How To Use Memories to Craft Powerful Stories

If you’re considering the use of storytelling in your personal or professional life as a way to get people to listen and take action or change their beliefs, you should consider spending time going over your memories before you craft your presentation.

You want to go over your memories from the earliest moment in time and move through your life in a chronological order, jotting down everything that made an impact on you in some way.

It can be anything at all – from experiencing food scarcity to hitting a ball out of the park and having your father cheer you on. It might be in later years, when you started your first job and a boss took you under his wing and taught you some important business lessons.

Having memories written down with details that you can call upon whenever you’re about to embark on a new storytelling adventure is important. You can add to it as you begin to remember certain details.

You need to not only write down the memory itself in terms of what happened, but also describe the setting and action using all of your senses. Remember how it made you feel before, during and after an event occurred.

Who else was affected by it? Some of the memories might not even be about you, but about someone else you once knew. You can tell a story without identify someone. Keep it vague and nonspecific.

Your memories can be about your home life and your upbringing. It might be about your years spent in school from elementary to middle and high school or even through your college years.

You can recall memories from your years spent working. It might be a memory of working as a teenager in an ice cream shop or as an adult only a year ago when something significant impacted your life.

When you write a swipe file of these memories that you can use in future storytelling pieces, you want to also write down what your reflection about these memories is like. Are you fond of the memory or does it make you sad?

What have you learned or how have you changed or taken action since the event occurred? Something that affected you might affect or better your audience the same way, and you can open their eyes through storytelling and help them live a better life.