How to edit your stories but still make them compelling (4/5 in the story series)
As I opened the email, my heart started racing. It was even more exciting than I’d anticipated!
Two months earlier, I’d booked my ticket for Portland’s World Domination Summit – a conference full of do-gooders trying to change the world (like me!). I’d never been before, but knew WDS was a big noise in my industry.
The month before, they’d put out a call for Attendee Storytellers. By this point, I’d been running my live storytelling show for about a year and a half (and coaching all of the storytellers), so I figured I had a good shot. After all, there were, what, 500 people at this conference? So probably 30-odd would apply, and they’d choose around 25 of us.
They needed an inspiring story with a message. I wondered what I’d ever done that was inspiring… and then remembered. Oh yeah. My solo marathon. Two years before, after Hurricane Sandy led to the cancellation of the New York City Marathon that I was due to run, I’d made up for it by running one on my own, in London.
I pitched my story to WDS – starting in an action scene – and sent it off.
“CONGRATULATIONS!” came the email. “You’ve been selected to tell an attendee story on stage!” This was nice to hear, though not unexpected. BUT THEN:
“Hundreds of people applied, and you were one of only twelve selected!”
Well, THIS was exciting! Immediately, I jumped onto Facebook, to my local business group of business ladies.
“GUYS!!!!!” I told them, “Hundreds of people applied to tell a story at WDS, and I’m one of 12 selected!!! I’m going to be telling my story to 500 people!!!”
“Dude,” one of them replied. “The WDS audience is THREE THOUSAND”.
Oh.
Crap.
After getting over the fear of speaking to a room that enormous, I had another problem:
I had to get the whole story – Inspirational Message included – down to one and a half minutes.
As I talked about in part 1 of this blog series, when you’re telling a story, you need as much of it as possible to be action scenes. And, as I told you in part 2: action scenes require detail.
So how do you get the narrative of a very eventful 42 kilometer run – that, in the end, took over 7 hours – into a minute and a half?
First…
