#151 – How Cinderella Can Help You Tell Better Stories
An simple exercise to try before starting your next project
This is Adventures in Storytelling your weekly note with resources, insights, and actionable tools for better creative communication through storytelling. A short new idea for you to explore this week. Enjoy!
You know the saying, practice makes perfect? Well this week I’m giving you an exercise to put that idea into… practice. I’m develop a storytelling workshop for a large architecture firm’s team leadership retreat. I wanted to give them a gentle way to start the narrative development part of the workshop (this is where you actually begin to craft stories!).
The idea for the exercise came to me in a story in R. Eric Thomas’ new book Congratulations, The Best is Over! Essays (this could also be a lesson in being open to inspiration in all places at all times). In it he tells a story of doing a workshop with teens during a period of depression in his life. He explains how most stories have changed since he was a kid because of new Disney interpretations and adaptations, but Cinderella has remained more or less the same. And he said it was a great tool to get kids to start to explore narrative.
With that in mind and as I drifted off to sleep one night, I started consider what that may look like for adults. And here’s the exercise I want you to try to do the next time you’re starting a new story. Before diving into the story.
The Exercise: If you had to summarize the story of Cinderella in three sentences, how would you do it? The reason I like this so much and plan to use it in the workshop is because it’s a great exercise for a group to sort of shout through together, it’s simple but it also forces brevity in your retelling. To make it easier I’d encourage you to use the challenge, choice, outcome framework as well. OR want, because, but. Both will get you there. The output of many of my workshops are three versions of your story: the long, the short, and the micro. The micro is the three sentence version.
Give it a try and let me know what you come up with. I’d love to hear your summaries in the comments! You can also try it with your favourite movie or book. It’s just a good way to ground in the essence of any story before getting into yours.
I hope this helps.
A Story Well Told
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a long time, you’ll know I am absolutely obsessed with the HGTV stars Joanna and Chip Gaines for a myriad of nostalgia-comfort-hygge related reasons. Well Joanna has a new cookbook out (I also enjoy cookbooks and cooking to a lesser extent 😅). It’s called Magnolia Table, Volume 3 and I think it may be her best one yet. In it she tells stories of the recipes and how they fit into her life and family, but the ones she and her team have chosen are just very approachable, I bookmarked most of them to try later. I got mine copy from the library but I already have a hard copy on its way—hot tip: libraries are a great way to try out a cookbook before buying in case you find it kind of underwhelms which many of them can do. Highly recommend this one for any cooks who like simple, comforting meals.
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