Storytelling Advice for College Essays

Matthew Dicks is a 53-time Moth StorySLAM storytelling champion, and I've been reading his book "Storyworthy" to find tips that will help my students' college essays this Fall. The following are some of my favorites from the book:

Every Story Takes Only Five Seconds to Tell

“All great stories,” Dicks writes, “tell the story of a five-second moment in a person’s life… The purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible… These five-second moments are the moments in your life when something fundamentally changes forever. You fall in love. You fall out of love. You discover something new about yourself or another person. Your opinion on a subject dramatically changes. You find forgiveness. You reach acceptance. You sink into despair. You grudgingly resign. You’re drowned in regret. You make a life-altering decision. Choose a new path. Accomplish something great. Fail spectacularly. These are the moments that make great stories. They are often small and sudden and powerful. These are the best stories. They are the only stories worth telling.”

The Dinner Test

"Your essay must pass “the Dinner Test.” Is the story similar to the one you would tell a friend at dinner? This should be the goal, Dicks says.

“This means that when I hear a storyteller say that the purple pansies were particularly pleasant on their plush pillow of purple petunias, I think, ‘No one talks like that. This isn't poetry. You’re just telling a story. No one would ever have dinner with someone who talked like that.’

“This means that when I hear a storyteller begin their story with dialogue like, ‘Mom, I told you not to look under my bed!’ or even a random sound like, ‘Boom!’ I think, ‘I would not eat dinner with someone who started their story with unattributed dialogue. Why do storytellers think that this is a good idea?’

“Storytelling is not theater. It is not poetry. It should be a slightly more crafted version of the story you would tell your buddies over beers.”

This is the Dinner Test. It will guarantee that you don’t sound ‘performancy’ or inauthentic."

The Story Must Reflect Change

“Your story must reflect change over time. A story cannot simply be a series of remarkable events. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new. The change can be infinitesimal. It need not reflect an improvement in yourself or your character, but change must happen… Stories that fail to reflect change over time are known as anecdotes.” 

On Authenticity

“We tell stories to express our hardest, best, most authentic truths. Audiences want the real deal. They want the kind of stories that just might make them fall in love with the storyteller.”

Does Your Story Have to be “Big” or Dramatic?

No. No one’s comparing your trauma to someone else’s. You don’t have to hide that you grew up in Scarsdale, Winnetka, or Beverly Hills. Be who you are. As much or as little as you normally would.

There’s nothing in extreme life experiences for people to relate to, Dicks writes. “Nothing that rings true in the minds of listeners. Nothing that evokes memories of the past. Nothing that changes the way audience members see themselves or the world around them. 

“But if I tell you about my secret childhood hunger, that story is much more likely to resonate with you. Why? We all have secrets that we hold close to our hearts. Maybe it’s a secret that you never want anyone to know, or maybe it’s one that you desperately wish someone would uncover. 

Either way, we all know what it’s like to have a secret. We know how powerful and painful secrets can be. We all know what hunger feels like. We know what it’s like to want something important and essential - food, friendship, acceptance, love - but never to have enough of it. And we all know what it’s like to feel embarrassed or ashamed of never having enough of something that you so desperately need.

“This is why tiny moments like the one at my dining-room table with my wife and children often make the best stories. These are the moments that connect with people. These are the stories that touch people’s hearts. One of the most popular stories that I tell is not terribly funny or suspenseful or extraordinary. It doesn’t involve a near-death experience or law-enforcement officers. It’s a simple moment between a husband and wife that has come to mean so much to me, and in turn to many of my fans.”

Afraid You Don’t Have a Story to Tell? Do This Every Day to Find Your Stories

At the end of every day (starting today!), write down in a journal, a Google Doc, or Notes in your phone your answer to this question:  If I had to tell a story from today, what would it be? As benign and inconsequential as it might seem, what was the most storyworthy moment from my day? 

You’re looking for the five-second moments Dicks writes about above.

Don’t write the entire story each day - just a snippet. A sentence or two that captures the moment. Just enough to recall it clearly when you write your college essays.

You can also record any meaningful earlier-life memories that came to mind over the course of the day, in response either to something you added to the document or something that came to mind organically. Oftentimes these are recovered memories: moments from your past that have been forgotten for years but returned to your mind through the process of writing down the day’s most striking memory. 

By placing these most storyworthy moments in a spreadsheet or google doc, you can sort them for later use, copying, cutting, and pasting these stories so you can separate the truly storyworthy ideas from the ones that merely have potential. 

Finally, by writing these stories down, you can better see patterns in your life, and sometimes these patterns become essays, too.

“There are meaningful, life-changing moments happening in your life all the time,” Dicks writes. “That dander in the wind will blow by you for the rest of your life unless you learn to see it, capture it, hold on to it, and find a way to keep it in your heart forever. If you want to be a storyteller, this is your first step. Find your stories. Collect them. Save them forever.”

Once you start to do this,“you will find your life changed forever.”

Here’s a story from Dicks’ own life that he captured by writing down his daily story:

Last week my daughter, Clara, who’s nine years old now, asked me to pick her up. It was early in the morning, and she was feeling sleepy and a little sad that the weekend was over and we were heading back to school.

I pick Clara up every time she asks, because I know that at some point, probably sooner than later, she will be too heavy for me to lift, or even worse, she will stop asking.

So I’m holding Clara in my arms in our living room. The morning light is casting a warm, yellow glow in the room. The house is quiet. She and I are the only two awake. She wraps her arms around my neck and holds me tight.

A minute later my arms start to shake. I’m struggling to keep her aloft. My right foot, which has a torn ligament, begins to throb. I decide to put her down.

At that very moment, Clara pushes her face into the crook of my neck and whispers, ‘It’s just so nice to be held this close.’

Then it occurs to me: I’m the only person in the world who picks up my daughter like this anymore. She’s become too big for my wife or her grandparents to lift. I’m the last person who will ever hold her like this. I’m the last person who will hold her like a little girl.

I tighten my hold on her. I ignore my throbbing foot and tiring muscles. I whisper back, ‘Let’s just stay like this for a little bit. Okay?’

‘Sounds great, Daddy,’ she whispers back.
We hold each other in the growing light of a spring morning until she sighs and whispers, ‘Okay, let’s eat.’

If I hadn’t been doing my [daily story], this moment would have been lost to me. Even if I had recognized its importance (which is doubtful), I would have been hard-pressed to recall it later.