Storyworthy Summary (C10): The 5 Lies

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Often, to make a true story more compelling, you’ll need to bend the truth.

Some may frown upon this, but their stories are probably quite boring.

However, we don’t just tell outright lies. There are rules to follow in our truth-bending as to how and why we do it.

Before we get into the five lies you as a storyteller are permitted to tell, there are some caveats you must be aware of.

The first is that you should only lie if it benefits your audience; if it makes the story more entertaining for them, and is not for your own personal gain.

The second caveat is more of a justification. It’s to always remember that your memories are fickle. Every time you recall a memory and replay it in your head, you subconsciously change it a little and it gets altered permanently. This means that even if you don’t stretch the truth at all in your story, it still won’t be 100% accurate.

So if no story is completely accurate anyway, it doesn’t hurt to be strategic in those inaccuracies in order to make your story more compelling.

The third caveat is that you should never add something to a story that wasn’t already there. We are bending the truth, not introducing fictional characters or events. You can never just make something up out of thin air. Everything must be based on a version of reality.

And finally, the lies will not work well if someone involved in the story is present. They will likely point out the ‘mistakes’ to the rest of your audience and that will kill the story.

Any entertaining story you have ever told has omitted unnecessary details. If you were to include every single thing the story would take forever and probably wouldn’t be very interesting.

Think about when a five-year old tells you about something that happened to them during the day. It’s usually not so interesting because they tell you EVERYTHING.

People are the most common things that are omitted from stories. Third wheels and random strangers will distract your audience from the important aspects you need them to be thinking about. If a person isn’t critical to the story, just don’t include them in it.

Events and objects can also be omitted. If something doesn’t make your audience understand the five-second moment any better, leave it out.

One event you should always leave out is redemption. If in your story you mess up and then later on you make up for it somehow, leave out the part where you make up for it. Just end your story early.

For example, your story may be about how you betrayed a friend and the five-second moment was when you realized that whatever you gained wasn’t worth the guilt. In real life, you may have confessed to your friend and paid them back somehow - this is your redemption. Leave the redemption out.

The problem with redemption in storytelling is that it ties up loose ends. It makes the story ‘whole’ and allows your audience to forget about it. You don’t want that. You want your audience to keep thinking about it, and the only way to do that is to leave things a little messy at the end. Questionable results and unanswered questions are where you need to end your story.

Compression is used to push time and space together in your story. This makes it easier for you to tell, and easier for your audience to visualize and understand.

For example, if all the important events from your story happen over a week, it will be far better if you tell it as if it happened over just one or two days. Placing scenes closer together like this also enhances the suspense and drama of a story.

You should also compress geography if your story allows it.

Remember, simple stories are best. Leave out all unnecessary complexity. If your audience is visualizing maps and timelines in their head, that will miss the things you actually want them to hear.

If you forget details from your story but those details are critical to your story, you can assume what those details were.

When making an assumption, always make it the most reasonable and likely assumption.

Lying about progression is when you change the order of events. You might do this in order to make the story more comprehensible or emotionally satisfying.

For example, it’s always better to make people laugh before they cry. It has more impact that way.

Use conflation to squeeze all the emotion and transformation of an event into a single time-frame. The audience expects this from a story, so give it to them.

A good example of conflation is in heist movies. A real heist might take months, if not years, to plan. In the movies, however, it’s often done in just a few days.

Another advantage of conflation is that it will naturally make your story shorter.

Read the next chapter here.

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