📖 What the best storyteller does:
The best storyteller in the world, Matthew Dicks,
described the biggest mistake writers make (and how not to be boring):
“A clear majority of human beings tend to connect their sentences, paragraphs, and scenes together with the word and.
This is a mistake. The ideal connective tissue in any story are the words but and therefore, along with all their glorious
synonyms. These buts and therefores can be either explicit or implied.
“And” stories have no movement or momentum. They are equivalent to running on a treadmill. Sentences and scenes appear, one after another, but the movement is straightforward and unsurprising. The momentum is unchanged.
But and therefore are words that signal change. The story
was heading in one direction, but now it’s heading in another. We started out zigging, but now we are zagging. We did this, and therefore this new thing happened.
I think of it as continually cutting against the grain of the story. Rather than stretching a flat line from beginning to end, the storyteller should seek to create a serrated line cutting back and forth, up and down, along the path of the story. We are still
headed in the same direction, but the best storytellers don’t take a straight line to get there.”
