Life Journey from a Reader’s Perspective — Book: Storyworthy
When some of my friends discussed books that can help us become better storytellers and brought attention to the book Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks, I just started writing somewhat consistently online. At first, I wasn’t intentional about what I should write and how to create the content. All I knew was that I was writing to find a place of calm and assurance for my mind in a world full of noise.
Then I started to become more aware of the content I was creating. Am I making a list of events or creating engaging content? This question gave me the hunger and motivation to go through this book.
Matthew Dicks divides the book into three parts: Finding Your Story, Crafting Your Story, and Telling Your Story. Based on personal experience, I’d like to share my thoughts on the first two parts, which involve finding story-worthy moments in life and creating story-worthy content.
What is Storyworthy
According to the author, a storyworthy story must reflect change over time,
A story cannot simply be a series of remarkable events. You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new. The change can be infinitesimal. It need not reflect an improvement in yourself or your character, but change must happen. Even the worst movies in the world reflect some change in a character over time. So must your story. Stories that fail to reflect change over time are known as anecdotes.
(p.27, What is a Story)
This might sound challenging because we don’t think intentionally about change often. At least when I think about stories to tell, I try to recall the exciting, memorable, or hard-to-replicate moments from the past. But they usually start as a singular event rather than reflect specific changes to my life before or after.
I. Finding Your Story
Matthew Dick introduced a few tips to help storyteller to tell their stories,
- First Last Best Worst
This is self-explanatory; the author suggested a list of prompts and wrote down the keywords for each category of events. When that happens, that’s it.
2. Homework for life
Another method to find stories, which is also the only assignment Matthew Dicks gave to the book's readers, is to use five minutes a day to reflect upon your day. Use this five minutes to find the most storyworthy moment and write it down in a few sentences at most.
I added this practice to my daily routine quite conveniently. Because my daily journaling method is called Life Dashboard, introduced by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in their book, Designing Your Life. Life Dashboard taught me to think about my previous day in four aspects: Health/Work/Play/Love. Depending on your stage of life, you can interpret them in your way to suit your life context; here’s how I approach Health/Work/Play/Love when I journal:
- Health: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state; Issues frustrate me
- Love: relationship with people around me; activities fostered my engagement with the community
- Work: things I did help me to progress in terms of career or overall productivity; any challenging or tedious tasks I accomplished; things I tried but did not deliver satisfying results.
- Play: exciting things I’ve learned; any novelty experiences
Journaling through Life Dashboard already gave me an overview of my previous day with a quick recap of moments worth noticing in different categories. Now I try to spend an additional 5–10 seconds every day to circle one moment, and hopefully, that can be turned into a storyworthy story in the future.
II. Crafting Your Story
- The defining moment
In terms of finding the central spine of the story and arranging the other pieces around it, I’m impacted mainly by Matthew Dick’s Five-second theory:
Every great story ever told is essentially about a five-second moment in the life of a human being, and the purpose of the story is to bring that moment in the life of a human being, and the purpose of the story is to bring that moment to the greatest clarity possible.
(p.99, Every Story Takes Only Five Seconds to Tell)
He explained that movies and great stories could involve significant and exciting assets, such as action and suspense, dinosaurs and monsters, or futuristic technologies. But what matters the most is that moment of transformation,
For example, the movie Jurassic Park was so well received that most people think because it’s about realistically rendered dinosaur images. But the author picked up a scene when the main character Grant looked at a piece of velociraptor claw he unearthed a long time ago, which was priceless to him. Now he lets the claw fall to the ground.
It’s important to remember that Grant used this same claw at the beginning of the film to frighten the boy he didn’t like. It’s a boy he thought was smelly and stupid. Now he has let his fossilized claw go. Instead of holding on to this precious bit of ancient dinosaur, Grant is now holding on to children — one who made him laugh a moment ago and the other whom he has comforted like a father.
This is Grant’s five-second moment.
It’s the most important moment of the film.
It’s the moment of true transformation.
This is why he tells Lex that he will have to evolve too. The word evolve is important and purposeful. Grant has already evolved.
(p. 106, Every Story Takes Only Five Seconds to tell)
Thus this story of dinosaurs is so resonating; it lingers in our minds and hearts longer than any dinosaur movie before and since. Essentially it echos the author’s point on what makes a story storyworthy; Jurassic Park tells a story of ‘transformation and love’, which makes it a moving story.
2. The beginning
Finding the defining moment of the story already sets you apart as a better storyteller than most people. In addition, the five-second moment is the “purpose and pinnacle (p. 115)” of the story. Therefore it sets the tone for the end of your story.
The next task is to create the beginning of the story; in the author’s opinion, it’s easy because
The beginning of the story should be the opposite of the end. Find the opposite of your transformation, revelation, or realization, and this is where your story should start.
This is what creates an arc in your story.
This is how a story shows change over time.
(p. 117, Finding Your Beginning)
I thought this was brilliant.
Nothing works better than starting from a point where the main character knows nothing about what will happen or how the story will evolve, assuming things will happen today, just as yesterday. But then one unexpected thing happens, then one asset after another; the story unfolds as a series of staircases that leads to that five-second moment of transformation or realization. Then the door to the new world opens. With or without a main character, a good story should bring the audience to enter a new space they did not anticipate.
Storyworthy framework to Storyworthy mindset
After learning about identifying the five-second moment and finding the beginning from the opposite, I adopted this story worthy framework more intentionally in my writing.
My original intention of writing involves capturing the lessons I learned from different books, and somehow I unintentionally made them into how my life was changed because of the readings. In that sense, the storyworthy framework fosters me to cultivate a storyworthy mindset, to think about my life as before and after I read each book. This turned a typical ‘book review’ writing into a personal story and encouraged me to hold on to that realization of change and live my life differently.
So far, I have written about five books: Deep Work, Atomic Habits, Life of the Beloved, Grit, and Istanbul. The experience of writing about them have become five life turning point through which I evolve into a new person after each encounter.
Before Deep Work, I was mindlessly driven by the demands of life
After Deep Work, I strive for methods to hold my ground and lay deep roots
Before Atomic Habits, I was often helplessly eyeing an unattainable goal
After Atomic Habits, I strategically architect a system to move closer to the goal
Before Life of the Beloved, I was afraid of knowledge and confronted my fear and insecurity
After the Life of the beloved, I embrace them as my unique blessings and let the light shine out of them.
Before Grit, I do good work in ministry by following other people's steps.
After Grit, I found my personal conviction and a grandeur purpose even through trials and errors.
Before Istanbul, I thought I loved this literature due to my personal affection for a foreign culture,
After Istanbul, I realized it addressed the universal sense of unfulfillment and longing in the heart of every man, nation, and civilization.
Live a Storyworthy life
Indeed this before-and-after way of narrating a story is familiar to me. For Christians, most people have a personal testimony to tell the story of before and after encountering Christ. But before reading Storyworthy, I thought I only had one before-and-after moment related to my testimony. After reading Storyworthy, I realized I have many more before and after moments. This realization also changed my outlook toward repentance in Christian teaching. I once thought repentance was painful and humbling; people often compare that to the experience of making a U-turn on the freeway after realizing I was heading in the wrong direction. Even though this sounds costly and humbling, it is worth making a U-term. This analogy makes sense when discussing that one repentance when I decided to center my life around God instead of myself. But sticking to this analogy gave me much more confusion once I heard I needed to repent daily, even after becoming a Christian. When I thought I had to make consecutive U-turns day after day, that did not make sense. Such thinking always made me feel dreadful about repentance, and I barely did so.
However, Storyworthy provides me with the lens to see my life as a series of stairs; each consists of a story of before and after, a story of transformation, a story of leaving the old behind and picking up something new, i.e., repentance. I understood each person is a complex system consisting of millions of mindsets, habits, preferences, and tendencies toward specific actions. Still, a majority part of these components we do not even know. Most people may live their lives with these millions of parts jumbled together and undetected. But a person who strives to live a story-worthy life can seek daily opportunities to pull a thread out of that messy coil, and to refine or renew at least one component, by thinking differently, acting differently, or believing differently. After all, that person can operate more of these components of the entire machinery called ‘self’ and orchestrate it to play wonderful music called ‘life.’
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:2
