Photo by Cara Lopez Lee A few nights ago, for the first time, I stepped in front of an audience of more than a hundred, without book, paper, or index card in hand, without a memorized song, dance, or play in my head. Just the mic and me. The place was in Los Angeles. The theme was Heat . The event was StorySlam. An organization called The Moth puts on these competitive events all over the country. The premise is: “True Stories Told Live”… no notes. Are you kidding?! When I first heard of StorySlam it sounded petrifying. I didn’t even want to watch. Why? It might be like watching amateur trapeze artists perform without a net: could be beautiful, could be painful. Then I started taking long drives to visit my sister, and on the way back I listened to The Moth Radio Hour on NPR. These storytellers mesmerize. Each spends 10 to 15 minutes revealing their most frightening, embarrassing, grief-stricken, weird, dysfunctional moments. Their stories are inspiring, hilarious,...

I confess. I’m one of those people who reads books about writing. A lot of them. I suppose it’s the teacher in me – we tend to be perpetual students, always looking for something new to learn, to reinforce, to pass on. Since buying Kindle and Nook e-readers, I’ve also downloaded a number of new books, many of them free and available only in e-book format (one of the boons of e-writing programs like Kindle and Smashwords, available to us all). One new book stands out in caliber and focus — The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make UsHuman by Jonathan Gottschall. Presented in entertaining categories that read like a thriller, the premises are firmly based in brain science. The author dishes out facts in palatable bites about why humans not only have a taste for story, but why almost everyone cooks up fantasies as real as their very lives. In fact, we spend more of our mental functions involved with imagination than with any actual physical tasks at hand. Here are a few morse...

One of my favorite descriptions of sound storytelling structure comes from Peter Rubie and Gary Provost’s How to Tell a Story—The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tales : Once upon a time, something happened to someone, and he decided he would pursue a goal. So he devised a plan of action, and even though there were forces trying to stop him, he moved forward because there was a lot at stake. And just as things seemed as bad as they could get, he learned an important lesson, and when offered the prize he so strenuously sought, he had to decide whether or not to take it, and in making that decision he satisfied a need that had been created by something in the past.   Such a story works because of the way it plays with reader expectation. When an event dashes the expectations of a character we care about, the reader expects he will ultimately succeed when he pursues his goal to set things right. Since the stakes for failure are high, we flip the pages, wondering what he’ll do in the f...

To find this intersection the title alludes to, we need to think about the longevity and depth of a story: its horizontal and vertical roads. While editing a client’s manuscript, I began thinking about the two roads and how important it is for writers to travel down both in order to develop their stories. Horizontal Road , in its basic sense, is the plot. It's what happens in the story. It's the making sure that all the pieces of the story are told so that the story makes sense from beginning to end. It doesn’t mean you have to follow a chronological, literally first thing first and last thing last, progression, but you want to make sure you leave no gaping holes. Vertical Road is the depth of the story. It could be development of characters, development of setting—those things that connect readers, endear them to characters, to place and therefore make them invested in the horizontal road they travel while reading the story. As you plunge into editing your work, think a...

As a developmental editor, I do the same stuff all editors do. I challenge word choice and track continuity and check for consistency in voice and clarity of meaning and errant punctuation. But my main task—and my true love—is to help you tell a good story. Since this is where any thorough edit should start, one might think it is also where a writer’s education begins. This is not necessarily so. I learned an awful lot about stringing words and paragraphs together for maximum punch before I learned anything about storytelling. In fact, I had to seek out my teachers in this regard, and I am humbled to now step up to the plate and pass along what I've learned to other storytellers. While the projects I assess vary greatly, I find myself recommending certain storytelling resources again and again. Since some of my favorite authors write about this topic, I thought I’d bust them here today. A summer spent studying these techniques would boost your storytelling skills. And if you ha...