Long Story Short
by Leitman, Margot · 110 highlights
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything. —MARK TWAIN
who would want to be friends with that perfect, stuck-up-sounding person?
Remember, no one cares about your life.
A:You have to trick people into caring about your life. You have to somehow make them think that your life is just like theirs. Once you do that, they will listen to anything you have to say.
look how easy it is to flip the first few lines of my story into something that relates more to the general population.
sometimes the best nights of our lives are not about fancy dining and evening gowns but good friends and a good spirit.
the stories you find yourself telling repeatedly in social situations are the one you should be exploring to develop more.
We are all selfish. Unless your story is also our story, we won’t give it a chance.
There’s no place like home. Everything you need, you already have; you just need to believe in yourself. Sometimes the people in charge have no idea what they’re doing.
the prospect of beginning something new is often scarier than sticking with something old and stale.
Start your story as if your audience is your best friend and you’re letting your BFF in on a little secret.
Starting a story with the word “so” makes me feel like I’m starting in the middle of a thought, like I’m midway through a casual conversation and I’m easing into the meat of a story I want to tell my friend. Feel free to try this yourself. A lot of my students
Starting a story with the word “so” makes me feel like I’m starting in the middle of a thought, like I’m midway through a casual conversation and I’m easing into the meat of a story I want to tell my friend.
Start your story with a thesis statement about yourself and then tell a specific story that proves your thesis to be true.
a story is not a list, so I don’t want twelve short examples of how you’re afraid of commitment; I want one story in great detail that proves this.
Indifference is the enemy of storytelling. If you don’t feel strongly about what you are talking about, the audience won’t care about it either.
As listeners, we often care more about how you felt about what happened than what actually happened.
Feeling strongly towards or against something/someone
No one likes being told how to feel.