Storyworthy
Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling
Matthew Dicks · 2018 · Communication
12 min · 11 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Matthew Dicks, an elementary school teacher and multiple-time Moth GrandSLAM champion, argues that the ability to tell a compelling true story is a learnable craft, not an innate gift. He claims most people fail at storytelling because they recount events instead of dramatizing change, and he offers a repeatable method—built around noticing daily life and isolating the exact moment a person shifts—for turning ordinary experience into stories that move an audience.
Read a little every day
15 min a day
1 days · done Sat, Oct 31
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- A professional preparing a wedding toast, eulogy, or work presentation who wants it to actually land - A writer or teacher who wants a concrete method for finding and shaping personal material - Someone who has told the same three anecdotes for a decade and wants new, better ones
What’s inside
- 1Stories Are About Change, Not Events1 min
A story is valuable not because of what happened but because of how the teller changed in a single moment, which means most chronological recountings of events are not really stories at all.
- 2Homework for Life: Training the Eye to See1 min
The scarcity of good stories in most people's lives is not a scarcity of experience but a failure of daily attention, and that failure is fixable with a five-minute nightly habit.
- 3The Five-Second Moment1 min
Every worthwhile story pivots on a single instant lasting only seconds, and locating that instant before drafting anything is what keeps a story from sprawling into a list of events.
- 4Building the Frame: World Before, World After1 min
A story's structure is a bridge between who the narrator was before the five-second moment and who they became after it, not a sequence of events, and material that doesn't serve that bridge should be cut regardless of how true or interesting it is.
- 5Specific Details Travel Further Than General Ones1 min
Idiosyncratic, oddly specific detail creates broader emotional connection with an audience than any attempt to speak in general, universally relatable terms.
- 6Start Inside the Moment, Not Before It1 min
A story's first line should drop the audience into action already underway, because preambles explaining context before the story starts are the single most common reason audiences disengage early.
- 7End at the Peak, Not After It1 min
A story should end at the moment its meaning becomes clear, not linger afterward to explain that meaning, because stated morals undercut work the story has already done.
- 8Rehearsed, Not Memorized1 min
Great storytelling is practiced until it feels natural but is never memorized word for word, because word-for-word memorization produces recitation rather than connection with a live audience.
About Matthew Dicks
Matthew Dicks is an elementary school teacher in Connecticut, a novelist, and a competitive storyteller who has won the Moth's GrandSLAM championship more than a dozen times. He founded Speak Up, a Hartford-based storytelling organization and coaching business, and has trained thousands of people to tell stories for the stage, the classroom, and the boardroom.
