Entertainment is the key in storytelling and entertaining stories.   If your stories entertain, the informative and persuasive elements in them will also be remembered.   So if your want your workshop, educational, or conference keynote to be really effective, build it around an entertaining story.

In public speaking, nothing is more effective in arousing emotions than a story.   So use an entertaining story to make your point.   If the story’s point is made strong enough, statistics, data, and facts are almost superfluous-  people will remember a yarn long after all the rest has faded from memory.  

You think not?     I’ll bet you can still remember ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears,’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ and the “Three Little Pigs,” to this day.   Stories stay!    They seem to get right down into our molecular structure.   

Also, remember that stories told at ‘first hand’ are those which a granted most credibility by a listener.   So tell stories from your personal experience wherever you can.     

The Nostalgic Factor in an entertaining story

Use those stories in which your audience has a shared experience wherever you can.  I call this the “Nostalgic Factor.”   For example, if your audience lived through World War Two, tell them stories from that era.   If they are teenagers, tell them stories from your own teenage years.   Empathy unlocks resistance.

Techniques and an entertaining stories?

 To create instant drama, use short, punchy sentences of no more than eight or nine words; monosyllablic words if possible.   But don’t keep this up for too long, for it will lose its effect.   To create feelings of tranquility, long, rambling sentences are the go.

Just as newspaper headlines entertaining stories must grab the reader’s attention at a glance, so a public speaker, trainer, workshop presenter must capture the listener’s attention within the first ninety seconds.    If they do not, it is often an uphill battle from thereon.    Even if you only say, “Once upon a time…” and continue on from there, you’ll have ‘em hooked.  So start with an entertaining story wherever you can.

Ability at storytelling- how do you get it?   Develop ‘Story Language.’   Read fiction, descriptive short stories, novels, poetry.    From these you will absorb colourful words into your everyday oral vocabulary.   

Avoid yarns that don’t grab you in entertaining stories.

Don’t use a story unless it has personal appeal to you.   If it grabs you, moves you, then, told well, it will grab and move your audience.    If it’s something you sort of feel duty-bound to do but really don’t want to…then don’t.

Avoid using visual aids such as white boards, projectors and the like when creating your entertaining stories.  Don’t break your audience’s inner picturing by showing them something physical.   Let their minds do the interpretation from your words.   Also, the less inhibited you are, the more easily you will fall into natural gesture and movement.   Don’t strive for effect.  Let it happen.   In storytelling, the idea is to sort of fade into the background as you lead the audience’s imagination into an entertaining story.

As in a joke’s punch line, the end of an entertaining story should bring it to its conclusion.   No explanation should be needed.  The story should stand by itself.   If the last sentence can complete it- good.   If the final word does it-  excellent.   Further embellishment is not required.

Finally, in entertaining stories, storytelling as in golf – if you want to get good at it-  practice, practice, practice!

Entertaining stories