Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling

Matthew Dicks, an elementary school teacher, novelist, and accomplished competitive storyteller, presents a comprehensive guide to the craft of personal storytelling. Drawing on his experience as a 34-time Moth StorySLAM champion and five-time GrandSLAM champion (the GrandSLAM being The Moth's higher-level championship event), Dicks organizes the book into three parts: finding stories, crafting them, and telling them.

Dicks opens with his origin story. In July 2011, he attended his first Moth StorySLAM, a live storytelling competition, at the Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan. Despite months of delays and excuses, his wife, Elysha, bought tickets and accompanied him. When his name was the last drawn, Dicks froze, but Elysha kicked him in the shin and sent him to the stage, where he told a story about learning to pole-vault in high school and won the competition. He emphasizes that he did not grow up in a storytelling family and only began because friends pressured him, establishing his central claim: Storytelling is a learnable skill, not an innate gift. He also challenges the assumption that dramatic life experiences are necessary, arguing that the simplest stories about the smallest moments are often the most compelling and that everyone has stories worth telling.

In Part I, Dicks defines what makes a story and introduces three exercises for finding them. He distinguishes personal narrative from folktales and fables, arguing that true stories told by those who lived them create a unique connection between teller and listener. A story must meet three requirements: it must reflect change over time (without transformation, it is merely an anecdote), it must belong to the teller, who serves as protagonist, and it must pass the Dinner Test, meaning the performance version should resemble how the storyteller would recount it to a friend over dinner, without theatrical gestures or overwrought language.

Dicks's primary story-finding method is Homework for Life, a daily practice of reflecting at day's end and recording the most storyworthy moment in a sentence or two on a spreadsheet. He illustrates with the story of Elysha revealing at the dinner table that she knew he had been hungry as a child, a secret he had never shared. Dicks argues that this tiny domestic moment resonates more deeply than his near-death experiences, because listeners connect to universal feelings like secrecy, shame, and being truly known by another person. Over time, Homework for Life sharpened what he calls a storytelling lens, enabling him to recognize meaningful moments in real time and recover forgotten memories. He reports that his list of untold story ideas exceeds 500 items.

The second exercise, Crash & Burn, is stream-of-consciousness writing governed by three rules: do not cling to any single idea, do not judge what appears on the page, and never let the pen stop moving. Dicks developed it partly because post-traumatic stress disorder from an armed robbery at a McDonald's when he was 22 impaired his ability to dream productively. He provides an annotated example of a 10-minute session that yields six potential stories and several recovered memories. The third exercise, First Last Best Worst, involves creating a grid with the categories first, last, best, and worst across the top and prompts such as kiss, car, pet, and trouble down the side. He credits Moth artistic director Catherine Burns with the original concept and demonstrates how even deliberately mundane prompts generate abundant story ideas.

Part II addresses craft, anchored to a model story called "Charity Thief," which Dicks presents in full. In the story, 20-year-old Dicks blows out a tire on a New Hampshire highway, spends all his money on a spare, and finds himself stranded with no gas and no one to call. He puts on his crumpled McDonald's uniform, goes door to door posing as a charity collector, and spontaneously lies about his mother dying of cancer. A widower whose wife died of cancer five years earlier pours out his grief on his porch, gives Dicks $20, and hugs him. Dicks leaves realizing he knew nothing about loneliness and never wants to understand it the way that man did.

From this and other stories, Dicks builds his central craft principle: Every great story is about a five-second moment of transformation, a brief instant when something changes forever. The storyteller's job is to bring that moment to the greatest possible clarity; everything else in the story exists to serve it. He extends the principle to film, arguing that Jurassic Park is really about a man learning to love children and that Raiders of the Lost Ark is about a scientist finding faith.

The beginning of a story, Dicks argues, should represent the opposite of the five-second moment, creating a clear arc of change. In "Charity Thief," the ending is realizing he knows nothing about loneliness, so the beginning is his belief that he is utterly alone. He also advises starting as close to the end as possible, citing a rental-car story in which he progressively moved the opening from a Connecticut airport to the Alamo counter in Boca Raton, eliminating unnecessary scenes. To maintain engagement, he identifies five strategies for raising stakes: the Elephant (a clear, early statement of the story's problem, which can shift as the story reveals its true subject); Backpacks (loading the audience with the storyteller's plans before they fail); Breadcrumbs (hints at future events); Hourglasses (deliberately slowing pace at moments of peak suspense); and Crystal Balls (false predictions that create wonder). Humor, he notes, can supplement these strategies but is optional, while stakes are nonnegotiable.

Dicks outlines five permissible manipulations of truth: omission (removing elements that do not serve the five-second moment), compression (pushing time or geography together), assumption (guessing at a forgotten detail), progression (reordering events for emotional impact), and conflation (squeezing gradual change into a single moment). He stresses that these serve only the audience, never the storyteller's ego, and that storytellers never add anything that did not already exist.

Additional craft chapters cover the principle that every moment needs a physical location so the story functions as cinema in the listener's mind; the but-and-therefore principle, which holds that scenes should connect through opposition and causation rather than simple addition; and the argument that big stories must be made small by finding the relatable human moment inside dramatic events. Dicks also teaches strategies for preserving surprise by hiding critical information, introduces two humor techniques (Milk Cans and a Baseball, where the setup builds so the funniest word comes last, and Babies and Blenders, where two incongruous things are pushed together), and explains how to discover a story's meaning by telling it aloud or by asking why one does the things one does. He presents "This Is Going to Suck," a second model story about a near-fatal car accident at age 17, to illustrate many of these principles.

Part III turns to performance. Dicks advocates present tense to create immediacy and teaches two strategies for telling success stories without sounding boastful: malign yourself by opening with an imperfect moment, and marginalize your accomplishment by following a triumph with the failures around it. He argues that storytelling at its best is a form of time travel and provides rules for sustaining the effect: avoid rhetorical questions, never address the audience directly, never use props, and avoid anachronisms. He offers guidance on word choices, including sparing use of profanity, avoidance of celebrity references and imitated accents, and strategies for protecting real people's identities. Practical performance advice includes memorizing only the first and last sentences plus the physical locations of scenes, making eye contact with friendly faces, controlling emotion by shifting mental perspective from first person to an overhead view, and learning proper microphone technique.

Dicks closes by arguing that storytelling is a superpower with broad application. He shares that four women have separately approached him after performances to confide secret miscarriages, stories they had told no one else, because his vulnerability onstage made him safe to trust. The same dynamic operates in his classroom: after telling students about his own homelessness, a girl reveals she lived in a car. He offers the book as an instruction manual and urges readers to begin collecting and telling their own stories.