How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth

by The Moth

Many of us have been taught that hiding our emotions is a survival skill. We’ve been told, “Hold it in, don’t show your cards. Don’t signal weakness.” However, in storytelling, bringing the full breadth of your feelings to the table is the power move!

A storytelling audience can be just as engaged silently together as they are laughing together. Both are stunningly intimate. When you learn to tune in to the feeling in the room during the heavier parts of the story, you can intuitively sense it. It’s a charged silence. We’ve come to refer to this as “the sound of the audience leaning in.”

Moth storyteller Krista Tippett once asked Nadia Bolz-Weber, a trailblazing Lutheran minister (who is also a Moth storyteller), how she knows a personal anecdote or story is ready to go into one of her sermons. Nadia answered that she always tries to “preach from her scars and not her wounds.” The first time we heard it was a eureka moment for us, and the phrase has become part of our vernacular because the same is true in storytelling.

To tell a story about someone who has died is to conjure them back to life, if only for a few minutes, and allow hundreds or thousands of people to meet them.