Three Sentence Story: The Atomic Level of Storytelling
Putting the dinner dishes into the dishwasher, he mentioned my time at Story2. His words gave me the inspiration I needed to get unstuck. I began to write.
My intro to this post is a three sentence story. I fell in love with the concept when I worked at a startup that helped high school students tell their story in the college admissions process. The product was something I wish I existed when I applied to schools as a first-gen student.
When I worked at Story2, I learned what the founder Carol Barash called, “The Moments Method.” The method distilled her research on the neuroscience around storytelling. The process takes you from finding a story to tell, focusing in on a specific moment in time, using your spoken voice to access your writing voice, mapping the story to help people remember it, and “focusing out” where you edit what you’ve written through the lens of a reader.
When mapping out a story, there are three critical sentences:
- An opening to draw the reader into the action
- A clear pivot where you “risk something, learn something, grow, change, or take action”
- A powerful ending that leaves the reader wanting to know more
I’ve always found the mapping structure exciting because you can create a story from those three sentences alone. It’s storytelling on an atomic level!
At Story2, I worked with Carol to embed storytelling into our team culture. One day I had an epiphany! The three sentence story was the perfect, bite-sized writing ritual our team could easily embrace and connect over. To put this into action, I created a daily Slackbot reminder for us to share stories in a dedicated channel.
Our team’s daily contributions were thrilling to watch come in. The stories ranged in tone and content.
I enjoyed telling my stories, ranging from the mundane to the profound.
Writing about the ritual now makes me recall how much I miss it. There’s something so simple and deeply satisfying about it.
One thing I’ll never forget: everyone has a story to tell.
This post is part of my WriteMarch series, a commitment to write daily for a month.
