to hide it behind a smile? Right then, you knew that the gift you thought was so lovely was going to vanish into a drawer, never again to see the light of day.

That doesn’t mean the object itself was awful. It just wasn’t a good gift.

Telling your story is the same. You have to take into account your audience’s interests. 

Does that mean my story has no value?

No. No it doesn’t mean that.

Every story has value. That is true whether your story is about raising your children, rowing across the Atlantic, teaching pupils to read, or the journey to becoming a millionaire.

So how do I tell my story so that other people will be interested?

A story that holds other people’s interest is one which allows them to imagine that the story is about them. They need to ‘live’ the story for themselves along with you – either looking over your shoulder or actually being you, especially when the tension of the story reaches its height.

They need to see, hear, feel and smell the experiences. Your job as the storyteller is to park your ego and allow them to do that. Allow them to make the story their own.

In other words, you have to learn to let the story go. Give it away. That might feel scary. It might feel unfair. After all, you’re the one who lived it.

Is nobody reading your stories? You’re probably doing THIS wrong…

You write a story, put it out there… and nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nobody (apart from your mum) seems to care. It’s a powerful story, one which had an impact on you when you lived or imagined it. Why doesn’t anyone comment on it or share it? The wind has been taken completely out of your sails. What went wrong?

Is it because what you have to say is worthless? Definitely not.

Rather, it is because people haven’t seen the value in what you have to say… which is a different matter.

And that is because (brace yourself for the honest feedback) you haven’t provided them with the story in a way that is of value to them. This is totally a problem you can do something about.

Creating an emotional connection with your readers

Go back to the time when you were living a story that you have tried to tell. It doesn’t matter if it’s a true story and you lived it for real, or if it’s a story that only happened in your head. How did you experience it? Or at least, how do you remember experiencing it? You might remember the colours, shapes, light, movements and other visual aspects of the experience. For example, do you remember the way that cloud sped across the sky and turned the ground grey?

Perhaps you recall the sounds more than the sights. The way the school children were shouting in their yard a quarter of a mile away; the way the back door slammed and cut off the noise from outside. Maybe you remember the characteristic rhythm of a clock.

It could be that you remember the feelings in your muscles, joints and ‘guts’ more than the sights or sounds. The way a person shrank in utter defeat or misery; the way you tapped and fiddled with a pen in your nervousness. The way people behaved physically – and changed their behaviour as the story moved on – is a third way you might have experienced the story.

These three ways of experiencing a story (sights, sounds and kinaesthetic sensations) are likely to be the main ways in which YOU experienced that story. The balance between the three ways varies from person to person, but you can be pretty sure that those three types of stimulus were present in your experience of the story.

Now let’s move on to how this can help you tell your story in a way that will help you form an emotional connection with your ideal audience…

Why you should never write a book

So what if you’ve always had that idea to write a novel? Big deal if the fabulous life events of a family member ought to be recorded for posterity in a book?

Nobody actually wants to read any book you could write, right? You haven’t written anything of that nature for years – not since you were in school. You don’t have the wit of Stephen Fry, or his vocabulary, come to that. Do you really think you could write enough? Books need to have thousands and thousands of words in them! Not to mention the effect it would have on your family and social life: everybody knows writers are loners; in fact, they mostly live tragic, isolated lives in a cold cottage somewhere on a blasted heath.

Actually, no.

How do you know nobody would want to read it? If the story grips your imagination, chances are it would grab other people’s imagination too.

School may be a long time ago (longer for some of us than for others!), but who says that learning stops when you leave formal education? School isn’t a place where all the knowledge and skills we could ever use are downloaded to our hard drives – it’s a place where we learn how to learn for the rest of our lives.

Why are you comparing your words with the words of other people? Of course you’re not Stephen Fry! Or Philippa Gregory. Or J.K. Rowling. Or… anyone else who isn’t you. Your voice is uniquely yours.